The work starts with the projection of an unusual scene on stage: 20 characters are lined up side by side as if to take a bow at the end of a performance. What will take place before our eyes is the story of the end of a show or, more exactly, the brutal end of the acrobat Capax, the sword swallower, who has cut his tongue and disappeared. Is he dead? Doubt hovers. Several actors/ narrators, matching the image of some characters projected onto the wall – including Chris, Capax's son, two women, Abbas and Borras, a mysterious character by the name of Mr., who may or may not be the murderer, we don't know, another person, or persons, who are perhaps Capax himself – intervene in this strange tale with its admixture of carnival, painting, circus, puppet theatre, tableau vivant, detective mystery and Shakespearian drama. The narrator incidentally embarks on his story with a musical air (Greensleeves), which is often attributed to the “songs” of Shakespearean theatre, while the range and tone of his voice are similar to those of the actors who brought this author to stage and/or screen. We are thus at a theatrical representation operating like an early cinematographic projection, while making reference to pictorial depiction. With its pretences, disguises and wrong tracks, the death of the acrobat Capax recalls Alfred Hitchcock's film Murder! (1930), and, needless to add, the scene where the homosexual murderer, a trapeze artist disguised as a woman, is chased by the police during a performance, and hangs himself in front of the audience, above the ring. Added to the mixture of genres and periods in Living and Presumed Dead are the voice-over narratives of the protagonists, played in turn by the same actor, trying to establish whether the man presumed dead (Capax) is alive or not. Showing and saying, covering up and hushing up, hiding and revealing, these are the main structures of a narrative where the repeated permutations, and the appearances and disappearances of the characters comes across not only as a kind of immense jigsaw puzzle which has to be put back together again in order to get to know the logic of the story, but also as another way of hiding the truth and making it disappear, just like the body of the alleged victim has been made to disappear. As in most murders in detective mysteries, the truth here is the truth of the body, for finding it again is thus to know the truth. The knowing is thus linked not with the discursive system of the work, or with the discourses of the characters, but with the presence or non-presence of a body. Even while Living and Presumed Dead is entirely constructed on visual perceptions and discursive methods, what is missing is not, however, either visual or discursive, but physical, literally “the body of the crime”, which is in reality absent, or alleged to be, from the beginning of the projection. And it is precisely because this body is missing from the spectacle that the spectacle takes place. Living and Presumed Dead proposes an optical and narrative structure including various gaps. It is possible to single out the transitions between images and narrative, then within the narrative itself, insofar as the actor alternately plays all the characters in the narrative, as well as inside the images, because the latter appear and disappear by means of sequential dissolves. As another form of replacement and substitution, the sequential dissolve might be the metaphor of the way the entire installation works, in the sense that its transitions are applied to the tangible matter of the images and sounds, but also, and above all, to the shifts from words to images and images to words. What is involved here is more an effect than an optical and linguistic reality, the effect having been sought by Coleman in order no longer to mark so much separations and unifications, clearly and perfectly defined, relative to the problem set of dearth, but the fact that this dearth is nothing other than the result of what is visible and describable, a dearth that is like the leftovers of different transitions. Which takes us back to the issue of the presence or non-presence of Capax's body, his death, real or presumed: is the body spread-eagled on the ground at the end of the tale a simple transition? In other words, is it Capax once more returned from who-knows what space-time, or else is it his son (who has meanwhile donned his father's costume) who is killed, or yet again is it a quite different person? This overlooks the fact that both are actors and that they play at being somebody else; they don't do what they say and they don't say what they do: they are performing. A performance where we are dupes, because the supreme subterfuge probably has to do with making us believe that a body has vanished, or just vanished, whereas it is perhaps there, before our very eyes, in some disguise or other. What is missing is perhaps not a body; it might be a shortcoming in the narrative, a hole in the tale being told to us.

Jacinto Lageira

Translated by Simon Pleasance