This week we looked at the role of the audience in our seminar discussion, in particular their experience of live performance or what is also regarded as liveness.  It is this sense of liveness that separates the theatre environment from television of film.  Liveness is consumed; it is the unique selling point for theatre.

Edinburgh based company, The Audience Business, a company well rehearsed in liveness as a commodity, launched an advertising campaign called You’ll Love It Live (2000).  The campaign consisted of “a press launch, PR stunts and series of posters, including one carrying the slogan ‘Experience the thrill of a live performance.’ Aiming to increase awareness of the live arts among casual and infrequent audiences” (Reason, 2004).  This was an illustration of how live performance is marketed with liveness as is overriding pull factor.

This study highlights the importance of liveness as a factor for creating art.  The example given is that theatre is the best example of this, as it has ‘live actors on stage in front of a live audience’ (Jellicoe, 1967, p, 67).  When you look however at theatre that is recorded and then played to a live audience, such as the National Theatre Live streams to cinema venues around the country, you lose the liveness.  This is because the audience is unable to experience the performance in the same space as the audience.  Theatre doesn’t conventionally perform to camera, it performs to a live audience and the camera cannot pick up every detail expressed on stage that the human eye can.

Therefore some means of exhibiting theatre, what is considered the purest form of live performance, falls under a separate category:  What I will refer to as ‘false liveness’.  This is a term which relates to methods such as NT live stream casts to cinemas, to music artists who use lip-synch technology, rather than their own voice, in what they are selling as a live performance, or in TV sit-coms which have a track they can edit into scenes of applause and laughter, to fabricate a live recording of a performance.

The concept of liveness as a commodity, which may at first sound unappealing because of its capitalist connotations, still is worth consideration.  Theatre is enjoyed because of the live experience; we are able to watch art that has not been synthetically modified.  This debate ties into a previous blog post of mine about the Posthuman, only now our art is also becoming a cyborg of both human input and computer input.

Works Cited

Jellicoe, Ann (1967) Some Unconscious Influences in the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reason, Matthew (2004) ‘Theatre Audiences and Perceptions of ‘Liveness’ in Performance’, Particip@ions, Vol. 1 (2).