Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives ed. by Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof (review)

Scholars of performance studies have long framed “liveness” through the terms of the debate between Peggy Phelan and Philip Auslander. Dispelling many myths, the central aim of Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance is to reconsider and reconceptualize this debate by moving away from a discussion of liveness per se and toward the performers’ and audiences’ experience of the live. Rather than focusing on or even addressing the well-worn debate between Phelan’s ephemeral and Auslander’s reproducible liveness, the book considers the liveness experience through the audience’s interaction with the performance. This subtle, yet reaching change in purview makes all the difference. Documentation of the “particular kinds” (7) of audience experience of liveness is long overdue. The majority of contributors manage to capture this and take some bold steps into this challenging frontier, while a few exceptions stay within the safe confines of philosophical musings. Interdisciplinary in orientation, this book discusses current critical discourses across the art forms of theatre, dance, music, and the visual arts.

The book consists of two parts: “Audiencing” and “Materialising.” Each contains a series of essays and shorts, which include analyses of immersive theatre, performance art, nonhuman audiences, archival performance, music improvisations, performance installations, and electronic music. Part 1, “Audiencing,” contains an array of exceptional essays on the liveness experience for the audience. Reason and Lindelof borrow the media studies term audiencing to explore the affects, effects, and practices of liveness on and for the audience. The essays in this first part reach toward the transformative power of liveness, proposing innovative ways to move forward in audience research or experience. If it is audiences who open up the world to larger meanings and augment the art event, then we need to be valuing audiences as co-creators. The chapters achieve this by exploring how the experience of the ephemeral event can be extended through vehicles such as the memorial experience, social media, creating artworks, or composing poems, with a large emphasis on mediatised audiences.

Refreshingly, some of the chapters include empirical research, and some, as Reason has argued for in previous work, “ask the audience” about their experiences, perhaps not of describing “liveness” as such, but of their own meaning-making and affective responses to productions or artworks. Martin Barker discusses “high-value” experience moments that result in cultural transformation, proferring that entertainment can be transformative when texts “come alive” for their audiences. Also focusing on transformation, Katja Hilevaara explores how our memories of performances are a valid part of critique, a provocative discourse in this “post-truth” age. A much more optimistic reading of liveness than Phelan’s “disappearance,” Hilevaara’s expansive concept of the memorial experience raises multiple questions about the role, construction, and subjective experience of memory. Lucy Bennett explores the social-media audiencing of spectators at live music events as experienced by wider audiences. Also considering music, Stephanie Pitts considers educational avenues and online solutions to boost audiences as a solution to the steady decline in live classical music attendance. She includes an overdue recommendation that classical music program notes and other extraneous public discourses move away from specialized “knowledge-rich” writing to more accessible information for audiences. Paddy Scannell considers the phenomenological aspects of liveness by introducing an interesting concept of care structures of events: the behind-the-scenes labor, love, and investment that work toward productions. Problematizing the “affect” turn in performance studies, Reason suggests that affect could be an avenue for exploring the ineffable in dance performance. Based on his original experiments with different audience responses to productions, he suggests a “vocabulary of the gut” (89). Reason’s chapter introduces many new concepts that deserve a book of their own.

Part 2, “Materialising,” follows more of a philosophical direction in exploring the ontological aspects of the live event. The chapters and shorts in this part contain recurring motifs of time and of the audience...