This volume brings together dynamic perspectives on the concept of liveness in the performing arts, engaging with the live through the particular analytical focus of audiences and experience. The status and significance of the live in performance has become contested: perceived as variously as a marker of ontological difference, a promotional slogan, or a mystical evocation of cultural value. Moving beyond debates about the relationship between the live and the mediated, this collection considers what we can know and say about liveness in terms of processes of experiencing and processes of making. Drawing together contributions from theatre, music, dance, and performance art, it takes an interdisciplinary approach in asking not what liveness is, but how it matters and to whom.
The book invites readers to consider how liveness is produced through processes of audiencing - as spectators bring qualities of (a)liveness into being through the nature of their attention - and how it becomes materialized in acts of performance, acts of making, acts of archiving, and acts of remembering. Theoretical chapters and practice-based reflections explore liveness, eventness and nowness as key concepts in a range of topics such as affect, documentation, embodiment, fandom, and temporality, showing how the relationship between audience and event is rarely singular and more often malleable and multiple. With its focus on experiencing liveness, this collection will be of interest to disciplines including performance, audience and cultural studies, visual arts, cinema, and sound technologies.
Contents
Introduction: Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance
Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof
Part 1: Audiencing
Section Introduction: Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof
Chapters
Coming (a)live: A Prolegomenon to any Future Research on 'Liveness'
Martin Barker
Orange Dogs and Memory Responses: Creativity in Spectating and Remembering
Katja Hilevaara
Fandom, Liveness and Technology at Tori Amos Music Concerts: Examining the Movement of Meaning within Social Media Use
Lucy Bennett
Social and Online Experiences: Shaping Live Listening Expectation in Classical Music
Stephanie E. Pitts
The Meaning of Lived Experience
Paddy Scannell
Affect and Experience
Matthew Reason
Shorts
Live Art, Death Threats: The Theatrical Antagonism of First Night
Alexis Soloski
Attention as a Tension: Affective Experience between Performer and Audience in the Live Encounter
Victoria Gray
Empathy and Resonant Relationships in Performance Art
Lynn Lu
Embodied Traces: Co-presence, Kinaesthesia and Bodily Inscription
Imogene Newland
An Experience of Becoming: Wearing a Tail and Alpine Walking
Catherine Bagnall
Sisters Academy: Radical Live Intervention into the Educational System
Gry Worre Halberg
One-to-One Performance: Who's in Charge?
Sarah Hogarth and Emma Bramley
A Performatic Archive
Kerrie Reading
Theatre of Bone
Rebecca Schneider
Part 2: Materialising
Section Introduction: Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof
Chapters
What is a Live Event?
Gary Peters
Improvising Music Experience: The Eternal Ex-temporisation of Music Made Live
Steve Tromans
The Place of Performance: A Critical Historiography on the Topos of Time
Jonah Westerman
Objectifying Liveness: Labour, Agency and the Body in the 11 Rooms Exhibition
Lisa Newman
Reconsidering Liveness in the Age of Digital Implication
Eirini Nedelkopoulou
Environmental Performance: Framing Time
Anja Mølle Lindelof, Ulrik Schmidt and Connie Svabo
Shorts
Three Performances: A Virtual (Musical) Improvisation
Mathias Maschat and Christopher Williams
Chronography
Craig Dworkin
Memory, Time and Self: A Text Work based on a Conceptual Performance
Paul Forte
Broken Magic: The Liveness of Loudspeakers
Dugal McKinnon
Managing Live Audience Attention in the Age of Digital Mediation: The Good, The God and The Guillotine:
Martin Blain
Enlivened Serendipity
Allen S. Weiss
National Theatre Wales's Coriolan/us: A 'Live Film'
Mike Pearson
Machines in Queer Gardens: Performance as Mixed Surreality
Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery
Afterword
So Close and Yet So Far Away: The Proxemics of Liveness
Philip Auslander
List of Contributors
Index
