At the Edge of Presence and Absence in an Uncanny Valley: On Rimini Protokoll’s Unheimliches Tal / Uncanny Valley

Conventional Western theatre is based on the Aristotelian notion of presence. Contemporary theatre, however, proposes an aesthetic of absence. Its orientation differs from the notion of presence found in text-centred Western theatre. This aesthetic model, adopted by contemporary theatre since the 1990s, also appears in various forms in current productions based on digital dramaturgies. Rimini Protokoll, a German theatre company with many experimental approaches, presents an anti-theatrical aesthetic based on absence. This study analyses Rimini Protokoll’s 2018 Unheimliches Tal / Uncanny Valley in terms of removing the human actor from the centre and replacing him with an animatronic robot. This production, which stands out as one of the most striking examples of digital theatre, erases the presence of the human actor on stage with an animatronic copy, proposing an uncanny theatricality that oscillates between presence and absence. To understand how this theatricality is constructed, the concept of the uncanny is analysed in the introductory part of the article through the metaphor of the “uncanny valley.” Subsequently, the academic literature on theatre and the notion of the uncanny is presented, with a particular focus on the metaphor of the ghost. The following section presents Jacques Derrida’s views onWestern theatre, focusing on his concepts of the metaphysics of presence, logocentrism, and hauntology. The article examines Unheimliches Tal / Uncanny Valley in the context of those concepts and then concludes with a consideration of the theatricality of this production in relation to contemporary theatre productions and digital dramaturgies.