Though Claudia and Louis left in hopes of finding the origin of vampirism, what they have found is something else. The Théâtre is a place of performance that breaks down the opposition between life and art: what the audience believes to be a performance of vampirism is actually true vampirism. However, the Théâtre is also a space that reveals itself as a space of, as Judith Butler would argue, performativity. As Louis and Claudia come to learn from the breakdown of theatrical artifice that accompanies the performance of vampirism on stage is that vampirism is not something one is, but something one does, “a stylized repetition of acts . . . which are internally discontinuous . . . [so that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity . . . which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief” (Butler 140-141). As Ken Gelder notes of the Théâtre, “they show it to have been (always?) a mode of representation, a sign of vampirism, a style or a posture. To be a vampire is, in other words, to act like a vampire” (Gelder 112). What Louis and Claudia learn of their nature from Armand and his troupe is exactly that it is not natural. Vampirism is not an essentialist identity; it is the performative repetition of a learned behavior meant to indicate vampirism, a mimetic behavior that they have learned from Lestat. Without a model of this behavior, they would become like the vampires who remain, isolated and alone, in Eastern Europe — “mindless, animated corpse[s] . . . dead” (Interview 190-191).