Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Matthew Reason, Anja Mølle Lindelof, Matthew Reason, Anja Mølle Lindelof

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317334842
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Thema: Artes escénicas

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.

Part 1

Audiencing

Introduction

Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof

‘Audiencing’ describes the work of the spectator. It describes acts of attention, of affect, of meaning-making, of memory, of community. A focus on audiencing recognizes that attention is a constructive or performative act, that spectators bring performances into being through the nature of their variously active, distractive or contested attention. In a volume that focuses upon experiencing live, this is central. Consisting of six full length chapters and eight ‘shorts’, the contributions in this section consider the work of the spectator in relation to experiencing liveness.

Threaded through all of the chapters in this section is a concern with how we experience live performance. What kinds of consequences, investments and relationships are prompted for spectators by the experiences of liveness? The first chapter in this section is sub-titled a ‘prolegomenon’, and it does indeed serve as an appropriate introduction to the collection as a whole. Martin Barker opens his discussion with a series of descriptions of vibrant, visceral and enduring experiences—of a church service, a film, a concert—only some of which might be described as formally live but all of which ‘achieved a form of liveness’ as a consequence of his investment into the experience. Barker arrives in this discourse from the perspective of film and media studies, with a particular focus on audience research, and therefore has a degree of distance from and insight into the discourses around liveness that have been flowing through performance studies. This chapter in part maps Barker’s intervention into this debate to propose that the vital and meaningful quality of any cultural encounter is its transformative potential: how does it impact upon and change spectators? In rethinking liveness as ‘aliveness’, Barker describes (a)live experiences as emergent, ‘that is, as they are experienced they are felt to grow, to integrate, and to open up new possibilities.’

If Barker opens with some brief anecdotal accounts of moments when an experience came alive to him, Katja Hilevaara’s chapter, ‘Orange Dogs and Memory Responses’, takes the extended memorial response to performance as its central motif. Images of disappearance, transience and ephemerality have long been central to evocations of liveness, a discourse that Hilevaara describes as producing ‘eulogy writing’. Hilevaara follows the vital counternarrative of considering what does remain, not least in spectators’ memories. Of course, memory is marked by its fallibility, represented here by the misremembering of an orange dog in a Laurie Anderson performance, but Hilevaara asks us to consider the conceptual and philosophical implications of placing positive value on the translations and mutations of memory. Instead of mourning (another deadliness) Hilevaara draws upon Henri Bergson’s discussions on memory as an act of becoming to construct a playful memory response approach through which spectators can actively engage in creatively responding to their performance experiences. Reading across these two chapters, we might consider how through such active misrememberings the experience comes (a)live.

The following two chapters in this section can also be read as companion pieces, as both engage in considering how spectators’ responses to live music have been shaped by changing technology. What is striking is that neither chapter—Lucy Bennett’s ‘Fandom, Liveness and Technology at Tori Amos Music Concerts’ or Stephanie Pitt’s ‘Social and Online Experiences: Shaping Live Listening Experience in Classical Music’—construct the relationship between the live and the technological as oppositional. Indeed, the irrelevance of such a construction becomes apparent precisely through both authors’ careful mapping of the interrelationships (or as Bennett puts it ‘entanglements’) between spectators’ live, mediatized, online and technological engagement with music. From within different music genres, both Bennett and Pitts utilize empirical audience research in order to provide grounded and evidenced discussion of how audiences construct and use technology in relation to performance experiences. Bennett considers how social media enables live sociability to extend beyond those actually present at the concert, while Pitts examines how the interrelationship of live and recorded classical music as well as the social circumstances of listening informs audiences’ musical lives. Framed by a contemporary concern in arts organisations for the status of classical music, Pitts argues for a more informal public discourse that acknowledges the experiential qualities of live music listening often emphasized in qualitative audience research.

It is not just within arts institutions that lived experience has long been an uncomfortable notion. In the new critical paradigm of cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s, experience became a contested term, dismissed as a theoretical abstraction or as pure subjectivity. In his chapter, ‘The Meaning of Lived Experience’, Paddy Scannell plays with Martin Heidigger’s phenomenological thoughts on ‘being’ and ‘time’ in order to explain why and how experience is fundamental to human existence. Departing from a brief introduction to various kinds of experiences, the chapter introduces the concepts of ‘care structure’ and ‘mood’ to examine how such ‘events as occasions’ are organized, planned and invested with hopes and expectations. ‘To own an experience (to possess it) is to have been possessed by it’, Scannell suggests and while such occasions might be ‘uselessness’, non-utilizable, they offer distinct moments in time, moments out of time, moments that are deathless.

Finally, in this section Matthew Reason’s chapter on ‘Affect and Experience’ addresses a crucial dilemma in talking (and writing) about the experience of live performance. If the live experience is best described as something that has impact upon us, but yet simultaneously escapes us, then how can we—as audience as well as researchers—engage with it, the experience and its impact, in post-performance situations in any meaningful way? Informed by the ‘affective turn’ and by contestations within affect theory, the inadequacy of language is discussed through an engagement with the words of audiences watching dance and the writings of Brian Massumi, Margaret Wetherell and Ruth Leys to examine the relationships between affect, emotion and meaning making. Experiencing live, Reason argues, is a dynamic relationship between having sense and making sense, a co-constructive process in which the non-conscious and the intentional intersect and allow ‘affect to infect our ongoing lived experience of the world’.

***

Following on from the chapters, the shorts in this section engage with the question of audiencing in a variety of manners and from a diversity of perspectives. They present careful considerations of particular relationships, engaging with experience, with encounter, with affect and with empathy.

The first two shorts, by Alexis Soloski and Victoria Gray, both engage with affective encounters between audience and performer, although from diametrically opposing perspectives. Drawing on her experiences as a critic, Soloski describes the sometimes numbing experience of sitting in the auditorium and recognizing that ‘as much as I want to believe that theatre demands the real-time interaction of actor and audience, it isn’t always true.’ She then recounts one particular experience, of Forced Entertainment’s First Night, that made her sit up, pay attention and recognize the centrality of her presence. Gray also presents a particular performance/audience encounter, but this time from the perspective of the performer. Her short presents parallel accounts—one a visceral ‘in the moment’ steam of embodied consciousness, the other a reflective analysis—of her experience of audience members photographing her in performance against her wishes. Both these chapters share an attention to the fine grain of the experiential encounter, its particularities and its embodiedness.

The experiential encounter between audience and performer is continued in the next two shorts, with Lynn Lu and Imogene Newland both explicitly engaging with questions of empathy. In the different contexts of live art and dance, Lu and Newland consider ways in which the audience experiences might be felt, inscribed on and remembered through the body. Echoing Hilevaara’s engagement with audiences’ ongoing memorial responses, Newland works to construct a ‘“liveness” that does not merely pass into “gone-ness” or “lost-ness” but rather is a living process.’ For Lu the dynamic between artist and live audience is an ‘inextricable and critical’ element of her work. Whether she asks spectators to swap clothes with her, or drink her bath water, or witness her exposure to shark infested waters, there is an interest in the consequences of the human-to-human encounter: a coming alive between performer and audience that represents a genuine opportunity for mutual surprise.

The opportunity to discover synergies across extremely different contexts is presented again in the next two contributions: Catherine Bagnall writing about participatory mountain walking while wearing the handmade ears and tails of animals; and Gry Worre Halberg on the Sisters Academy’s radical interventions into Danish secondary schools, designed to enable sensuous and poetic modes of being. The connections between the pieces are in fact significant, most noticeably a concern to develop alternative, more connected, modes of being with ourselves, other people and the world around us. And, moreover, to do so through performance experiments which re-orientate our aesthetic sensibility and, in the words of the Sisters Academy involve ‘putting our flesh into the idea’. In relation to experiencing liveness, both describe audience/participant becomings—moments of acting, transformation, ongoing immersion. Moments in which co-presence both matters and means.

In their contribution Sarah Hogarth and Emma Bramley also deal with a kind of immersion, on this occasion in the context of one-to-one performances. The authors draw on their curation of a 2014 festival of one-to-one performance, in Liverpool, which focused on motifs of control and authorship. Often seeking to stage moments of face-to-face encounter, where the I of myself recognizes the I of another, the one-to-one performance is an exemplar of the careful curation of the relationship between audience and performer. Hogarth and Bramley’s discussion suggests that more participation in and of itself does not always result in greater impact or greater sense of live co-creation, instead accounting of the powerful affect of a decision not to speak.

Finally in this section on audiencing, Kerrie Reading and Rebecca Schneider engage with different kinds of performance remains and consider how the process of engaging with such archival and indeed archaeological traces can become a form of audiencing of past performances, experiences, encounters and livenesses. Reading’s account is of a practice-based intervention into, and re-staging of, the archive of Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. She uses the phrase ‘performatic archive’ to argue that ‘the archival document can be approached in an embodied way that is able to make it (a)live.’ In her contribution, Schneider travels further back in time, using her encounter with the face of a Roman actor on a small bone disk or token to consider a ‘strange question’ and ‘ask whether I am experiencing the object live?’ Vitally, the question is not is this object live, but am I experiencing it live? And this, of course, is the question that underpins all the contributions in this collection with the variety of ways in which it is answered and addressed demonstrating the complexity—but also vibrancy—of the issue.

1 Coming a(live)

A Prolegomenon to any Future Research on ‘Liveness’

Martin Barker

When I was 13 years old, I used to accompany my parents to our local church. One Sunday, to their consternation, the preacher was an evangelical. He strode around, roused, urged, cajoled—and then called on all the young ones who felt The Call to come forward. I was hooked. I really wanted to go, but didn’t—I have no idea why. That night, I talked to my mum, who was very clear: if I really believed what I had heard I should ‘come forward.’ That experience and that conversation set in train a year-long process of thinking which I’ve never forgotten.

When I was 22, I went to see If, Lindsay Anderson’s (1968) film about a rebellious boy at a British ‘public’ school. I found it deeply arousing: first, for its general portrayal of the school’s viciousness—like an extreme version of my own; second, for a pivotal fantasy sex scene, in which Malcolm McDowall writhes on the floor with a beautiful naked motorbiking girl; third, for its denouement, in which the pair machine-gun teachers and boys from the roof of the school and themselves go down in a hail of bullets. As I watched, I cheered inside, and I’ve never forgotten it.

When I was 42, my wife took me for my birthday to a live concert of my long-time favourite piece of music, Mahler’s Second Symphony. We arrived quite late and had to take seats right behind the brass section. There is one moment in the symphony which always catches me: the end of the first movement, where the orchestra descends in arrhythmia across many bars, which then resolve suddenly. But I have never reacted so strongly as this time: at the moment of resolution I lurched forward almost convulsingly. I’ve never forgotten it.

Three moments of complete absorption, each of which by dint of its force contributed to making me what I am. But each worked differently. The first certainly depended upon my being there and feeling caught up in the preacher’s ‘performance.’ But its effect found shape through what happened afterwards. Thinking about it, it lost its ‘liveness’ as I began to think about how manufactured it was, and how its artificiality ran counter to thinking about the issues it claimed to address. That led to me becoming an atheist, after a year of thinking. The second was from the outset wholly mediated, and I knew it was, but it felt as if I was (re)living my own unpleasant, bullying, hierarchical school. It took me on a journey towards becoming a socialist (as I came to see in myself, partly through that film, a horrible assumed superiority that I needed to shuck off). That lived with me for many years—and I intend that both literally and metaphorically. The Mahlerian third was without doubt live in the traditional sense. But its force came from me knowing the music beforehand and being primed to respond to my favourite moment, but getting an experiential excess, because of those local circumstances. The memory of my response led me to reflect on what I love in all forms of art: ‘moments’ where form is visible but stressed. That has informed my choices on many occasions since. All three were, and in some ways still are, magically ‘alive’ to me.

This chapter addresses the topic of what is going on when culture most matters to people—when it comes alive for them. It is about the capacity of media and cultural forms and products to change lives. We know very well that most of the time no such thing happens. We note, we enjoy, we evaluate, we criticise and we consign to appropriate places in our repertoire of bits of memory—or simply forget. But once in a while, something different occurs. This chapter is about the processes that are triggered. And it is, tentatively, about how perhaps we might research this largely ignored phenomenon.

This chapter is intended as a contribution to ongoing debates about ‘liveness’ as a factor in the reception of media and cultural materials. Yet its evidence is drawn primarily from a field that is synonymous with the non-live: cinema. And I am not addressing any of the features traditionally said to characterise ‘liveness’: simultaneity, co-presence, performers’ interaction with audiences, and so on. In a previous study (Barker 2013a and 2013b), I compared approaches to liveness across a series of fields of study: theatre and performance, television, film and cinema, comedy, music (especially opera), radio, sport and virtual presence. That study was prompted by the rise of the phenomenon of simulcasting of theatre, opera and other events into cinemas—events that stress their ‘liveness,’ but are clearly not live in many of the traditional senses. Trying to make sense of these and how audiences de...