Archaeologies of Presence

Archaeologies of Presence is a brilliant exploration of how the performance of presence can be understood through the relationships between performance theory and archaeological thinking. Drawing together carefully commissioned contributions by leading international scholars and artists, this radical new work poses a number of essential questions:


What are the principle signifiers of theatrical presence?


How is presence achieved through theatrical performance?


What makes a memory come alive and live again?


How is presence connected with identity?


Is presence synonymous with 'being in the moment'?


What is the nature of the ‘co-presence’ of audience and performer?


Where does performance practice end and its documentation begin?

Co-edited by performance specialists Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye, and archaeologist Michael Shanks, Archaeologies of Presence represents an innovative and rewarding feat of interdisciplinary scholarship.

Gabriella Giannachi is Professor in Performance and New Media, and Director of the Centre for Intermedia at the University of Exeter. Her book publications include: Virtual Theatres: an Introduction (2004); Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts, ed. with Nigel Stewart (2005); The Politics of New Media Theatre (2007); Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated, co-authored with Nick Kaye (2011); and Performing Mixed Reality, with Steve Benford (2011).

Nick Kaye is Dean of the College of Humanities and Professor of Performance Studies, at the University of Exeter. His books include: Postmodernism and Performance (1994), Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents (1996), Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (2000), Staging the Post-Avant-Garde: Italian Performance After 1970, with Gabriella Giannachi (2002), Multi-media: video - installation - performance (2007) and Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated, with Gabriella Giannachi, (2011). He is co-director of REACT, an AHRC Knowledge Exchange Hub that will invest over £4million in creating collaborations between academic researchers and the creative industries 2012-16.

Michael Shanks is the Omar and Althea Hoskins Professor of Classics and Director of Stanford Archaeology Center's Metamedia Lab. His major book publications include: ReConstructing Archaeology (1987), Social Theory and Archaeology (1987), Art and the Greek City State (1999), Classical Archaeology: Experiences of the Discipline (1996), Experiencing the Past: On the Character of Archaeology (1992) and Theatre/Archaeology, with Mike Pearson (Routledge 2001).

1 Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye and Michael Shanks
Introduction: Archaeologies of Presence

Being Here: place and time

2 Josette Féral,
How to Define Presence Effects: the Work of Janet Cardiff
3 Gabriella Giannachi
Environmental Presence
4 Rebecca Schneider
Performance Remains Again
5 Jon Erickson
Tension/Release and the Production of Time in Performance

Being Before: stage and gaze

6 Erika Fischer-Lichte
Appearing As Embodied Mind – Defining a weak, a strong and a radical concept of presence
7 Phillip Zarrilli
‘…presence…’ as a question and emergent possibility: a case study from the performer’s perspective
8 Simon Jones
Out-Standing Standing-Within: being alone together in the work of Bodies in Flight
9 Nicholas Ridout
Mis-spectatorship, or, ‘redistributing the sensible’
10 Tim Etchells, Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye
Looking Back: a conversation about presence, 2006

Traces: after presence

11 Amelia Jones
Temporal Anxiety/’Presence’ in absentia: experiencing performance as documentation
12 Lynn Hershman Leeson and Michael Shanks
Here and Now
13 Nick Kaye
Photographic presence: time and the image
14 Mike Pearson
Neither Here nor There….