The three papers and the pictorial essay that follow Rustom Bharucha's keynote all originated at "Theatre Applications" (Central School of Speech and Drama, London, April 2010). One theme of the conference was "cultural geographies of dislocation, place and space"; the three papers and pictorial essay respond to that theme. All address issues of applying performance-related practices in different nontheatrical sites and the reverberations of such interventions with several incorporating key theoretical debates (e.g. Lefebvre's) on space. Bharucha opened his address--and provocation to applied theatre--by asking delegates to reflect on beginnings and endings and to consider "what remains" once a play has finished and is therefore no longer "present". When the play ends, he asked, "what remains?" and "when the play ends, what begins?" Bharucha's questions resonate with some of the major challenges confronting contemporary applied theatre practice today: sustainability, impact and how these are measured. His provocation also asks one to reflect upon what of the past remains in the present. This paper begins by developing Rustom Bharucha's questions of beginnings and endings. The authors suggest that the immanent interpretation of a project's futurity is something that concerns all facilitators or creators of applied theatre projects although suppositions about impact can only be tentative. They draw out some of the key questions raised in relation to projects-in-site, subsequent new beginnings and the relationship between the location of the project and the experience of participants who are involved in it. They foreground futurity and effect. In the second part of the introduction they reflect on how the converged theme of "What remains, what begins: locations, event, futurity" might be advanced when they consider a past event such as the conference. They end by proposing "absence" as a particular remainder in this instance.