Our article problematizes the relations between the politics of performance, media and disappearance. Moving away from an influential strand of discourse on disappearance that claims that performance exists and is exhausted in the moment of its enaction, we work with disappearance as a recurring (affective) phenomenon in performance, referring to that which is obscured from view, or is forgotten, but still continues to exist. Disappearance is therefore a generative context within which performance is seen, understood and analysed. We posit that performances in the Indian context cannot be disengaged from the material - mediatized situations from which they emerge and which they reference. We show that context generates the ground, the material, and the strategies of ‘disobedient’ performance; as scholars of performance, this is a significant analytic method. The performances we are working with might be read as acts of resistance against (mediatized) disappearance.