Being Here While Not Being Here

Performance maker Sylvia Rimat tries to retrace her experience of fainting on stage in a performance in 2003. Being Here While Not Being Here is a contemplation on memory, on being here and disappearing, and tests out the live audience-performer relationship.

Being Here While Not Being Here is a solo-performance following several interwoven and ongoing strands. By presenting fragments of memories from different perspectives and people, Rimat tells and re-enacts the experience of fainting on stage during a performance in 2003. Drawing the outlines of furniture with chalk on the stage floor, Rimat constructs diverse spaces and rooms of the past and inhabits them. And then the ‘fainting lark’ is being introduced, a simple physical trick that can be applied to make yourself faint on purpose and which could be used live on stage.

There’s a possibility for me to be here and at the same time not to be here. But it’s too early yet…

The performance uses the theatre stage as a metaphor for the different (inner and outer) rooms we pass through.