Desire and Absence in Rimini Protokoll's Conference of the Absent: A Lacanian Analysis of Audience Interviews

Abstract

This paper explores the Conference of the Absent experience, a participatory theater piece produced by Rimini Protokoll, through a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with audience members who participated in the performance, it seeks to analyze the anxieties and resistances around performing, as well as how these experiences are retrospectively narrated and made sense of. Conference of the Absent is considered as a reconfiguration of the spectator-performer relation in a manner analogous to processes of subject formation in Lacanian psychoanalysis. The paper, thus, discusses how the performance destabilizes scopic mastery, repositions the voice as the central medium of subjectivation and situates the participants in a new system of meaning. Drawing from the audience interviews and analysis of the theatrical design, it is argued that the audience's engagement is less an act of personal agency than a pre-orchestrated response conditioned by the performance's dramaturgical design. This paper contributes to theater audience research by offering psychoanalytical theory as a methodological tool in understanding the workings of spectatorship in a participatory theater setting. © 2026 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.