Leanore Lieblein: The Ghost of Ophelia and the Aesthetics of Absence

In an essay on representing Ophelia in Canada, Ric Knowles concludes that the character of Ophelia is never central or determinate in any of the cases he has studied.  The revisionings he examines are unable to escape “the dominant representation of Ophelia-as-woman-as-victim.”  It is this dominant representation that Daphné Thompson as author and performer of Sauvée des eaux (2000), and Jocelyne Montpetit as choreographer and dancer of Vol d’âme (2000), try to escape by identifying not with Ophelia, but with her ghost.  Thompson’s text is as verbal as Montpetit’s is nonverbal, but both performances implicate the spectator in a reflection on authorship and agency.  In writing Ophélie Thompson is written – by the computer that writes and prints her text, by the actor that performs it, by the Shakespeare whose lines she quotes, by the professors who interpret them, and by many others, all of whose voices are channeled through the solo performer’s body and ultimately effaced.  Her Ophélie is not saved from the waters. Nor is that of Jocelyne Montpetit.  It is with the drowned Ophelia that Montpetit begins, and it is her vanishing, the corporeality of disappearance, that she dances.