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Live and Technologically Mediated Performance
*
Philip Auslander
1)
The material I shall present today derives in part from the work of preparing
the second edition of my book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture,
which was published by Routledge in 2008. The first half of this presentation
restates some of the themes from the first edition of the book, with some
updates and reworkings from both the second edition and other of my writings,
and hints of new ideas. The second part is a case study that does not appear in
the book but that I discuss in my contribution to the Cambridge Companion to
Performance Studies, entitled "Live and Technologically Mediated Performance."
At heart, the question of liveness is a question of bodies, of bodies made
physically present to one another--or not. For some, such as performance theorists
Peggy Phelan and Herbert Blau, liveness is a question not just of physicality but
of mortality, of the sense that the body and the person, like the performance, are
disappearing even as you watch them and watching them is a rehearsal for one’s
own eventual disappearance. Liveness is also a question of the technological
* Georgia Institute of Technology
270 한국연극학 제42호
mediation of bodies, the deployment of bodies in relation to one another across a
grid defined by temporal and spatial vectors. As the French term for “live,” en
direct, suggests, live presence was direct, initially, but it is now articulated to an
ever-expanding array of cultural media. And the question of liveness prompts
consideration of non-human bodies: Are there bodies other than human ones that
can be said to be “live”? Because the distinction between live and technologically
mediated performance remains a fundamental and culturally stratifying distinction,
it is important to interrogate it directly.
Theatre is different from all other forms of theatrical presentation because it is
live. … ‘At the heart of the theater experience, then, is the performer-audience
relationship: the immediate, personal exchange; the chemistry and magic which
gives theater its special quality.’
As a starting point for the journey, I use this quotation, from an introductory
course document prepared by Professor Kaoime Malloy, to stand for what I shall
call the traditional view of live theatrical performance. The key word is
immediate, which suggests that the traditional definition of live performance is
founded on an opposition between the immediate and the mediated. From this
perspective, the performer/audience relationship in film, for instance, is thought to
be mediated by the camera and the rest of the filmic apparatus; in the theatre,
by contrast, this relationship is seen as one of direct and unmediated physical co
presence.
Such distinctions are largely commonsensical. Whereas stage actors can
appropriately be considered the “authors” of their performances, film actors
cannot. As the actor Willem Dafoe emphasized when I interviewed him, film
actors basically provide raw material that is shaped into performances by directors
and editors and therefore need not be as concerned about the through-lines of
their performances as stage actors. Audiences witness theatre actors in the