Disappearance Acts: Janieta Eyre's Lady Lazarus Series
 

Although performance research has become increasingly interdisciplinary, relatively little attention has been devoted to the complex relationship between theatre and photography. Yet, as a closer look at disciplinary genealogies makes clear, these artistic forms share a distinct set of philosophical concerns with respect to the relationship between human body and phenomenal space. Roland Barthes drew our attention to the merging of the theatrical and the photographic in the form of the “pose”—the immobilization of the body prior to the click of the camera shutter. In her acclaimed Lady Lazarus series, Toronto-based photographer and performance artist Janieta Eyre explores the terroristic collapse of human body into two-dimensional picture as well as the form that this collapse might take in our present social field of vision. Performing in shallow space before a series of explicitly theatrical backdrops, Eyre stages anxieties about the normative assimilation of female subject to socio-cultural milieu. In these photographic portraits, Eyre images the self as a product of elaborate spatial camouflage by mapping the dazzling colors and geometrical forms found in the settings onto her body. In this paper, I argue that Eyre formally represents the way in which the self is interpellated by dominant cultural patterns and recedes into a globalized world view. At the same time, Eyre’s synthesis of the theatrical and the photographic gestures towards the dissolution of the performing body’s limits in space and helps us to envision an enabling porosity of self to world. Eyre’s work challenges the aesthetic of distance that has been privileged in theatre studies and exchanges it for an aesthetic, or ethic, of closeness.