Liveness

Author(s) Auslander, Philip

Imprint Routledge, 2023

ISBN 9780367468187, 9780367468170,

9781003031314, 9781000813517,
9781000813678

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2 Live performance in a
mediatized culture

Some have argued that the binary opposition between the live and the
mediatized I discussed in the introduction is no longer relevant. Patrice
Pavis (2013:135) declares,

the old distinction between live performance and programmed,

mediatised performance no longer holds true, if indeed it ever did.
As the media—literally—penetrate our bodies in all their forms—
implants, probes, pacemakers (perhaps soulmakers, soon enough?),
microprocessors, Korean-Japanese implanted mobile telephones—as
our attention and our imagination become colonised and distracted
by the dominant media of our time, the old-fashioned categories of
the human, the living and the present become irrelevant. Our
perception is entirely determined by intermediality.

While Pavis paints a compelling picture of a world in which the analytical

distinction between the live and the mediatized is hopelessly outmoded,
his rhetoric suggests he retains a foothold in the old order. He describes
the “dominant media” negatively as colonizing our minds and distracting us
from such fundamental values as the human and the living. Pavis’s de-
scription of the infiltration of media into live performance posits a similar
competition, if not antagonism, between them:

the true challenge to live performance has come, at least since the
1980s, from audiovisual media, whose presence at the heart of live
performance has consequences for our perceptions. Thus, the change of
scale of an image, which is a familiar procedure in photography and
cinema, can lead—when that image is onstage—to spatial and
corporeal disorientation for the spectator. In the competition between
the filmic image and the “real” body of the living actor, the spectator
will not necessarily choose the living over the inanimate—in fact, quite
DOI: 10.4324/9781003031314-2
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 11
the opposite! The eye is drawn by what is visible at the largest scale,
that which never stops moving and holds the attention by way of
constant shifts in shot and in scale. Such is the lot of live performance,
and such is the challenge to theatre: to render, in spite of everything,
living presence and its forces of attraction.
(ibid., 134)

Despite the scare quotes around the word real, Pavis presents the re-
lationship between the live and mediatized elements of performance as a
competition for the spectator’s attention in which live performance stands
for the traditional humanistic values associated with living presence and
must negotiate with its other to find ways of asserting those values despite
the disadvantages it confronts in its competition with the media it seeks to
incorporate.
Lynn Lu (2017:115), a performance artist, draws a sharp line between
the live presence of the performer and mediatized performance, a dis-
tinction she sees as having ethical dimensions. In traditional live per-
formance in which performers and spectators are physically co-present,

responsibility and power to intervene are thrust upon the spectators,

transforming them from aloof observers into invested agents … . In
contrast, live performances that can only be accessed remotely via real
time broadcast … are spectacles communicated to us in one direction:
the work is complete without us and indifferent to our presence … .

It is clear from such examples that the live/mediatized binary is still a

crucial part of the framework within which critical discourse on perfor-
mance unfolds.
That said, my purpose in this chapter is not to reinforce this way of
thinking but to challenge it. I see the relationship between live and
mediatized performance not as deriving from what are taken to be their
respective intrinsic characteristics but, rather, as determined by cultural
and historical contingencies. After considering the place of live perfor-
mance in a cultural economy defined by mediatization, I examine claims
about the ontological characteristics of live and mediatized performances. I
will argue against intrinsic opposition and in favor of a view that emphasizes
the mutual dependence of the live and the mediatized and challenges both
the traditional assumption that the live precedes the mediatized and the
idea that live and mediatized performances can be distinguished from one
another on the basis of the fundamental characteristics usually ascribed to
each. From there, I will proceed to a historical narrative that encompasses
the relationship of live performance to television and assess the resulting
12 Live performance in a mediatized culture
impact of mediatization on the cultural status of live performance. I con-
tinue this narrative by looking at the advent of the internet and its impact
on performance. Finally, I discuss the revival of conventional under-
standings of the relationship between live and mediatized performance
under the sign of nostalgia during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The cultural economy of live performance:

representation and repetition
One of the most articulate versions of the position that sets live and
mediatized performance in opposition to one another is Peggy Phelan’s
account of what she understands to be the ontology of performance.1 For
Phelan, the basic ontological fact of performance is that its

only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded,

documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representa-
tions of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other
than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter
the economy of reproduction, it betrays and lessens the promise of its
own ontology.
(Phelan 1993:146)

For Phelan, performance’s devotion to the “now” and the fact that its only
continued existence is in the spectator’s memory enable it to sidestep the
economy of repetition, a term I have borrowed from Jacques Attali (I return
to this understanding of memory in Chapter 4). In Noise, his book on the
political economy of music, Attali offers a useful description of the cultural
economy in which performance currently takes place. He distinguishes an
economy based on representation from one based on repetition:

Stated very simply, representation in the system of commerce is that

which arises from a singular act; repetition is that which is mass-
produced. Thus, a concert is a representation, but also a meal à la carte
in a restaurant; a phonograph record or a can of food is repetition.
(Attali 1985:41)

In his historical analysis, Attali points out that although “representation

emerged with capitalism” when the sponsorship of concerts became a
profitable enterprise and not merely the prerogative of a feudal lord, ca-
pital ultimately “los[t] interest in the economy of representation” (ibid.).
Repetition, the mass-production of cultural objects, held greater promise
for capital because whereas “in representation, a work is generally heard
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 13
only once—it is a unique moment[,] in repetition, potential hearings are
stockpiled” (ibid.). Performance thus becomes an accumulable value.
Although live performances are representations and are usually experi-
enced as such by audiences who see them only once, they often function
within the economy of repetition either to promote cultural objects
characterized by repetition or to serve as reproducible objects in them-
selves. This is as true of the CDs and DVDs always available at perfor-
mances by Cirque du Soleil or Blue Man Group as it is of the images
derived from the performance work of Marina Abramović available for
purchase in art galleries, or the performance scenarios Tino Sehgal sells to
museums. That Abramović trains other performers to perform her works
in museums and Sehgal stages the same performances in multiple venues
using different performers are ways in which the performances themselves
participate in the economy of repetition.
Phelan argues that “Performance’s independence from mass reproduc-
tion, technologically, economically, and linguistically, is its greatest
strength” (ibid.:149). Although some of the early documentation of per-
formance and body art of the early 1970s was not carefully planned or
conceived as such, artists who were interested in preserving their work
quickly became fully conscious of the need to stage it for the camera as
much as for an immediately present audience, if not more so. As
Abramović puts it, “if you don’t record the performance, you lose it”
(quoted in Dannatt 2005). Chris Burden

carefully staged each performance and had it photographed and

sometimes also filmed; he selected usually one or two photographs of
each event for display in exhibitions and catalogs … In this way,
Burden produced himself for posterity through meticulously orche-
strated textual and visual representations.
(Jones 1994:568)

As another example, the European body artist Gina Pane describes the
role of photography in her work in the following terms:

It creates the work the audience will be seeing afterwards. So the

photographer is not an external factor, he is positioned inside the
action space with me, just a few centimeters away. There were times
when he obstructed the [audience’s] view!
(quoted in O’Dell 1997:76–7)

It is clear, then, that such archetypal works of body and endurance art as
Burden’s, Pane’s, and Abramović’s were not autonomous performances.2
14 Live performance in a mediatized culture
Rather, these events were staged to be documented at least as much as to
be seen by an audience, and it was understood that the documented form
of the performance available for mass circulation was the final product
with which it would inevitably become identified. As Kathy O’Dell
(ibid.:77) puts it, “performance art is the virtual equivalent of its re-
presentations.” Pane indicates that sometimes the process of doc-
umentation even interfered with the initial audience’s ability to perceive
the performance. In this respect, no documented work of performance art
is performed solely as an end in itself: the performance is always at one
level raw material for documentation and replication. These develop-
ments illustrate Walter Benjamin’s (1968:224) claim in “The work
of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” that “To an ever greater
degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for
reproducibility.” Alessandra Barbuto (2015:5) observes,

While in the 1960s and ‘70 s, the dematerialization of the work of art
had stood as a critique of the market dynamics governing the art-
world, giving rise to a notion of performance as a wholly immaterial
event, less radical stances also subsequently emerged, and this extends
to artists’ current views on documentation … . In many instances, it
appears that the translation of action into other material forms of art
has affected the very notion of performance, leading to events
designed and calibrated specifically for the (contextual and/or
subsequent) production of material works.

The example of performance art shows that, historically, live forms cannot
be said to be, or to remain, economically or technologically independent
of mass reproduction.
Much as I admire Phelan’s commitment to a rigorous conception of an
ontology of liveness, I doubt very strongly that any cultural discourse can
stand outside the ideologies of capital and reproduction that define a
mediatized culture or should be expected to do so, even to assume an
oppositional stance.3 I agree with Sean Cubitt (1994:283–4) when he says
that “in our period of history, and in our Western societies, there is no
performance that is not always already a commodity.” Furthermore, as
Pavis (1992:134) observes, “‘the work of art in the era of technical re-
production’ cannot escape the socioeconomic-technological domination
which determines its aesthetic dimension.” It is not realistic to propose
that live performance can remain ontologically pristine or that it operates
in a cultural economy separate from that of the mass media.
The terms of the traditional opposition between live performance and
mediatized or technologized forms generally focus on two primary issues:
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 15
4
reproduction and distribution. Herbert Molderings (1984:172–3) defines
the question of reproduction by saying:

in contrast to traditional art[,] performances do not contain a

reproduction element … Whatever survives of a performance in
the form of a photograph or videotape is no more than a fragmentary,
petrified vestige of a lively process that took place at a different time
in a different place.

Or, in Phelan’s (1993:3, 146) succinct formulations, performance “can be

defined as representation without reproduction”; “Performance’s being
becomes itself through disappearance.” In terms of distribution, Pavis
(1992:101) contrasts the one-to-many model of broadcasting with the
“limited range” of theatre: “media easily multiply the number of their
spectators, becoming accessible to a potentially infinite audience. If
theatre relationships are to take place, however, the performance cannot
tolerate more than a limited number of spectators.” In these formulations,
live performance is identified with intimacy and disappearance, media
with a mass audience, reproduction, and repetition. Phelan (1993:149)
offers an apt summary of this view: “Performance honors the idea that a
limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an ex-
perience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward.” Overtly or
covertly, the writers I have just cited valorize the live over the mediatized,
as is evident in Molderings’s contrast between “lively” performance and
“petrified” video. Even Pavis (1992:134), who argues that theatre needs to
be seen in relation to other media, nevertheless refers to the influence of
other media on theatre as a contamination. From this point of view, once
live performance succumbs to mediatization, it loses its ontological in-
tegrity. These formulations of the relationship between live performance
and mediatization as oppositional are not neutrally descriptive; rather,
they reflect an ideology central to contemporary performance studies.
Phelan (1993:148) claims that live performance’s inability to participate
in the economy of repetition “gives performance art its distinctive op-
positional edge.”5

The ephemerality and distribution of live and mediatized

performance
Claudia Georgi (2014:5) identifies

five aspects that are often associated with live performances and
are frequently deemed to be defining characteristics of liveness: the
16 Live performance in a mediatized culture
co-presence of performers and spectators, the ephemerality of the live
event, the unpredictability or risk of imperfection, the possibility
of interaction and, finally, a specific quality of the representation
of reality.

To these I will add that co-presence and the possibility of interaction are
frequently said to create a sense of community in live performance.
Ephemerality has been central to the discussion to this point. My ongoing
purpose here is to destabilize somewhat traditional theoretical oppositions
of the live and the mediatized. Having already argued that the ostensible
ephemerality of the live event does not exempt it from participation in a
cultural economy defined by repetition, I will challenge the idea that
ephemerality is a defining characteristic of live performance that differ-
entiates it from mediatized representations first through a consideration
what might be called the “electronic ontology” of media:6

the broadcast flow is … a vanishing, a constant disappearing of what

has just been shown. The electron scan builds up two images of each
frame shown, the lines interlacing to form a “complete” picture. Yet
not only is the sensation of movement on screen an optical illusion
brought about by the rapid succession of frames: each frame is itself
radically incomplete, the line before always fading away, the first scan
of the frame all but gone, even from the retina, before the second
interlacing scan is complete … TV’s presence to the viewer is subject
to constant flux: it is only intermittently “present,” as a kind of
writing on the glass … caught in a dialectic of constant becoming and
constant fading.
(Cubitt 1991:30–1)

As this quotation from Cubitt suggests, disappearance may be even more

fundamental to television than it is to live performance—the televisual
image is always simultaneously coming into being and vanishing; there is
no point at which it is fully present.7 This is equally true for analog and
digital televisions as well as digital displays, though digital televisions have
more scan lines, producing an image at a higher resolution than analog
sets. At the electronic level, the televisual image is hardly a petrified
remnant of some other event, as Molderings (1984) would have it, but
exists rather as a lively, and forever unresolved, process. For some the-
orists, the televisual image’s existence only in the present also obviates the
notion that television (and video) is a form of reproduction. Contrasting
television with film in this regard, Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow
(1977:54–6) point out that:
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 17
where film sides towards instantaneous memory (“everything is
absent, everything is recorded—as a memory trace which is so at
once, without having been something else before”8) television
operates much more as an absence of memory, the recorded material
it uses—including material recorded on film—instituted as actual in
the production of the television image.

Regardless of whether the image conveyed by television is live or recorded

(and, as Stanley Cavell (1982:86) reminds us, on television there is “no
sensuous distinction between the live and the repeat or replay”) its pro-
duction as a televisual image occurs only in the present moment. “Hence
the possibility of performing the television image—electronic, it can be
modified, altered, transformed in the moment of its transmission, is a
production in the present” (Heath and Skirrow 1977:53). Although
Heath and Skirrow are referring here to broadcast television, what they
say is as true for a recorded video as it is for broadcast: the televisual image
is not only a reproduction or repetition of a performance, but a perfor-
mance in itself.
I want to worry this question of reproduction in one more context by
considering the related issue of repetition in the context of film, whose
ontology is photographic rather than electronic. Writing on the experi-
ence of film, Cavell (1982:78) observes that:

movies … at least some movies, maybe most, used to exist in

something that resembles [a] condition of evanescence, viewable
only in certain places at certain times, discussable solely as occasions
for sociable exchange, and never seen more than once, and then more
or less forgotten.

It is remarkable how closely Cavell’s description of the film experience

parallels descriptions of the experience of live performance. Paul Grainge
(2011:5) extends this account of the ephemerality of film:

While the development of the Hollywood studio system would see

motion pictures achieve greater solidity in their length, circulation
and status as material property, film remained a time-specific and
place-bound encounter, subject to contingencies of programming and
local performance. The typical classical Hollywood movie, for
example, played in second-run movie theatres on a double bill for
three or four days and never returned. In these ways, film can be seen
as a highly transient medium. In the postwar period, Hollywood
movies would increasingly appear on network television and would
18 Live performance in a mediatized culture
surface as remastered works and in other kinds of specialist screening.
However, before the domestication of video and DVD … the
experience of film was largely based on occasional cinematic and
broadcast screenings rather than, as now, via the precise time-shifting
enabled by home viewing technologies.

As Grainge points out, in the past, the experience of film was as tied to
local contingencies as any live performance. Film is no longer an un-
repeated experience confined to particular places and times: people fre-
quently see their favorite films multiple times, and have opportunities to
do so afforded them by the appearances of these movies on cable and
broadcast television, and on DVDs and the internet. If we want to, we can
own copies of movies and watch them whenever, and as often, as we wish.
Whereas film was once experienced as representation, it is now experi-
enced as repetition.
The crucial point is that this transition was not caused by any sub-
stantive change in the film medium itself though, as Grainge indicates, it
was influenced by the development of digitization and such adjacent
technologies as the DVD player.9 As a medium, film can be used to
provide an evanescent experience that leaves little behind, in the manner
of a live performance, or it can provide an experience based in repetition
and the stockpiling of film commodities.10 Cubitt (1991:92–3) makes
much the same point with respect to video, arguing that repetition is not
“an essence in the medium.” Rather, “the possibility of repetition is only a
possibility”; the actual use of the medium is determined by “the imaginary
relation of viewer and tape.” A case in point is Christine Kozlov’s in-
stallation, Information: No Theory (1970), which consisted of a tape-
recorder equipped with a tape loop whose control was fixed in the “record”
mode. Therefore, as the artist herself noted, new information continuously
replaced existing information on the tape, and “proof of the existence of
the information [did] not in fact exist” (quoted in Meyer 1972:172).
Kozlov thus used a recording medium to create pure evanescence. The
functions of reproduction, storage, and distribution that animate the
network of repetition were undermined by this way of using the very
technology that brought that network into being (see Attali 1985:32). In
this context, reproduction without representation may be more radical
than representation without reproduction (cf. Phelan 1993:146).
Other examples in which reproductive media are used to produce
ephemerality include Snapchat and Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone at
Alexandra Palace, a concert film streamed online for ticket holders in the
summer of 2020 with the promise that this was a one-time opportunity
and that the film would not be shown again.11 Videos posted to the social
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 19
media platform Snapchat, “which prides itself on being ephemeral,” dis-
appear within ten seconds of being opened by their intended viewer
(Laestadius 2017:578). Neither permanence nor repetition is an ontolo-
gical characteristic of film, video, digital media, or any other reproductive
medium that determines the experiences these media can provide, but a
historically contingent effect of their culturally determined uses.
Just as recording media like film and video can be used in ways that
provide an experience of the ephemerality usually associated with live
performance, so, too, live forms such as theatre have been used in ways
that do not respect, or even recognize, the ostensible spatial and temporal
limitations of live performance. There are instances in which the theatre,
for example, aspires to the condition of a mass medium. One example is
the WPA Federal Theater’s 1936 production of It Can’t Happen Here,
adapted from Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, which opened simultaneously in
twenty-one different productions in multiple American cities.12 The
productions were not identical—each was staged using local talent and in
response to local social and political conditions. Nevertheless, the theatre
in this case partook of two basic qualities of a mass medium. “If we define
broadcasting as a form of dissemination that connects dispersed people via
a common text at a more or less common time,” as John Durham Peters
(2010:272) suggests, then It Can’t Happen Here was, in effect, a live
broadcast that became necessary viewing for Americans across the country
and part of the national conversation in the manner of the popular radio
programs and hit movies of the time. “No one agreed on the play,” re-
ported Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theater Project, “but ev-
eryone had to see it” (quoted in Quinn 2008:310–11). In fact, the Federal
Theater Project took up It Can’t Happen Here after a planned film version
was canceled (Whitman 1937:18, 64). Hollywood saw the Federal Theater
as a competitor and opposed it on the grounds that it was leaching away
audiences that would otherwise be attending movie houses and under-
mining the motion picture industry’s use of Broadway as a place to develop
projects (ibid.:130–2).
To take another kind of case, producers of the genre known as “in-
teractive plays,” a predecessor to “immersive theatre” that emerged in the
1980s, envisioned live performances as franchisable. Interactive plays are
environmental performances that incorporate varying degrees of spectator
participation.13 In Tamara (1981), for instance, spectators follow the
character of their choice through a series of rooms, witnessing various
scenes from the life of the artist Tamara de Lempicka. Tony’n’ Tina’s
Wedding, which ran Off-Off Broadway from 1985 to 2010 and had an
additional 100 other productions, was a simulation of an Italian-American
wedding ceremony and reception that was often staged in churches and
20 Live performance in a mediatized culture
event spaces. Spectators interacted with the performers by eating with
them, dancing with them, gossiping with them, etc. Barrie Wexler, the
California producer of Tamara, “franchises … Tamara worldwide, re-
plicating the product in exact and dependable detail. ‘It’s like staying in
the Hilton,’ he explains, ‘everything is exactly the same no matter where
you are’” (quoted in Fuchs 1996:142). Another relevant example is Blue
Man Group, a performance troupe that has been in residence in a theatre
in New York City since 1991 and eventually established other permanent
companies in multiple cities, including Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, and
Berlin. All of the Blue Man performers are intended to be identical and
interchangeable; each performer plays a character established by one of
the three founding members (Grundhauser 2015). Blue Man performances
are functionally identical regardless of where one sees one. In these cases,
live performance takes on the defining characteristics of a mass medium:
by making the same text (a play, a theatrical production, a non-verbal
performance) available simultaneously to a large number of participants
distributed widely in space.
It is crucial to observe that the intentions underlying these examples of
the use of the live medium as a mass medium are very different, and each
is arguably reflective of its particular historical moment. The ideological
positioning of these productions is determined not by their shared use of
live performance as a mass medium, but by the different intentions and
contexts of these uses. The Federal Theater’s practices may be said to have
grown out of a generally left-populist attitude, while interactive plays are
the creatures of postmodern consumer capitalism (see Fuchs 1996:129).
Ironically, interactive plays like Tamara commodify the very aspects of
live performance that are said to resist commodification. Because they are
designed to offer a different experience at each visit, they can be mer-
chandised as events that must be purchased over and over again: the
ostensible evanescence and non-repeatability of the live experience be-
come selling points to promote a product that must be fundamentally the
same in each of its instantiations. The promise of having a different ex-
perience at each attendance at an interactive play is meaningful only if
each is clearly recognizable as a different experience of the same, essen-
tially static object, like viewing a sculpture from different angles.
This point leads to the concept of “the unpredictability or risk of im-
perfection” that Georgi includes in her list of characteristics ascribed to live
performance. Unpredictability and risk of imperfection are two different
ideas. In principle, an improvised jazz performance is unpredictable yet need
not be imperfect.14 Nevertheless, as Martin Barker (2013:43–4) suggests,
the two concepts are linked. Barker characterizes the idea “that audiences
gain much from a sense of the risks of performance—that performances are
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 21
unpredictable, might go wrong” as an “untested claim” and “a strange no-
tion,” a perspective I share. As Erving Goffman (1959:212) points out,
when an incident occurs that disrupts the smooth flow of a performance, the
result is embarrassment for both performers and spectators, an outcome all
studiously seek to avoid. Goffman identifies “protective practices” through
which the audience seeks “to help the performers save their own show” such
as audience tact in which spectators knowingly overlook apparent errors on
the part of the performers (ibid.:229, 231). Spectators are as invested in the
success of a performance as performers. It therefore seems unlikely that they
perceive the value of live performance as residing partially in the possibility
that something might go wrong.
Obviously, some mediatized performances, such as live broadcasts, can
be just as spontaneous as live performances in which performers and
audience share the same space. It is equally obvious that whereas re-
corded performances are fixed, live performances can be spontaneously
different each time. Although much is made of the way each in-
stantiation of a live performance is potentially different from every other
one, how different does the audience want them to be?15 In the case of
traditional theatre, any given performance of a particular production
of a play is expected to be virtually identical to any other performance of
that same production. If a particular performance deviates radically from
the established norm, it is arguably no longer a performance of that
production. The uniformity of performances is regulated in the profes-
sional theatre. In the United States, stage managers are required by the
Actors’ Equity Association, the trade union that represents them as well
as actors, to post a list of Responsibilities of the Actor. One of the
responsibilities listed is to “Maintain your performance as directed.”16 If
an actor violates this rule, the stage manager must report the infraction
to Equity for possible sanction (Actors’ Equity Association 2005). As
Barker (2003:28, original emphasis) indicates,

a committed company of players will surely be working towards

minimizing random changes between performances. They will seek a
plateau where everything in a production is controlled, where
characterization is organic and consistent, movements are choreo-
graphed, timed and effective, where dialogue is delivered with the
patina of appropriate emotion, and so on. In addition, although in
principle they could, most audiences rarely go back for a second
viewing. But even when they do, it is hardly to search for and pay
attention to the small elements of difference. They go in most cases, I
suspect, in order perhaps to be able to scrutinize the same performance
more closely.
22 Live performance in a mediatized culture
Barker goes on to suggest that the valorization of the spontaneous varia-
bility of live theatre is more ideological than based on real experience:
audiences seek to experience theatrical performances “as if they had ele-
ments of uniqueness” (ibid.) even though the actual variations are prob-
ably minimal and insignificant, and significant variations are likely to be
unwelcome.
There are, of course, kinds of performance that have spontaneity as part of
their makeup, such as improv comedy or jazz in which portions of the per-
formance are conventionally understood to be improvised. Improvisation
always occurs in a context that limits what can happen. For instance, there
must be a high degree of continuity across improvised performances by the
same artist. If I choose to attend a performance by a comedy improv troupe or
a jazz musician whose work I have enjoyed in the past, I expect the newly
improvised performance to be somehow consistent with my earlier experi-
ence. Paradoxically, the most successfully spontaneous forms of performance
may be those in which the element of “spontaneity” is relatively planned and
predictable. In his essay on “The Lecture,” for instance, Goffman (1981:178)
observes,

There are moments in a lecture when the speaker seems most alive to
the ambience of the occasion and is particularly ready with wit and
extemporaneous response to show how fully he has mobilized his spirit
and mind for the moment at hand. Yet these inspired moments will
often be ones to most suspect. For during them the speaker is quite
likely to be delivering something he memorized some time ago, having
happened upon an utterance that fits so well that he cannot resist
reusing it in that particular slot whenever he gives the talk in question.

Such cases are similar to Barker’s description of the theatre: since most
audiences attend the performance only once, they have no basis for
measuring the differences that arise spontaneously from performance to
performance. It is ironic that such differences are more accessible from
recorded performances through which one can make specific comparisons
of improvised moments, as those who study the improvisatory practices of
jazz masters do, than from live performances. I have also argued that the
fact of improvisation is not directly apprehensible from live performance
since there is no way for a spectator to know whether or not the material
presented is actually improvised or planned in advance. Improvisation in
performance is a social agreement between performers, who act in certain
conventional ways that signal they are improvising, and spectators, who
act as if improvisation is taking place when they are not in a position to
know (Auslander 2021:154).
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 23
Barker’s analysis also invites reflection on the conventional belief that
the interaction between performers and audience

determines to some extent the aesthetic quality of the performance.

An enthusiastic audience will energize the actors, whose timing and
vivacity may improve as a result. On the other hand, a bored house
can often bring the actors down with it.
(Osipovich 2006:464)

While there is no question that performances are produced by performers

and audiences working together by playing their respective roles, as
Goffman suggests, the idea that the audience has a real impact on
performers—aside from technical matters such as holding for laughter or
applause—is as much an untested claim as the idea that audiences value
the supposed unpredictability of live performances. It may well be that
performers act as if they gauge audience response and adjust their per-
formances when in reality they vary their performances only minimally for
different audiences. Some theatrical front of house workers, for instance,
find that “repeated viewings of actors’ performances grow predictable
during the season” while “the audience members perform differently each
night” (Heim 2016:24). From this perspective, liveness, in the sense of
variability from performance to performance, is located more in the au-
dience than on the stage.
It is also important to note that whereas the idea that audiences have a
significant impact on performers in a live setting comes up frequently in
the context of theatre and popular music, other kinds of performance are
not described in this way. According to Christopher Small, in the context
of classical music, “a musical performance is thought of as a one-way
system of communication, running from composer to individual listener
through the medium of the performer” (Small 1998:6) involving “two
separate groups of people [musicians and listeners] who never meet”
(ibid.:27). Given the lack of intimacy and exchange between the two
groups in this kind of performance, it is unlikely that the musicians’
performance is affected by audience response or that they are necessarily
even aware of their audience. As I mentioned earlier, traditional theatrical
productions cannot vary much in response to different audiences. Even if
feedback between actors and spectators occurs in the theatre, the effect
results from the social and aesthetic conventions that define the perfor-
mance, not from the mere presence of the two groups to each other, which
is configured differently in different genres of performance.
Another thing to consider is whether we need to be present at the live
performance in order to enjoy the interaction between audience and
24 Live performance in a mediatized culture
performers. Watching recorded improv comedy on television, for instance,
do we not experience the pleasure of seeing performers engaging with
audience suggestions? Is it necessary that those suggestions emanate from
an audience of which we are members to enjoy that experience?
It is often suggested that the experience of live performance builds
community. It is surely the case that a sense of community may emanate
from being part of an audience that clearly values something you value,
though the reality of our cultural economy is that the communal bond
unifying such an audience is most likely to be little more than the
common consumption of a particular performance commodity (Small
1998:40). Leaving that issue aside, I argue against the idea that live
performance itself somehow generates whatever sense of community one
may experience. For one thing, mediatized performance makes just as
effective a focal point for the gathering of a social group as live perfor-
mance. Theodore Gracyk (1997:147), who discusses this issue as it per-
tains to popular music, observes that:

One does not need a live performance to create such a [social] space
or its attendant sense of being part of a community engaged with the
music: discos, Jamaican “sound system” trucks, bars and pubs and pool
halls with juke boxes, and the British rave scene have created diverse
public sites for recorded music.

Gracyk’s point can be generalized across performance genres. Another

example would be that of the crowds that gather for participatory
screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or other cult films; such
audiences experience a sense of community, of common interest and
purpose, strong enough to be described by sociologists as a “secular
cult” engaged in shared rituals known to its members (Kinkade and
Katovich 1992). Their experience is arguably more genuinely com-
munal than that of the audience attending a typical live performance.
My point is simply that communality is not a function of the liveness of
the performance but rather of the liveness of the audience, as Mark
Russell (2016) suggests.

If you remove the performer and reduce the equation to a group of

people who have chosen or found themselves to be in the same room
together to witness something, it is still a live event. The delicate
dance of the audience, the listening, the watching, watching others
watching, the keeping quiet, the shifting in the seats, the sigh, the
laughing, or even weeping shared with your fellow travelers in
the room.
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 25
The sense of community arises from being part of an audience and in-
teracting with fellow spectators. It is not clear that everyone needs to be in
the same room for this effect to occur as is the case in the examples cited
so far. A strong sense of community can also arise from a group of people
witnessing something online and interacting with each other while doing
so, through chat, for example. The quality of the experience of community
derives from the specific audience situation, not from the spectacle for
which that audience has gathered.
Another version of this account of the appeal of live performance
proposes that live performance brings performers and spectators together
communally in ways that can transcend the distinction between them.
This view misunderstands the dynamic of performance, which is pre-
dicated on the distinction between performers and spectators. Indeed, the
effort to eliminate that distinction destroys the very possibility of per-
formance: “The more you approach a performer, the more you inhibit the
very performance you are there to see. No matter how much a performer
gives, no matter how intensively you attend to her, the gap remains be-
tween” (Cubitt 1994:283). Those like Jerzy Grotowski and Augusto Boal,
for whom bridging this gap became the primary purpose of their work,
albeit for very different reasons, found themselves constrained to abandon
performance as such altogether (see Auslander 1997:26–7, 99–101). Blau
(1990:10, original emphasis) addresses these issues of performance and
communality in his discussion of the theatre audience:

Desire has always been … for the audience as community, similarly

enlightened, unified in belief, all the disparities in some way healed
by the experience of theater. The very nature of theater reminds us
somehow of the original unity even as it implicates us in the
common experience of fracture, which produces both what is time-
serving and divisive in theater and what is self-serving and
subversive in desire … as there is no theater without separation,
there is no appeasing of desire.

As Blau suggests in this extraordinary passage, the experience of theatre

(of live performance generally, I would say) provokes our desire for
community but cannot satisfy that desire because performance is founded
on difference, on separation and fragmentation, not unity.17 Live perfor-
mance places us in the living presence of the performers, other human
beings with whom we desire unity and can imagine achieving it, because
they are there, in front of us. Yet live performance also inevitably frus-
trates this desire since its very occurrence presupposes a gap between
performer and spectator. Arguably, the power of the live resides not in its
26 Live performance in a mediatized culture
perceived potential to create community but in the tension between our
sense of being connected experientially to something while it is happening
while also remaining at a distance from it. The distance can be physical, as
in live broadcasts or a live stream in which a performance artist is sitting
in a museum in a different city, or it can be a matter of consciousness, as in
cases where my distance from the performers is a function of our re-
lationship’s having been framed as an interaction between two distinct
groups—performers and spectators—with different roles to play. In all
cases, liveness is the experience of having an active connection to an
event taking place now, but somewhere else, whether that somewhere else
is miles away or only inches away but distinguished from my space by
virtue of its belonging to the realm of the performer rather than that of the
spectator, the inviolable distinction on which all performance depends. In
all cases, the live connection feels as if it could abolish distance but never
actually does, and indeed cannot, since liveness, like theatre, “posits itself
in distance” (Blau 1990:86).
Partly because of the promise of community, we go to live performances
to be in the presence of the performers, but we must acknowledge that
such presence can take on a wide variety of forms. Seeing a singer in a
cabaret setting is quite different from going to a stadium rock concert
where, for most in attendance, the singer is a tiny speck in the distance
seen clearly only on the jumbo video screen above. Since both situations
are equally regarded as live performances, live presence cannot be equated
with any particular relationship between audience and performers. For an
audience to share space with performers does not in itself guarantee any
sort of intimacy, connection, or communication between performers and
spectators, as Small’s description of the performance of symphonic music
suggests.
Furthermore, one can ask: what, exactly, is the value of co-presence? It
certainly is not an absolute value. Some actors are far better on screen
than on stage, and it may well be that I can see and follow a football game
much better on television than at the stadium (and I can even enjoy the
experience of community, albeit on a smaller scale than at the stadium, if I
invite some friends over to watch and cheer with me). There is no sense in
which it is somehow “better,” across the board, to be present at a live
event than to witness it by other means. There is, however, a socio-
cultural value attached to live presence: being able to say that you saw a
particular musician or actor live or that you were present at a particularly
legendary performance enables you to gain social prestige. Attendance at a
particular event can constitute valuable symbolic capital—certainly, it is
possible to dine out on the cachet of having been at the 1969 Woodstock
Festival, for example, and having seen Hamilton on Broadway with the
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 27
original cast is worth more symbolic capital than any other experience of
the show.18 One remarkable aspect of performance’s position within
cultural economy is that our ability to convert attendance at a live event
into symbolic capital is completely independent of the experiential quality
of the event itself. Attending Woodstock might have meant spending
three days hungry, sick, covered with mud, and unable to hear any music
whatsoever. Seeing the Beatles at New York’s Shea Stadium in 1965 al-
most undoubtedly did mean hearing no music and might have meant
suffering temporary deafness as a result of screaming fans. None of this
matters, however; merely being able to say you were there, live, translates
into symbolic capital in the appropriate cultural contexts.
This aspect of liveness has a complex relation to cultural economy.
Despite the claim, discussed earlier, that performance’s evanescence al-
lows it to escape commodification, it is that very evanescence that gives
performance value in terms of cultural prestige.19 The less an event leaves
behind in the way of artifacts and documentation, the more symbolic
capital accrues to those who were in attendance, at least in some cases (see
Cubitt 1994:289). In other cases, however, the symbolic value of having
attended an event may be a function of that event’s notoriety, which, in
turn, may result from the extent to which the event has been circulated as
reproductions. Having been at Woodstock may carry a great deal of
symbolic capital precisely because the festival has been so widely re-
produced as multiple sound recordings, books, and a film, and thus has
become iconic in a way that most other rock festivals have not despite
their cultural and experiential value.

Against ontology
I am suggesting that thinking about the relationship between live and
mediatized forms in terms of ontological oppositions is not especially pro-
ductive, because there are few grounds on which to make significant onto-
logical distinctions. Like live performance, electronic and photographic
media can be described meaningfully as partaking of the ontology of dis-
appearance ascribed to live performance, and they can also be used to provide
an experience of evanescence. Like film and television, theatre can be used as
a mass medium. Half joking, I might cite Pavis’s observation that “theatre
repeated too often deteriorates” (Pavis 1992:101) as evidence that the
theatrical object degenerates with repeated use in a manner akin to a re-
corded object, whether analog or digital. I am not proposing, however, that
live performance and mediatization partake of a shared ontology. I am sug-
gesting, rather, that how live and mediatized forms are used is determined not
by their ostensibly intrinsic characteristics but by their positions within
28 Live performance in a mediatized culture
cultural economy. To understand the relationship between live and med-
iatized forms, it is necessary to investigate that relationship as historical and
contingent, not as ontologically given or technologically determined.
As a starting point for this exploration, I propose that, historically, the
live is actually an effect of mediatization, not the other way around. It was
the development of recording technologies that made it possible to perceive
existing representations as “live.” Prior to the advent of such technologies
(e.g., sound recording and motion pictures), there was no such thing as
“live” performance, for that category has meaning only in relation to an
opposing possibility. The ancient Greek theatre, for example, was not live
because there was no possibility of recording it. In a special case of Jean
Baudrillard’s well-known dictum that “the very definition of the real is that
of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction” (Baudrillard 1983:146,
original emphasis), the “live” can be defined only as “that which can be re-
corded.” Most dictionary definitions of this usage of the word “live” reflect
the necessity of defining it in terms of its opposite: “Of a performance, heard
or watched at the time of its occurrence, as distinguished from one recorded
on film, tape, etc.” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.).
On this basis, the historical relationship of liveness and mediatization
must be seen as a relation of dependence and imbrication rather than
opposition. That the mediated is engrained in the live is apparent in the
structure of the English word “immediate.” The root form is the word
mediate, of which immediate is, of course, the negation. Mediation is thus
embedded within the im-mediate; the relation of mediation and the im-
mediate is one of mutual dependence, not precession. Far from being
encroached upon, contaminated, or threatened by mediation, live per-
formance is always already inscribed with traces of the possibility of
technical mediation (i.e., mediatization) that defines it as live (I return to
this point in the context of live and recorded music in Chapter 3).
Theorizations that privilege liveness as a pristine state uncontaminated by
mediatization misconstrue the relation between the two terms.
Connor (1989:153) summarizes the relationship between the live and
the mediatized in related terms:

In the case of “live” performance, the desire for originality is a

secondary effect of various forms of reproduction. The intense
“reality” of the performance is not something that lies behind the
particulars of the setting, the technology and the audience; its reality
consists in all of that apparatus of representation.

Connor’s frame of reference is the performance of popular music, a subject

I take up in the next chapter as part of a discussion of the relationship
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 29
between live and recorded music. A good example of the inscription of the
apparatus of representation within live performance in that realm is the
status of the microphone in popular music performance: consider its
central role in Elvis Presley’s performance style, the microphonic acro-
batics of James Brown, the way the Supremes’ and Temptations’ chor-
eography revolved around the positioning of their microphones, or the
way the Beatles’ use of three microphones for four singers was crucial to
the staging of their performances (Auslander 2020). As Connor implies,
the very presence of the microphone and the performers’ manipulation of
it are paradoxical markers of the performance’s status as live and im-
mediate. Far from suppressing the apparatus of reproduction, as performers
who use headset mikes not clearly visible to the audience may be said to
be attempting, these performers emphasize that the apparatus of re-
production is a constitutive element of their liveness. In short, they per-
form the inscription of mediatization within the immediate.
This also may be a good way to understand the relationship between
live and mediatized elements of performances sometimes described as
hybrid or intermedial, in which live and recorded or mediatized elements
interact with one another. In the earlier editions of this book, I posited
that audiences would tend to see images produced through the dominant
media of their time (e.g., cinema, television, digital) as more compelling
than live bodies, for both perceptual and cultural reasons (as Pavis also
observes). It may be more productive, however, to see such interactions of
live and mediatized elements as mutually defining, as stagings of the
historical process by means of which the live and the mediatized acquire
their respective identities through the discursive distinctions constructed
around them.
The immediate is not prior to mediation but derives precisely from the
mutually defining relationship between the immediate and the mediated.
Similarly, live performance cannot be said to have ontological or histor-
ical priority over mediatization, since liveness was made visible only by
the possibility of technical reproduction. This problematizes Phelan’s
claim that “to the degree that live performance attempts to enter into the
economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own
ontology” (Phelan 1993:146), not just because it is not at all clear that
live performance has a distinctive ontology, but also because it is not a
question of live performance’s entering into the economy of reproduction,
since it has always been there. My argument is that the very concept of
live performance presupposes that of reproduction—that the live can exist
only within an economy of reproduction.
This means that the history of live performance is bound up with the
history of recording media; it extends over no more than the past 100 to
30 Live performance in a mediatized culture
150 years. To declare retroactively that all performance before, say, the
mid-nineteenth century was “live” would be an anachronistic imposition
of a modern concept on a pre-modern phenomenon. In fact, the Oxford
English Dictionary’s earliest examples of the use of the word “live” in re-
ference to performance come from 1934, well after the advent of sound-
recording technologies in the 1890s and the development of broadcasting
systems in the 1920s. If this word history is complete (and I assume that if
the word “live” had been applied to performances in, say, the Middle
Ages, the editors of the OED would have found the references!), then the
concept of live performance came into being not at the appearance of the
basic recording technologies that made the concept possible but only with
the maturation of mediatized society itself.
The reason why the appearance of recording technologies was not en-
ough in itself to bring the concept of liveness into being has to do, I think,
with the fact that with the first recording technology, sound recording, the
distinction between live performances and recordings remained experien-
tially unproblematic (though the experience of disembodied voices was
problematic for some listeners, as will be discussed in Chapter 3). If you put
a record on your gramophone and listened to it, you knew exactly what you
were doing and there was no possibility of mistaking the activity of listening
to a record for that of attending a live performance. As Attali (1985:90–6)
points out, the earliest forms of sound recordings, such as Edison’s cylinder,
were intended to serve as secondary adjuncts to live performance by pre-
serving it. As recording technology brought the live into being, it also
respected and reinforced the primacy of existing modes of performance.
Live and recorded performances thus coexisted clearly as discrete, com-
plementary experiences, necessitating no particular effort to distinguish
them.
It is significant that the earliest use of the word “live” in relation to
performance listed in the OED has to do with the distinction between live
and recorded sound, but not with the gramophone. The technology ne-
cessitating this usage was radio. This first citation of the word “live” comes
from the BBC Yearbook for 1934 and iterates the complaint “that recorded
material was too liberally used” on the radio. Here, we can glimpse the
beginnings of the historical process by which recorded performances came
to compete with live ones. Radio represented a challenge to the com-
plementary relationship of live and recorded performances that went be-
yond its role in enabling recordings to replace live performances. Unlike
the gramophone, radio does not allow you to see the sources of the sounds
you are hearing; therefore, you can never be sure if they are live or re-
corded. Radio’s characteristic form of sensory deprivation crucially un-
dermined the clear-cut distinction between recorded and live sound.
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 31
It appears, then, that the concept of the live was brought into being not just
when it became possible to think in those terms—that is, when recording
technologies such as the gramophone were in place to serve as a ground
against which the figure of the live could be perceived—but only when it
became urgent to do so. The need to make that identification arose as an
affective response specifically to radio, a communications technology that
put the clear opposition of the live and the recorded into a state of crisis.
The response to this crisis was a terminological distinction that attempted
to preserve the formerly clear dichotomy between two modes of
performance—the live and the recorded—a dichotomy that had been so
self-evident up to that point that it did not even need to be named.
Recording technology brought the live into being, but under conditions
that permitted a clear distinction between the existing mode of perfor-
mance and the new one. The development of broadcast technology,
however, obscured that distinction, and thus subverted the formerly
complementary relationship between live and recorded modes of perfor-
mance. The word “live” was pressed into service as part of a vocabulary
designed to contain this crisis by describing it and reinstating the former
distinction discursively even if it could no longer be sustained experien-
tially. As a consequence of the circumstances under which this vocabulary
was instated, the distinction between the live and the recorded was re-
conceived as one of binary opposition rather than complementarity. This
way of conceptualizing the live and the distinction between the live and
recorded or mediatized originated in the era of analog technologies and
persists to the present day; it forms the basis of current assumptions about
liveness.
It is clear from this history that the word “live” is not used to define
intrinsic, ontological properties of performance that set it apart from
mediatized forms, but rather is a historically contingent term. The default
definition of live performance is that it is the kind of performance in which
the performers and the audience are both physically and temporally co-
present to one another. But over time, we have come to use “live” to de-
scribe performance situations that do not meet these basic conditions. With
the advent of broadcast technologies—first radio, then television—we
began to speak of “live broadcasts.” This phrase is not considered an oxy-
moron, even though live broadcasts meet only one of the basic conditions:
performers and audience are temporally co-present in that the audience
witnesses the performance as it happens, but they are not spatially co-
present. Another use of the term worth considering is in the phrase “re-
corded live.” This expression is an oxymoron (how can something be both
recorded and live?) but is another concept we now accept without question.
In the case of live recordings, the audience shares neither a temporal frame
32 Live performance in a mediatized culture
nor a physical location with the performers, but experiences the perfor-
mance later and usually in a different place than it first occurred. The li-
veness of the experience of listening to or watching the recording is
primarily affective: live recordings allow the listener a sense of participating
in a specific performance and a vicarious relationship to the audience for
that performance not accessible through studio productions.
The phrases “live broadcast” and “live recording” suggest that the un-
derstanding of liveness has expanded well beyond its initial scope as the
concept has been articulated to emergent technologies. This process,
which continues, is additive: new experiences defined as live take their
place alongside of existing ones, which they do not supplant. Along these
lines, Nick Couldry (2004:356–7) proposes “two new forms of liveness,”
which he calls “online liveness” and “group liveness”:

[O]nline liveness: social co-presence on a variety of scales from very

small groups in chat rooms to huge international audiences for
breaking news on major Web sites, all made possible by the
Internet as an underlying infrastructure … [G]roup liveness[:] … the
“liveness” of a mobile group of friends who are in continuous contact
via their mobile phones through calls and texting.

For Couldry, “Liveness—or live transmission—guarantees a potential

connection to shared social realities as they are happening.” Because this
is perceived as valuable—and has become habitual—liveness in more or
less this sense persists across new media such as the internet and social
media that are not “linked to a mediated social ‘centre’” (ibid.:356) in the
way that broadcasting is.
Thinking about liveness across cultural forms such as theatre, music,
dance, sports, the internet, and social media, and thinking about the
different emphases in each case (physical and temporal co-presence in
traditional live performance; only temporal co-presence in the case of
broadcasts; social co-presence that may or may not entail temporal co-
presence in the case of social media) it becomes clear that liveness is not
just one thing—the term stands for a number of different kinds of con-
nections among people supported by a range of different technologies and
social formations. Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof (2016:6)
argue that we need to think in terms of plural “liveness-es.” Karin van Es
(2017:1249) notes both the common ground shared by differently situated
livenesses and the dissimilar emphases that distinguish them:

one could argue that what live media share is that they establish that
something needs to be attended to now rather than later, because it is
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 33
important to us as members of society. This is the collective function
of live media, and what binds those media together as a group.
However, live media can make different selling points explicit by
drawing on the particular relation they configure between real time
and sociality. With regard to news broadcasts, for example, the live is
used to frame the programme as authentic and real. The live broadcasts
of sports draw more on the unpredictability of the competition—the
excitement that comes from the awareness that anything can happen—
and on notions of presence. In yet other cases, the programme might
stress participation.

Van Es (2016:14) offers a useful approach to thinking in terms of situated

livenesses by regarding each “liveness [as] a construction shaped by in-
stitutions, technologies, and users.” Each such construction, which she
calls a “constellation,” is specific to the particular variables involved.
Although Van Es, like Couldry, focuses exclusively on the liveness of
media such as television, the internet, and social media, it is clear that the
sorts of questions she poses can also be addressed to live forms such as
theatre, concerts, and sporting events: “what is actually being promised?
Why does it matter that they are ‘live’? What do viewers expect from
them?” (ibid.:2). Dwelling on two of these questions for a moment, it is
obvious that what is promised by and expected from a symphony concert
and an evening of improv comedy is very different, and if the staid be-
havior expected of both symphony musicians and their listeners were
somehow to be transposed onto improv comics and the audiences with
which they interact, the experience would be deemed wholly un-
satisfactory. Both are equally live, yet the liveness of the symphony
concert provides a very different experience from that of improv comedy.
Another way of getting at this idea is through Goffman’s concept of the
social frame in which both promises and expectations are embedded.
Goffman (1974:10–11) defines frames (which he also calls “frames of re-
ference”) as “principles of organization which govern events—at least
social ones—and our subjective involvement in them.” Frames enable us
to understand what is going on, to use a favorite phrase of Goffman’s. To
frame an event as a symphony concert is to create a wholly different set of
expectations and understandings of what kinds of engagement the liveness
of the event permits than to frame it as improv comedy.
This applies as much to the concept of liveness itself as to the specific
constellations that construct its meaning in particular circumstances:

the category of liveness seems to refer as much to the way in which

certain performances/events are constructed and framed, as to the
34 Live performance in a mediatized culture
ontological status of performance prior to recording. “Liveness” … is
constructed and signified, and not simply an ontological foundation
of theatre.
(Power 2008:161)

The framing of a performance as live is particularly apparent in cases

where the audience is not co-present, such as National Theatre Live,
which presents simulcasts of live performances in cinemas; the Tate
Modern Performance Room, which features live performance art events
that can only be seen as online streams; and Woody Harrelson’s 2017 film
Lost in London, which was projected in cinemas as it was being shot on the
streets of the titular city. Such cases share the problem with broadcasting
that there is no way of knowing just from what you see and hear that the
event is taking place at the same time as you are watching it. Therefore,
they have to be explicitly framed as live. Other kinds of performances that
seem to be self-evidently live because performers and audience are co-
present are nevertheless framed and signified as such as well. This is one of
the functions of the reminder to put away your cell phone at the theatre,
of the large container of cough drops at the entrance to the concert hall,
and of the local references that pepper stand-up comedy performances and
the stage talk at rock concerts. All serve as assertions that you have en-
tered into an event framed as live and reminders of the particular social
meanings, expectations, and rituals attached to the event.
In challenging the traditional opposition of the live and the mediatized,
I am not suggesting that we cannot make phenomenological distinctions
between the respective experiences of live and mediatized representations,
distinctions concerning their respective positions within cultural
economy, and ideological distinctions among performed representations in
all media. What I am suggesting is that any distinctions need to derive
from careful consideration of how the relationship between the live and
the mediatized is articulated in particular cases, not from a set of as-
sumptions that constructs liveness as an ontological condition, rather
than a historically mutable concept, and the relation between live and
mediatized representations a priori as a relation of essential opposition. In
what follows, I will attempt to do something of the kind by examining the
way that television came to be positioned discursively first as a replication
of theatrical discourse, then as a replacement for live theatre. That theatre
and television came to be competitors within cultural economy resulted
from this particular discursive history, not from some intrinsic opposition
between them as cultural forms. The consequence of this competition
was the theatre’s becoming mediatized, both directly and indirectly. I
will continue this analysis with a discussion of the evolving relationship
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 35
between live performance and the internet to show that this relationship
is developing from a different set of premises and is not defined in the
same economically competitive terms as was the relationship between
television and theatre.

TeeVee’s playhouse
Television broadcasting was inaugurated in the United States in 1939,
when the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Columbia
Broadcasting System (CBS), and Dumont all began broadcasting diverse
programming in New York City. By 1940, there were 23 television stations
actively broadcasting in the country (Ritchie 1994:92). Along with the
manufacture of radio receivers and sound recordings, television program-
ming was curtailed in 1942 with the entry of the United States into World
War II. Television experienced a resurgence after the war, beginning in
1946 when sets became widely available to the public. The first television
era in the United States, then, occurred between 1939 and 1945, for al-
though programming and the industrial development of television were
truncated by the war effort, the discourse on television remained lively
during those years. This first phase of television was characterized by ex-
perimentation, speculation, and debate. From 1947 onward, television
broadcasting coalesced into the industry we still know today.
One of the central concerns of the discourse on television in the United
States during its earliest phases was the relationship of television to other
forms of entertainment and communication, particularly radio, film, and
theatre. Television was often described as a hybrid of existing forms. One
analyst characterized it as a “new and synthetic medium … radio with
sight, movies with the zest of immediacy, theatre (intimate or spectacular)
with all seats about six rows back and in the centre, tabloid opera and
circus without peanut vendors” (Wade 1944:728). The question, in the
words of Hans Burger (1940:209), was “whether or not television is … a
new complex of existing arts, or an art in its own right. And if it is an art,
what are its essential techniques and possibilities?” In the opinion of Kay
Reynolds (1942:121), “an authentically [sic] television form” had not yet
been discovered.
Although the question of authentic television form remained un-
resolved, early writers on television generally agreed that television’s es-
sential properties as a medium are immediacy and intimacy. As Lenox Lohr,
the president of NBC, put it, “the most utilitarian feature of television lies
in broadcasting events exactly when and as they happen” (Lohr 1940:52,
original emphasis). Orrin E. Dunlap’s later description is even more em-
phatic: “People now look upon scenes never before within their range;
36 Live performance in a mediatized culture
they see politics as practiced, sports as played, drama as enacted, news as it
happens, history as it is made” (Dunlap 1947:8). In an essay of 1937,
Alfred N. Goldsmith, an industrial engineer, compares television, film,
and human vision in these terms:

As far as ocular vision is concerned, a real event can be seen only at

the instant of occurrence … Accordingly all the historical past is lost
so far as direct vision by human beings is concerned. The motion
picture suffers from no such limitation … the motion picture may be
made at any time and shown at any later time … Television with
direct pick-up of an actual event is as dependent on its time of
occurrence as is the eye.
(Goldsmith 1937:55)

Here, film is represented as the realm of memory, repetition, and dis-

placement in time. By contrast, television, like direct human vision (and
also like theatre, as Goldsmith (ibid.:56) observes later in his essay) occurs
only in the now. Unlike film, but like theatre, a television broadcast is
characterized as a performance in the present. This was literally the case in
the early days of television when most material was broadcast live. Even
now that most television programming is recorded, the television image
remains a performance in the present in an important sense I discussed
earlier in this chapter. Although the possibility of recording television
broadcasts was available as part of television technology from quite early
in its development, the capacity for rebroadcasting was seen then as an-
cillary to television’s essence as a live medium. In the 1930s and 1940s,
television was envisioned primarily as a medium devoted to the trans-
mission of ongoing live events, not to reproduction. Not surprisingly, early
television displayed a voracious appetite for all types of live presentations.
A survey of the activity of one pioneering television station (WRGB in
Schenectady, New York) between 1939 and 1945 lists among its offerings:
variety shows and revues; sports; drama, including amateur and college
theatricals; light opera; various musical groups; dance; news; panel dis-
cussions; educational presentations; fashion shows; puppet shows; quizzes
and games; vaudeville acts, monologists, and magicians; children’s shows;
religious shows; and commercials (Dupuy 1945).
Television’s intimacy was seen as a function of its immediacy—the
close proximity of viewer to event that it enables—and the fact that
events from outside are transmitted into the viewer’s home. As Lohr
(1940:3) put it, “the viewer of the television scene feels himself to be on
the scene.” The position of the television viewer relative to the image on
the screen was often compared with that of a boxing fan sitting ringside or
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 37
a theatre-goer with the best seat in the house. Television “make[s] all the
world a stage and every home a front-row seat for sports, drama, and news”
(Dunlap 1947:8). It was thought to make the home into a kind of theatre
characterized, paradoxically, by both absolute intimacy and global reach.
Given the domestic context in which television was envisioned,20 it is
important to sketch the social implications of the home theatre.21 Spigel
(1992:110) argues persuasively that the new medium was associated with
an existing cultural discourse, dating back to the mid-1800s, in which
“electrical communications would defuse the threat of cultural difference
by limiting experiences and placing social encounters into safe, familiar,
and predictable contexts.” By the early 1920s, “radio, like the telegraph
and telephone before it, was seen as an instrument of social sanitation”
that would make cultural objects more generally accessible, but in a way
that would also keep “undesirables away from the middle-classes.” In the
postwar era, Spigel (ibid.:111) goes on to say, “the fantasy of antiseptic,
electrical space was transposed onto television.” That the linkage between
television and the discourse of antiseptic electrical space occurred in the
context of the growing suburbanization of the postwar period is evident
from the following quotation, from a 1958 book entitled, strikingly, A
Primer for Playgoers, in which the author stresses:

the tremendous personal comfort of relaxing at home in an easy chair

and seeing some of the top names in the theatre world perform in a
variety of three or four programs in a single evening. This involves a
greater degree of physical comfort than to come home weary from the
day’s work, wash, dress, hurry, drive through heavy traffic, find a place
to park, walk to the theatre, pay an ever-increasing admission, sit on
the same seat for two hours, then fight traffic and arrive home very late.
(Wright 1958:222–3)

Here, the benefit of television-as-theatre over live performance is defined

explicitly in terms of the suburban experience. Tichi notes that this un-
derstanding of television was frequently reiterated in advertisements for
television sets:

Numerous advertisements … showed couples in evening attire

gathered in their living rooms as if in a private box at the theatre,
and gazing in rapt attention at on-screen ballet, opera, or drama from
the legitimate stage. Television in the living room was thus offered …
as an excursion out of the household and into an expensive private
box for an experience of high culture.
(Tichi 1991:94; see also Spigel 1992:126)
38 Live performance in a mediatized culture
Descriptions of drama on television from this period emphasize that tel-
evision’s immediacy and intimacy make the experience of televised drama
entirely comparable to that of drama in the theatre. (By televised drama, I
mean plays written or adapted for television, not direct broadcasts of
theatre events. Although such broadcasts did occur, it was generally
conceded that direct transmission of a play in the theatre yielded un-
satisfactory television.22) In an article in Theatre Arts, Mary Hunter
(1949:46) observes that

the audience experience in relation to the performer is similar in

television to the performer–audience relationship in the theatre: the
audience is in direct contact with the performer at the moment of his
“performance.” You see him when he does it.23

Likewise, Lohr (1940:72), writing almost a decade earlier, makes the im-
mediacy of televised drama the basis on which to distinguish television from
film: “the instantaneous nature of the broadcast gives television drama a
certain superiority over filmed drama. The spectator knows that he is seeing
something actually taking place at the moment.” (Lohr (ibid.:80–1) ad-
vances the same argument to assert the superiority of televised news over
the filmed newsreel.)24 Spigel summarizes this discourse:

Television, it was constantly argued, would be a better approximation

of live entertainment than any previous form of technological
reproduction. Its ability to broadcast direct to the home would allow
people to feel as if they really were at the theatre … Whereas film
allowed spectators imaginatively to project themselves into a scene,
television would give people the sense of being on the scene of
presentation—it would simulate the entire experience of being at the
theatre.
(Spigel 1992:138–9, original emphasis)

I want to emphasize the implications of this last statement, as I shall go on

to argue that the goal of televised drama was not merely to convey a
theatrical event to the viewer, but to re-create the theatrical experience
for the home viewer through televisual discourse and, thus, to replace live
performance.
As significant as this habitual representation of television as theatre and
the notion that televised drama partakes of the immediacy of drama in the
theatre is the suggestion that emerges from the early commentary that
television production techniques themselves evolved in a conscious effort
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 39
to reproduce the theatrical image. In commenting on the television actor,
Lohr observes:

In a theatre, each actor assumes that the audience has as wide-angle

vision as he possesses, but he must be taught that a television
camera does not see at such wide angles … For this reason,
television producers have found it helpful to use more than one
camera for studio productions. This enables a televiewer to see a
continuous action.
(Lohr 1940:56)

The multiple-camera setup enables the television image to recreate the

perceptual continuity of the theatre. Switching from camera to camera
allows the television director to replicate the effect of the theatre spec-
tator’s wandering eye: “the eye, while observing a stage set … makes its
own changes to various parts of the scene to maintain interest, whereas in
television the camera must take the eye to various points of interest in the
scene” (ibid.:55). One way of objecting to Lohr’s characterization of tel-
evision editing would be to say that televisual discourse fails to replicate
the perceptual discourse of the spectator’s eye because whereas in the
theatre spectators direct their own vision, the television camera does not
permit them to choose their own perspectives. In her article explaining
why stage directors might make good television directors, however,
Hunter implicitly responds to such an objection by suggesting that the
spectator’s gaze is always directed in the theatre by means of focal points
in the staging that are equivalent to camera views. She compares the stage
director’s manipulation of audience attention with the television direc-
tor’s use of the camera, saying that:

the [stage] director’s approach to movement on the stage is to apply

something of a “psychological” camera eye. He must direct the
audience’s attention about the stage precisely as the camera moves
from one point of interest to the next.
(Hunter 1949:47)

These observations are striking because they suggest that the multiple-
camera setup deploying three to five cameras simultaneously (still the
standard way in which television studio productions are shot) evolved
specifically out of a desire to replicate the visual discourse of the specta-
tor’s experience of theatre. In a provocative comparison of television and
film editing, Burger explains in detail why the image produced by the
multiple-camera setup is theatrical rather than cinematic:
40 Live performance in a mediatized culture
This shifting between cameras has a purpose similar to cutting in the
movies. It divides the scene into different views of the same object, thus
affording a greater variety. Actually, however, the effect of television
cutting is quite different. Since the cameras are placed almost in one line,
and since the settings resemble bas-reliefs more than the three-
dimensional sets of the films, the possibility for variety among the shots
is strictly limited. If the angles of the cameras are changed they run the
danger of catching each other or the low-hanging mike in their line of
vision; and counter-shots are, as yet, almost impossible because there is no
background for them. Therefore, although the television camera shifts, it
does not show a new angle of the scene or tell more about the actors. What
happens is essentially the same as in the occasional use of opera glasses in
the theatre; the frame of the picture is changed, but the angle is the same.
(Burger 1940:209, original emphasis)

Susan Sontag (1966:29, original emphasis) contrasts theatre and film by

asserting that whereas “theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of
space[,] cinema … has access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.”
Burger suggests that the limited camera work possible in early television
created an effect of spatial continuity more comparable to the continuous
space of theatre than to cinema. That television editing appears as a re-
framing of a single, continuous image from a fixed point of view, rather
than a suturing of image to image or a shift in point of view, also asserts
the immediacy, the sense of a continuous perceptual experience unfolding
in real time, that television shares with theatre.
It is important to acknowledge that the resemblance of televisual pro-
duction to theatrical production was strongest at this early stage in the
development of broadcast television, when live presentation of drama and
other televised events was the norm, and the technology itself was suffi-
ciently clumsy that it could not easily replicate cinematic discourse.
Because of their relative immobility, the cameras were arranged along a
single axis parallel to the width of the playing area, and their movements
were highly restricted. In an article on directing ballet for television, Paul
Belanger (1946:8–9), a director of dance programs for CBS, catalogs the
types of shots available to television cameras: all are either pans, “tongues”
(i.e., vertical pans), or trucking shots. In the diagrams that accompany
the article, the two cameras are always placed outside and in front of the
performance space. This setup illustrates the fact that in this earliest phase
of American broadcast television, all shows were shot “in proscenium”
(see D. Barker 1987 [1985]); the cameras never entered the playing space to
produce reverse angles (Burger’s “counter-shots”). As a result, the television
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 41
image was frontal and oriented toward the viewer in much the same way as a
performance on a proscenium stage would be. This was reflected in the
actors’ playing, which Burger (1940:209) describes as “aimed … at the
fourth wall” in front of the cameras “much as it is on stage.”
As television technology quickly became more sophisticated and tele-
vision cameras more nimble, televisual discourse aspired less to the thea-
trical and more to the cinematic. To Murray Bolen, the author of a postwar
book entitled Fundamentals of Television, immediacy was no longer clearly
fundamental to the medium. Acknowledging that champions of televisual
immediacy have a valid point, Bolen (1950:190) nevertheless demurs that
“we cannot be sure as yet that the instantaneous element of immediacy is
really that much of television” and goes on to deduce from the success of
prerecorded radio programs that “canned” television shows are quite likely
to attract an audience. A television production textbook of 1953 makes the
relationship between the changed capacity of television technology and the
transition from a theatrical to a cinematic paradigm explicit:

The question has been commonly asked: Why cannot the television
medium transmit a stage play to the home audience, capturing the
immediacy of the performance instead of attempting to simulate the
motion picture? Perhaps if a play were televised in one continuous
long shot with the proscenium arch of the stage constantly visible,
the effect of a stage play would be retained. As soon as the cameras
are brought onto the stage, however, and proceed to break the action
down into close-ups, two-shots, reverse angles, and so forth, the show
no longer resembles a play but has become a motion picture. The
television medium is a medium of the camera and as such has
departed almost as far from the live theatre as has the medium of film.
(Bretz 1953:3)

Once the cameras could enter the set and shoot from reverse angles, the
syntax of televisual discourse became that of cinematic discourse, though
it is probably not coincidental that these comments were made around the
time (1951–2) when television production was beginning to switch from
live broadcasting to film production and, consequently, from New York
City to Hollywood (Barnouw 1990:133–4).25 For Bretz, who embraces the
cinematic paradigm for television, to replicate theatrical discourse on
television means to present a static television image. But, as we have seen,
the more imaginative television conceptualists of the previous decades felt
that replicating theatrical discourse on television meant replicating the
discourse of the spectator’s shifting eye, not that of the static proscenium.
42 Live performance in a mediatized culture
As television production practice moved away from honoring the im-
mediacy ascribed to television and its links with theatrical discourse,
televisual appropriations of theatrical discourse ironically became si-
multaneously more overt and more vestigial. Fictional shows shot cine-
matically still represented themselves as theatre, but through the use of
dramatic convention rather than by using the camera to replicate the
perceptual experience of the theatre spectator. The so-called “Golden
Age” of television, which began after World War II and lasted through the
1950s, saw a spate of drama anthology shows with theatrical names, in-
cluding The Kraft Television Theatre, Ford Theatre, Playhouse 90, The Philco
TV Playhouse, and Goodyear TV Playhouse (see Barnouw 1990:154–67). In
the early 1960s, the practice of making episodes of such hour-long dra-
matic series as The Fugitive and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. into “plays” by
giving each episode a title and dividing it into “acts” became prominent.
Even as the American theatre moved closer to making the streamlined
two-act play its normal product, television drama remained wedded to an
Ibsenian four-act structure because of the segmentation imposed upon it
by the requirements of advertisers. The laughtrack and the practice of
announcing that programs are “filmed before a live studio audience” are
more recent techniques of theatricalizing television. It is ironic that in the
1930s and 1940s, when television practice was most faithful to the
medium’s purportedly ontological immediacy, television studios could not
accommodate audiences; the programs were directed exclusively to the
home audience. The practice of recording television programs before “a
live studio audience” is a simulation, rather than a replication, of the
conditions of live theatrical production. The presence of the studio au-
dience on the television screen and soundtrack implies that the program is
a record of a real event. Because the programs are edited, however, the
home audience does not see the same performance as the studio audience,
but rather a performance that never took place.
An important theme emerges from this glimpse at history. For Raymond
Williams (1992 [1974]:19), “when the question of [early television’s] con-
tent was raised, it was resolved, in the main, parasitically.” Television was
imagined as theatre, not just in the sense that it could convey theatrical
events to the viewer, but in that it offered to replicate the visual and ex-
periential discourse of theatre in the antiseptic space of the suburban home
theatre. Television, like a parasite, strangled its host by offering itself not as
an extension of the theatrical experience but as an equivalent replacement
for that experience. As the passage from A Primer for Playgoers quoted above
suggests, the implication of the cultural discourse surrounding television was
that one should watch it instead of going to the theatre. The televisual
experience is implicitly equated with the live theatrical experience, but is
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 43
represented as better suited to the postwar, suburban lifestyle: the message is
that nothing is lost, and much is gained, by staying home.

The mediatization of live performance

The theatre was clearly at a disadvantage in its forced rivalry with tele-
vision. In their pioneering 1966 study of the economic situation of the
performing arts, Baumol and Bowen (1966:245) analyze live performance’s
competition with television by pointing out that between 1948 and 1952,
the years in which television became widely available, consumer spending
generally rose by 23%, but admissions to live performances rose only by
5%. “In sum,” the authors conclude, “it seems clear that the mass media
have made inroads into the audience for live performance.”
A more recent study, the 2004 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts
(SPPA), produced every five years by the US government’s National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA), strongly suggests that live forms re-
mained in direct competition with mediatized ones well into the twenty-
first century, though I will go on to show in the next section of this
chapter that the 2017 SPPA paints a rather different picture. The broad
facts will come as no surprise: in 2004, 60% of American adults went to
the movies versus the 22.3% who went to the theatre and the 4% who
attended the opera or ballet; the average adult watched 2.9 hours of tel-
evision per day (NEA 2004:45). While a question such as “Do people go
to the movies or watch television instead of attending live performances?”
is difficult to answer with empirical certainty, the SPPA provides a useful
perspective through comparisons of adults’ consumption of specific kinds
of performance in both live and mediatized forms that allow us to get a
glimpse of how people interested in a particular form pursue their interest.
It is self-evident that far more people listen to recorded music than attend
concerts, but the discrepancy may be larger than expected, especially
considering that the SPPA tracks classical music and jazz but not popular
music: in 2004, 47.9% of adult Americans listened to recorded music,
while only 18.8% attended concerts; 8.7% attended dance recitals, but
13.7% viewed dance in mediatized forms (ibid.:6). Irrespective of whether
it is literally the case that the people who consume these arts in media-
tized forms do so instead of attending live events, it is very clear that the
mediatized version of these arts defines the normative experience of them.
The theatre audience of 2004 seemed to prefer the live event, though not
by a huge margin: 22.3% of adults attended the theatre while 21% watched
theatre in mediatized forms (ibid.:6). But there is a wrinkle. Audiences for
both musical and non-musical theatre typically attended 2.3 productions.
The number of mediatized viewings on TV, VCR, or DVD was exactly twice
44 Live performance in a mediatized culture
that figure for musical theatre (4.6 viewings) and three times it for non-
musical theatre (6.9 viewings) (ibid.:28). So, even though the percentage of
adults who attended live theatre at least once was higher than the per-
centage that viewed theatre in mediatized forms, the theatre was being
consumed in mediatized forms two to three times more often than it was
attended live. There are good reasons why people might choose to watch or
listen to mediatized theatre, music, and dance that do not necessarily reflect
the value they place on live performance, including cost, access, con-
venience, the unavailability of live performances by particular artists or of
specific works at a given moment, and many others. But the fact that the
audiences for these performing arts participated in mediatized versions of
them far more often than in live forms probably means that live perfor-
mances were in direct competition with recorded performances.
As a consequence of this competitive cultural environment, live per-
formance now often incorporates mediatization to the degree that the live
event itself is a product of media technologies. This has been the case to
some degree for a long time, of course: as soon as electric amplification is
used, one might say that an event is mediatized. What we actually hear is
the vibration of a speaker, a reproduction by technological means of a
sound picked up by a microphone, not the original (live) acoustic event.
This effect has been intensified across a very wide range of performance
genres and cultural contexts, from the giant television screens at sports
arenas to the video apparatus used in much performance art. The spectator
sitting in the back rows of a Lady Gaga or Nicki Minaj concert is present
at a live performance, but hardly participates in it as such since their main
experience of the performance is to read it off a video monitor.
Spectators at many sporting events now watch significant portions of
the games they are attending on giant video screens. The rhetoric of
mediatization embedded in such devices as the instant replay, the “si-
mulcast,” and the close-up, at one time understood to be secondary tel-
evisual elaborations of the live event, are now constitutive of the live
event itself. Given these conditions, “attending a live performance …
these days is often roughly the experience of watching a small, noisy TV
set in a large, crowded field” (Goodwin 1990:269). The games—their
scheduling, the distribution of time within them, their rules, and so
forth—have themselves been molded by their entry into the economy of
repetition, which demands that the form of the games as live events be
determined by the requirements of mediatization. The color of tennis balls
was changed officially in 1972 from white to “optic yellow” to make them
more visible on a color television set (Fox Weber 2021). The use of in-
stant replay in American football games as a means of adjudicating the
referees’ calls has altered the time frame of the games. “Media time-outs”
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 45
periodically bring professional and collegiate basketball games to a halt to
allow television stations to show commercials.
The theatre, too, has experienced this attenuated incursion of media
technology via both direct and indirect mediatization. Pure examples of
the direct mediatization of live performance are the versions of Hamilton
and David Byrne’s American Utopia offered by streaming services in 2020
and 2021, respectively. In both cases, the theatrical experience was ac-
cessed through a medium rather than in a theatre, part of an overall trend
within the theatre industry to employ models of distribution derived from
the film industry (Felschow 2019). In an article titled “8 Ways Television
is Influencing Theater,” two of the ways to which Jonathan Mandell
(2013) refers are the impact of television on playwriting and the ubiquity
of projected scenery. He quotes director and playwright Jay Stull, whose
episodic play Streepshow! Season One (2014–17) features nine characters
played by Meryl Streep who take up residence in a Big Brother–style
reality TV house: “Television has conditioned me to prefer shorter scenes,
quicker cuts, and fractured unities, but also to prefer longer stories gen-
erally.” Stull’s comment exemplifies the indirect mediatization of dramatic
writing for the theatre and its absorption of television style and form.
Mandell also points to the widespread use of video projection as an-
other aspect of the mediatization of theatre. Television and video have
been present on the stage as scenography for decades. The set for the 1995
Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, for
example, was “a wall composed of thirty-two projection cubes showing a
video of computer-generated three-dimensional images” (von Hoffman
1995:132). In the theatre, as at the stadium, you are often watching tel-
evision even when attending the live event, and audiences now expect
live performances to resemble mediatized ones. As celebrated theatre
projection designer Wendall K. Harrington has said,

every playwright and director alive today grew up in the age of cinema
and television. There is so much projection because they have been
conditioned to think in these terms: Theatre directors want scenes to
“dissolve” into each other; they’d like a “close up”—these are cinematic
and TV terms.
(quoted in Mandell 2013)

Harrington implicitly supports Pavis’s position that “the formation …

of audience taste by television necessarily rebounds on the future audience for
theatre … ” (Pavis 1992:121).
The mediatization of live theatre is exemplified in sound design as well
as in the use of scenographic projections. The sound design for Hamilton
46 Live performance in a mediatized culture
involves “a high-tech system of manipulated microphone levels, signal
pathways, 3D-computer modeling, digital processing and 172 speakers
positioned just so around the room” (Lederman 2016) to manipulate the
live sound produced by the performers and musicians as well as recorded
sound cues and blend them in a multi-channel mix. Another report de-
scribes an increase in the digital sample rate used in the production when
it moved from Off-Broadway to Broadway as “result[ing] in extremely
high-fidelity sound reproduction” (Gustin 2016). The use of the word
“reproduction” underlines the point that the sound the audience hears is
as much a product of the technology, which shapes the sound in ways that
go far beyond amplification, as it is of the performers. Theatre critic
Vincent Canby (“Look who’s talking on Broadway: microphones,” New
York Times, January 22, 1995:2:1, 4–5) argued long ago that the use of
sound systems and mixing techniques that produce digital-quality sound at
live performances of Broadway musicals encourages audiences to assess
live performances in terms of their resemblance to mediatized ones: “the
theatre is fast approaching the day when a Broadway show will be a nearly
perfect, if artificial, representation of a live performance.” Jonathan
Burston (1998:206) emphasizes the role of digital sound design in the
“increasing homogenisation of both music and acoustics within the world
of the stage musical. Further, this aesthetic development … correlates to
the highly standardised performance practices and production methods”
that permit live theatrical performances to be franchised and to function
as mass media texts, as discussed earlier in this chapter.
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe (2015:72) has criticized my position by saying,
“The integration of media into live performance, however, does not make
such a performance less live.” This is not what I am saying, of course. I am
not attempting to quantify liveness and declare one phenomenon to be
more or less live than another. What I am trying to do is to describe how
the integration of media into live performance influences the character
and experience of the live performance and what this integration means
in historical and cultural terms. Theatre audiences are not only seeing live
performances that look and sound like mediatized ones, but are apparently
modeling their responses to the live event on those expected of them by
television. Ethan Mordden, quoted in an article analyzing the ubiquity of
standing ovations on Broadway, offers the opinion that “audience reac-
tions at live performances are so programmed as to seem canned, and …
theatre audiences, emulating those in television studios, appear to applaud
on cue” (Peter Marks, “Standing room only (and that’s not good),” New
York Times, December 8, 1995:H5). Of course, audience response has been
the object of manipulation throughout the history of theatre: the organized
claques employed from the ancient Roman theatre at least through the
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 47
dawn of the twentieth century were a central mechanism of such manip-
ulation (see Esslin 1977:64 for a useful summary of this phenomenon). It is
tempting to draw a parallel between claques and the “Applause” signs used
in television studios as mechanisms for cuing audience response, but it is
likely that the more recent model is the proximate cause of contemporary
audience behavior.
Arguably, theatre audiences today respond spontaneously to the same
sorts of cues that would be signaled by means of the “Applause” sign in
a television studio because the studio audience has become the cultu-
rally engrained model for what gets applause and how audiences
behave.26 Caroline Heim extends this discussion from the television
studio into the viewer’s home by pointing out that television viewing
behavior has changed greatly over time. As discussed earlier, television
viewing in the early days of the medium was modeled on theatre
spectatorship. Now, the situation is reversed: “Much twenty-first-
century audience performance … has been cultivated in the television
room … ” (Heim 2016:119). Heim uses Goffman’s (1959:107, 112)
distinction between front and back social regions to argue that audiences
now perform in the public space of the theatre actions that previously would
have been confined to the privacy of the home television room. Her list of
such behaviors includes:

people taking their shoes off and putting their feet up, stroking and
kissing children, stretching out arms across the back of seats, bobbing
heads up and down in time to the music, painting their toenails,
eating sushi in the front row of theatres and French-braiding hair.
(Heim 2016:120)

To an ever-greater extent, live performances are economically tied to

mediatization. In the case of professional and college sports in the United
States, for instance, the live game can take place because of the income
the teams receive from the companies that broadcast the game, who de-
rive income, in turn, from advertising during the game. In many instances,
the same capital interests are behind both live and mediatized cultural
objects. I first became aware of the imbrication of theatre within the
economy of repetition in the early 1980s when I noticed that a number of
the Broadway productions I was seeing had been underwritten in part by
cable television money with the understanding that taped versions of the
productions would appear later on cable networks.27 Whether by con-
scious intention or not, the productions themselves (particularly their
sets, but also their staging) were clearly “camera-ready”—adjusted to the
48 Live performance in a mediatized culture
aspect ratio, intimate scale, and relative lack of detail of the television
image—a suspicion borne out when I later saw the televised version of
one of them. This is a particularly explicit example of the historical
reversal I mentioned earlier. In a process driven by the economics of
cultural production, television, which initially modeled itself on the
theatre, especially in dramatic presentations, became both model and
telos for live theatre.
In a particularly elaborate scenario, the casting of the lead players in a
Broadway revival of the musical Grease that opened in the summer of
2007 was determined by the NBC reality television show Grease: You’re
the One that I Want. In this American Idol–style competition, viewers’ votes
ultimately determined which of the finalists were cast. In what could be
seen as a test of the relationship between televisual liveness and theatrical
liveness, viewers are placed in the distinctive position of having to assess
the stage-worthiness of performers they see live on the screen. The fact of
the eventual live performance makes the television program more com-
pelling, independent of the theatrical production’s quality or reception.
The success of this symbiotic economic relationship between television
and theatre is clear: more than six months before opening, the Broadway
show had garnered ticket receipts of over $1 million on the strength of just
one episode of the television program.
John Weidman (2007:642) former president of the Dramatists’ Guild,
argues that the economic basis of theatrical production changed in 1982
when the musical Cats opened on Broadway. This production, and others
like it, showed that “the money to be made from two dozen identical
versions of a hit show, playing to sold out houses in two dozen cities
around the world, was clearly enormous” (ibid.:643) suggesting that live
theatre could be integrated into the media industries (I discussed the idea
that live performances can be mass-produced in a different context earlier
in this chapter). As a result, film, television, and media companies have
entered into the business of theatrical production. First out of the gate was
Disney Theatrical Productions, Ltd., which was founded in 1993 and
produced its first Broadway play, a live version of the animated film Beauty
and the Beast, in 1994. NBCUniversal provided most of the $14 million
budget for the Broadway musical version of Gregory McGuire’s 1995 novel
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which it had
optioned originally to make a non-musical film version. Wicked, which
opened on Broadway in 2003 and is still running, was developed under the
aegis of Universal Studios partly on the assumption that producing the
novel as a musical play would leave open the possibility of the non-
musical film adaptation originally envisioned (a film of the musical is in
pre-production as I write this). The live event was conceived and developed
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 49
in the context of the film and television industries. The production was
integrated into the parent company’s other holdings:

Universal took advantage of its recent merger with NBC to promote

the new Broadway musical across multiple platforms. It played music
from the Wicked cast album during tram tours around its studio
backlot, and NBC gave it significant coverage on The Today Show.
Several NBC affiliates also aired special segments about the show.
(Hershberg 2018)

In this and other ways, such as merchandising, live performances participate in

corporate “synergy,” “the notion of selling a particular product and integrating
it into its broader web of properties and commercial opportunities” (Salter and
Bowrey 2014:126). The impact of the absorption of theatre into the economy
of the media industries extends beyond big-ticket Broadway productions in
that companies like Disney and NBCUniversal develop theatrical projects
from the ground up, depriving the non-profit theatre sector of its usual de-
velopmental role and the funding associated with it (ibid.:127).
All of these instances, and a great many more that I could mention,
exemplify the ways mediatization is now explicitly and implicitly em-
bedded within the live experience and live performance is embedded in
the economy of media production. I have described examples of the in-
cursion of mediatization into a range of live performance events at some
length to make the point that, within our mediatized culture, live events
are increasingly either made to be reproduced or are becoming ever more
identical with mediatized ones. Some have challenged this position by
arguing that while it may be true for large-scale entertainment such as
sporting events, Broadway shows, and rock concerts, it does not hold for
more intimate forms of theatre and performance art. However, I do not
believe this distinction to be valid, as I have already suggested in the
discussions of the documentation of body and endurance art earlier in this
chapter. I am not arguing that all instances of live performance reflect the
incursion of mediatization in the same ways or to the same degree, and
scale is certainly one differentiating factor. Some sectors of our cultural
economy determine that if an event is to occur live at all, it must be
mounted on a large scale. Connor (1989:151–2) points out, for example,
that the use of giant video screens at rock concerts provides a means of
creating in a large-scale event the effect of “intimacy and immediacy” as-
sociated with smaller live events. In order to retain those characteristics,
large-scale events must surrender a substantial measure of their liveness to
mediatization. Ironically, intimacy and immediacy are precisely the qualities
50 Live performance in a mediatized culture
attributed to television that enabled it to displace live performance. In the
case of such large-scale events, live performance survives as television.
More intimate live performances may not be mediatized in the same
way or to the same effect. Inasmuch as mediatization is the cultural
context in which live performances are now inevitably situated, however,
its influence nevertheless pervades even these smaller-scale events.
Mediatization is not just a question of the employment of media tech-
nology; it is also a matter of what might be called “media epistemology.”

[It] should not be understood as meaning simply that our world-view

is being increasingly dominated by technical equipment. Even more
important is the fact that we often perceive reality only through the
mediation of machines (microscope, telescope, television). These
frame works … preform our perception of [the world].
(Bolz and van Reijen 1996:71)

Even small-scale, intimate live performances can be products of this

preformed perception.
Thinking about these phenomena has led me back to Walter Benjamin’s
crucially important essay “The work of art in the age of mechanical re-
production” (1968). The focus of Benjamin’s analysis in that essay is on the
historical progression from unique, “auratic” cultural forms to mass-
reproduced ones. Except in his brief discussion of Dada, Benjamin does not
take note there of the kind of doubling back that I have described, in which
older forms emulate and incorporate newer ones, as television did with
theatre. He was remarkably prescient, however, and many of the terms of his
analysis still shed light on the current situation.
I will begin by noting Benjamin’s emphasis on the idea that “human sense
perception … is determined not only by nature but by historical circum-
stances as well” (ibid.:222). Many aspects of our relation to performance
suggest that mediatization has had a powerful effect in shaping the sensory
norm for the current historical moment. Roger Copeland (1990:29) has
explained the use of amplification in live theatrical performance in precisely
these terms: “on Broadway these days even nonmusical plays are routinely
miked, in part because the results sound more ‘natural’ to an audience whose
ears have been conditioned by stereo television, high fidelity LPs, and
compact disks.” The use of almost invisible microphones placed on the bodies
of the actors in both musical and non-musical theatre only reinforces our
perception of an amplified voice as “natural.” Andrew Goodwin (1990:266)
has identified another intriguing case of the normalization of mediatized
sound: that of the handclap effect used on many pop and dance records.
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 51
Recordings of the 1970s frequently used a particular percussion synthesizer,
the TR-808, as the source for this sound. After a decade of synthesized
handclaps, when musicians in the 1980s wanted to sample a handclap effect
from existing recordings, “they sampled their own electronic simulation from
the TR-808 machine, rather than ‘real’ handclaps” because “the electronic
handclap sounded so ‘natural’ to pop musicians and audiences” (ibid.). Linda
Dusman (1994:140), a composer, has suggested that the dominance of re-
cording as the normative experience of music has made it almost impossible
for audiences to hear a live musical performance as something actually oc-
curring in the moment rather than as a reproduction of a recording.
The degree to which our eyes and ears have been conditioned by
mediatization was clear well before the advent of compact discs, stereo
television, and sampling. Benjamin describes the mode of perception he
saw in an emergent mass culture in terms of overcoming distance (and
therefore banishing aura, which can be understood as a function of dis-
tance). He refers to:

the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially

and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming
the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every
day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range
by way of its likeness, its reproduction.
(Benjamin 1968:223)

Benjamin’s notion of a mass desire for proximity, and its alliance with a
desire for reproduced objects, provides a useful matrix for understanding
the interrelation of live and mediatized forms that I have described. The
use of giant video screens at sporting events, music and dance concerts,
and other performances is another direct illustration of Benjamin’s con-
cept: the kind of proximity and intimacy we can experience with televi-
sion, which has become our model for close-up perception, but that is
traditionally absent from these performances, can be reintroduced only by
means of their “videation.” When a live performance re-creates a mass-
reproduced one, as in the case of the replication of images derived from
animated films in the theatre, an inverted version of the same effect takes
place. Because we are already intimately familiar with the images from
our televisual and filmic experience of them, we see them as proximate,
irrespective of how far away they may be in physical distance. Whether
the effect of intimacy results from the videation of the live event or from
acquaintance with the live images from their prior reproductions, it
makes live performances seem more like television, and thus enables live
events to fulfill the desire for reproduction that Benjamin notes. Even in
52 Live performance in a mediatized culture
the most intimate of performance art projects, in which we may be only
a few feet away from the performers, we are still frequently offered the
opportunity for the even greater intimacy of watching the performers in
close-up on video monitors, as if we can experience true proximity only
in televisual terms.
This points to another of Benjamin’s (ibid.:221) postulates: that “the
quality of [the original’s] presence is always depreciated” by reproduction.
Steve Wurtzler’s analysis of this effect in the context of sports may be
generalized to many other cultural contexts:

Over time, as the conventions of the televisually posited live come to

constitute the way we think of the live, attending the game … becomes a
degraded version of the event’s televisual representation. This degrada-
tion of the live is itself compensated for by the use of Diamondvision and
instant replays on elaborate stadium score boards … In other words, the
degradation of the live is compensated for by the inscription into
the “real” of its representation.
(Wurtzler 1992:92)

The ubiquity of reproductions of performances of all kinds in our culture

has led to the depreciation of live presence, which can only be com-
pensated for by making the perceptual experience of the live as much as
possible like that of the mediatized, even in cases where the live event
provides its own brand of proximity.

Liveness in the age of the internet

Bringing the picture of the relationship between live and mediatized forms
more up to date requires a second narrative that partly overlaps the story of
television and theatre recounted in a previous section of this chapter. Even
as live performances incorporate mediatization in ways that make them
experientially less distinguishable from the products of the media industries,
an emergent form, the internet, is beginning to shift this cultural ground
significantly. (I am using the expression “the internet” to stand for a host of
consumer-level digital media, including the World Wide Web, streaming
services, social media, etc.) As noted earlier, from a statistical point of view,
television retains its status as the globally dominant medium, and the tel-
evisual remains the dominant mode of production and reception in newer
media, though, as design theorist Tony Fry (2003:111) suggests, the tele-
visual is also being redefined by the new media environment as “a relational
domain that constitutes an ever expanding immaterial environment created
by the interaction of all electronically inflected visual media—digitised film,
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 53
TV (in all its transmission modes), video/DVD, computers/the internet, cell
phones.” The cultural position of the television medium itself is starting to
erode. Both television’s continued dominance and its slippage are reflected
in the 2019 Zenith Media Consumption Forecasts:

Television remains the biggest medium globally, attracting 167

minutes of viewing each day in 2019. Television viewing is predicted
to fall slowly to 165 minutes a day in 2021. Television will remain the
world’s favourite medium throughout our forecasts, accounting for
33% of all media consumption in 2021, down from 35% in 2019.
(Medianews4you.com 2019)

Extrapolating from Zenith’s data by combining mobile and desktop in-

ternet use, which Zenith counts as separate media, it appears that the
internet has already outstripped television by a small margin: media users
spent 167 minutes per day watching television and 170 using the internet
(Richter 2020). Surveys of this kind also show television to be in a slow
decline, while internet usage is rising rapidly. Between 2011 and 2019,
television viewing decreased by 4.5%, while internet usage more than
doubled (ibid.). In short, it seems clear that the internet will soon replace
television as the globally dominant medium.
But will the internet assume the same relationship to live performance as
television assumed to the theatre when it was introduced to the public? Like
television, the commercial internet was positioned from its introduction in
the early 1990s as a domestic medium catering to the needs of families.
However, it was not presented in the way television had been two gen-
erations earlier: as an equivalent but superior version of existing cultural
forms like radio, the theatre, concerts, and sports. As William Boddy (2004)
has shown, this is because those promoting the internet wanted to distance
the new medium from television, to posit the internet as something sig-
nificantly different from the screen already present in the home.
Early advertisements for internet service providers (ISPs) in the United
States emphatically downplay or simply ignore the possibility of using the
internet as a medium for art or entertainment and emphasize its potential
as a means of accessing information and performing quotidian tasks. For
example, a direct mail piece of 1994 from America Online (AOL) pro-
mises to make the user “more capable, powerful, connected, knowledge-
able, productive, prosperous, and happier” (Staiti 2019). The means to
these goals are suggested by an AOL television commercial from 1995
(mycommercials 2009). In the advertisement’s scenario, two men meet up
at one’s office to attend a sports event together, but one says that he is not
54 Live performance in a mediatized culture
able to go because of domestic needs he has to address. The other man,
who is sitting at his office computer, assures him that these tasks can be
completed through AOL. In the course of about a minute, the man at the
computer orders flowers for the other one’s mother, books airplane tickets
for his family vacation, and gathers information for his child who needs to
do a report on dinosaurs. He makes a point of showing his friend that they
can find out about dinosaurs from two different sources and tells him about
other things he can do with AOL, such as reading news magazines and
updating his stock portfolio. The gender politics of this commercial, which
reinforces the conventional association of technological interest and skill
with masculinity (Bray 2007:38), are obvious: one man enables another
man’s release from domestic obligations to women and children to indulge
in the homosocial activity of sports spectatorship. Of particular interest in
the present context is the fact that the man with the computer is able to
liberate his friend from domestic obligations by using AOL so that they
are free to attend a live event together. There is no suggestion that the
internet could offer an experience equivalent to the live event.
The primary means by which early ISP advertising emphasizes the difference
between television and the internet is in its characterizations of the internet
public as consisting of active agents rather than passive spectators. People are
shown doing things with the internet, not just watching what appears on the
screen. As Boddy (2004:123) puts it, the user evoked in the promotion of
interactive technologies was depicted as “a reformed and empowered spectator
to supplant the disparaged couch potato” associated with television. (This
rhetoric persists: Gregory Sporton (2009:71) remarks that, with web 2.0, “the
formerly passive spectators of the broadcast age are replaced by technologically
skilled creative partners.”) The selling point of the new medium was not what it
could do, as with television, but what you could do with it. Glossing Benjamin,
Samuel Weber (2004:118) observes, “the medium, whether theater, radio,
television, or all of these, now unified and transformed through the internet,
produces its audience rather than simply reproducing the latter’s expectations.”
Weber describes the internet in the same way early commentators described
television: as a synthetic medium that brings together existing cultural forms on
its own terms. While it is too deterministic to say that the medium produces its
own audience, Weber has a point. Television initially was directed to its au-
dience’s existing expectations derived from their experience of familiar cultural
forms—“every home a front row seat for sports, drama, and news” (Dunlap
1947:8)—and audiences were encouraged to replicate at home the behaviors in
which they would engage at the theatre or arena.
By contrast, the internet was introduced as a medium that promised a
spectatorial experience that was not premised on the audience’s existing
expectations derived from other media, but an unprecedented experience
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 55
which the user controls. Ingrid Richardson (2010:8) links this change of
status with the viewer’s relationship to the screen.

[Our] physically embodied relation to the personal computer screen is

quite different to our experience of both traditional televisual and
cinematic screens in terms of proximity, orientation and mobility,
and not least because we are no longer “lean-back” spectators or
observers but “lean-forward” users.

The “lean-forward” posture reflects the engagement attributed to the inter-

net’s audience of users as against the passivity of the “lean back” couch potato.
Another important difference between the assumptions about audience
underlying the introduction of television and those underlying the in-
troduction of the internet is that television was initially presented as radio
had been: as a group activity, particularly an activity the family could enjoy
together. Numerous early advertisements for television depict couples,
whole families, or groups of adult friends watching television together, as
had earlier advertisements for radio. As Tichi (1991:46) shows, television
was frequently imagined as a new version of the warm and welcoming family
fireplace, the focal point of the living room. Tichi quotes a journalist writing
in 1989: “In the home, the television has become an electronic hearth. It
has brought the American family back together.”
Although this picture fragmented as individual family members ob-
tained their own television sets and installed them in parts of the house
other than the living room, a process that began with the introduction of
portable sets beginning around 1955 (see Spigel 1992:65–72), the internet
was depicted from the beginning as a medium addressed to the individual,
in part because it is difficult for more than one person at a time to sit at a
personal computer. A 1983 print advertisement for the ISP CompuServe
spells out the implications of this. The main text reads: “Last night,
CompuServe turned this computer into a travel agent for Jennie, a stock
analyst for Ralph, and now, it’s sending Herbie to another galaxy”
(CompuServe 1983). The accompanying photograph shows Herbie, a boy
about nine years old, enthusiastically manipulating the keyboard while his
parents (presumably Jennie and Ralph) engage in their own activities in the
background, in front of the fireplace. The context is still the familial one;
the setting is still the living room. But unlike television, which was said to
unify the family through collective use and programming everyone could
enjoy, only one person at a time can use the computer, and each one uses it
for a different purpose that reflects their individual interests and needs.
The medium’s address to the individual rather than the collective is
reflected in the technology. Broadcast media are frequently described as
56 Live performance in a mediatized culture
“one-to-many,” meaning that the broadcaster emits a single signal that is
received simultaneously by multiple audience members. Live performances
are also one-to-many, albeit on a much smaller scale. On the internet,
however, individual users receive their own streams of data in response to
requests they initiate. In other words, despite its resemblance to broad-
casting, the internet is actually a “one-to-one” medium. Even if I am re-
ceiving the same data at the same time as other viewers, I am not actually
receiving the same stream as any other viewer. As I navigate the internet,
I create my own individuated flow of materials.28
This flow can contain elements that are “live live, nearly live [or]
nonlive” (Blau 2011:257), but my activity of seeking them out and na-
vigating through them always takes place live, in real time. Tara
McPherson (2006:202) describes internet liveness in these terms:

This liveness foregrounds volition and mobility, creating a liveness on

demand. Thus, unlike television which parades its presence before us,
the Web structures a sense of causality in relation to liveness, a
liveness which we navigate and move through, often structuring a
feeling that our own desire drives the movement … . The Web’s forms
and metadiscourses thus generate a circuit of meaning not only from a
sense of immediacy but through yoking this presentness to a feeling of
choice, structuring a mobilized liveness which we come to feel we
invoke and impact … .

The sense of agency, of active participation in the structuring of the flow

through navigational choices promised by the internet from its inception
as a commercial service ultimately characterizes the experience of liveness
it provides. Whereas televisual liveness was defined in terms of the tem-
poral relationship between viewer and event enabled by the medium
(thanks to television, you are seeing it as it happens), internet liveness is
defined purely in terms of the viewer’s real-time actions. In short, internet
liveness is the liveness of the user/spectator, not that of the medium itself
or the event to which the medium provides access.29
Even for those invested in live performance, the internet has not
provoked the anxiety that it will replace live performance, as was the case
with television. As I pointed out in my analysis of the 2004 Survey of
Public Participation in the Arts (NEA 2004) in a previous section, it seemed
clear at that point that mediatized forms were offering live events stiff
competition for audiences. However, more recent data suggests that with
the rise of the internet, which was not introduced as a substitute for live
performances in the way television had been, the picture has changed.
Only 22% of respondents to a 2013 survey of arts organizations “thought
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 57
that the internet and its endless offerings are leading to a decrease in
attendance at in-person events” (Thomson, Purcell, and Rainie 2013),
and the 2017 SPPA suggests change along similar lines. According to the
2004 study, 50% more people experienced dance in mediatized forms than
went to dance recitals. By 2017, dance was on a nearly level playing field:
15% of US adults attended a live dance performance and 14% “used
electronic media to consume dance performances” (NEA 2019:97). In
2004, 2.5 times as many adults listened to recorded music as attended
concerts. In 2017, that ratio was reduced to 1.5:1, as 65% of adults listened
to recorded music while 42% attended concerts (ibid.:11). In the case of
theatre, the percentage of adults who attended live performances in 2017
had risen only a bit from 2004, from 22.3% to 24%, but the number of
people who “used electronic media to consume theater productions” fell
significantly from 21% to 16% (ibid.:13).
It appears that the internet does not threaten to siphon audiences from
live performances, as did television, and that there is little worry about
this possibility among presenters. Their questions and concerns sur-
rounding its growing prominence have more to do with what happens
when the “empowered spectator” fostered by the internet attends live
performances. One form this anxiety has taken is an increased concern with
audience behavior indicated by the growing emphasis on “theatre etiquette”
which, as Sedgman (2018:5) has shown, increased exponentially in the
first two decades of the twenty-first century. This seems to reflect a fear
that an audience used to interacting with a computer or cell phone will
not know how to behave in a live performance setting. Some of the
representatives of arts organizations who participated in the survey cited
above expressed worry about this audience’s supposedly reduced atten-
tion span (a position that has scientific support; see Firth, Tourus, and
Firth [2020]) and desire for on-demand experiences, while others re-
cognize audience expectations that align with the image of the internet
user as an active and mobile individual rather than a relatively passive
spectator.

People will have higher expectations for a live event. For audiences to
invest the time and effort of going to a live performance, the work they
see will have to be more engaging … . Events will have to be more
social and allow for greater participation and behind-the-scenes access.
Programming will need to incorporate much more personal involve-
ment by the consumers or they will not be interested in engaging.
(Thomson, Purcell, and Rainie 2013)
58 Live performance in a mediatized culture
Genres of performance that ask the audience to navigate actively and
shape their own trajectory began to evolve in the same timeframe as the
internet’s increasing popularity, from 1990 to 2000 and beyond. These
include immersive theatre, audio walks, and escape rooms. Josephine
Machon (2016:35–6) describes immersive theatre in terms that apply to
all three forms:

the event should always establish an “in-its-own-world”-ness where

space, scenography, sound and duration are palpable forces that
comprise this world. To allow full immersion in these worlds, some
kind of “contract for participation” is shared early on between the
spectator and the artist, inviting and enabling varying modes of
agency and participation. These contracts may be explicit in written
or spoken guidelines shared prior to entering the space, or implicit
within the structures of the world that become clear in a tacit fashion
as an individual journeys through the event—or a combination of the
two. On entering these immersive domains, spectators are submerged
in a medium that is different to the “known” environment and can
become deeply involved in the activity within that medium, all their
senses engaged and manipulated.

I am not claiming that these forms bear the same relationship to the in-
ternet that the mediatized live performances I discussed in the previous
section have to television because live performances of these kinds do not
seem to be competing for audiences with the internet in the same way as
the theatre has had to compete with television within cultural economy.
Indeed, some versions of immersive theatre use the internet as part of their
infrastructure. These forms developed alongside the internet with which
they share audiences whose experience with digital technologies impacts
not only their expectations and desires, but also their ways of experien-
cing. Olivia Turnbull (2016:150) argues, for example, “As the time spent
on social media escalates, it inevitably impacts on how we think, behave
and communicate, with effects reaching far beyond the self to every corner
of our lives, theatre included.” Even if genres such as audio walks, im-
mersive theatre, and escape rooms are not in direct competition with the
internet, they engage with audiences whose expectations and cultural
consumption bear the imprint of their experience with digital media,
particularly with respect to what it means to be a spectator. As Alison
Oddey and Christine White (2009:13) state bluntly: “The new definition
of spectatorship is interactivity.” Using binge-watching of television series
as his point of reference, Matthew Causey (2016:438) argues for a new
model “of viewership in which the individual audience member selects
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 59
location and timings, allowing for the construction of a broadcast network
of one programing for a spectatorship of the self” that is also present in
contemporary performance. Although there are many angles from which
to discuss these forms, I will emphasize the characteristics that align them
with the internet: navigation and the individualization of the audience.
I will focus here primarily on audio walks, sometimes called perfor-
mance walks, which started to have a presence in art world contexts
around 1995, though there is an earlier history of artists using walking as a
means of intervening in public space and of walks intended to draw at-
tention to environmental sound (Behrendt 2019).30 In a typical audio
walk, each participant is given a sound playback device, such as a digital
music player or cell phone, and a map, and then asked to walk a specific
route while listening to a recorded soundtrack through headphones. The
best-known practitioner of the audio walk is the Canadian artist Janet
Cardiff, often in collaboration with George Burres Miller, though many
other artists work in this form. The audio portion of Cardiff’s walks usually
takes the form of a narrative, often with elements of the mystery story or
film noir, imposed on the geography. Other artists have used the audio
walk to excavate the hidden history of places, to provide a sense of the
displacement experienced by migrants, and to explore many other themes.
Whereas Cardiff’s audio consists of her own voice speaking intimately to
the listener accompanied by environmental sounds, other artists use
multiple voices, sometimes those of actors representing historical figures.
Since the sounds one hears are usually recorded, the liveness of an audio
walk inheres in the participant’s actions of walking, looking, consulting
maps and other guides, and listening. Navigation thus is one of the par-
ticipant’s primary activities. Navigation is also a central metaphor for use
of the internet, as suggested by the names of some of the earliest web
browsers, Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, as well as the com-
pass icon that designates the web browser Safari. In an analysis of why the
metaphor of navigation is valid for the internet (in a way that “hiking,”
for example, is not), Hartwig H. Hochmair and Klaus Luttich (2009)
employ mathematical and computer modeling based on the premise that if
internet use and real-world navigation and wayfinding on foot all satisfy
the same set of axioms, then the term maps from one domain onto the
other and the metaphor is valid. The four axioms they posit are: that na-
vigation is a form of human behavior; that it entails “movement or change
of location”; that exploration is “an active, self-triggered movement”; and
that “the self-triggered movement must be guided by the agent’s intention
to reach a destination” (Hochmair and Luttich 2009:249). From the per-
spective of this analysis, exploration on the internet is isomorphic with any
form of exploration or navigation in the real world. Audio walks dramatize
60 Live performance in a mediatized culture
this relationship by foregrounding the act of navigation that characterizes
our movement through both real and virtual worlds. Writing on Cardiff’s
work, Walter Moser (2010:231–2) identifies two kinds of movement, which
he labels as locomotion and mediamotion (médiamotion). The first term
refers to physical movement in the real world, while the second refers to all
forms of mediatized movement, such as the experience of virtual displace-
ment experienced by a person exploring cyberspace while sitting physically
immobile at a computer or someone moving through real space while
talking on a cell phone. Moser thus suggests that audio walks map these two
domains of movement onto each other.
Another aspect of the audio walk that is isomorphic with the experi-
ence of the internet is the isolation of the participant. Wearing head-
phones and focusing on both navigation and absorbing a recorded
narrative, the walker is present in the terrain traversed yet distracted from
it. In this respect, the audio walker is no different from anyone walking
while wearing headphones: “private space is nested in public space” (Cook
2013:230). Rimini Protokoll’s Remote X, first performed in 2013, takes this
dichotomy as its terrain. The walk is undertaken by a group of 50 people,
together but isolated from one another by headphones, who travel on foot
through a city guided by a synthetic female voice. Rimini Protokoll de-
scribes the work’s dynamic by saying the participants “make individual
decisions and yet remain always part of a group,” and the guiding voice
occasionally asks them to behave as a group (Kaegi and Karrenbauer 2021).
Even though they all listen and respond to the same thing at the same time,
they do so as individuals, each through their own device and headphones, a
situation that parallels the computer’s address to the individual (versus
television’s address to the group) and its status as a one-to-one medium.
The guiding voice in Remote X sometimes asks participants to do things
collectively that cause others to watch them then suggests that the group has
engaged in performance. This draws attention to an ambiguity shared by
audio walks and human-computer interaction. Jen Harvie argues that the
participant in an audio walk typically enacts a script provided by the artist via
audio recording and thus “becomes a solo performer” (2009:58). (As Remote
X shows, it is also possible for a group to become a company of performers by
the same means.) This is true, but the walker’s role, or that of a participant in
an escape room or an immersive theatre event, is not so readily specified
since, in addition to performing the scripted walk, the walkers are also
spectators by virtue of their listening to the recording and perceiving
the world around them through the perspectives it provides. Arguably,
the walkers are simultaneously performers and spectators, an equivocal
position that parallels the ambiguities attendant on understanding the
human-computer relationship in which the user seems to be simultaneously
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 61
performing through the keyboard, mouse, or game controller while also
watching the resulting performance on screen.31 Andy Lavender (2016:155)
describes this change in spectatorship as marking the transition

from a society of the spectacle (objects out there to be seen) to a

society of implicated spectation … where the spectator completes the
event through her active presence … . [This kind of spectation] folds
the participant modally into its procedures, promising that we are part
of the thing rather than merely witnesses to it.

Proof of life: pandemic performance (a postscript)

In a book published in 2017, Bree Hadley writes:

In drama, theatre and performance scholarship, debate about whether

online media is fundamentally ontologically distinct from live media
is also, following Auslander (2008b), a debate that has largely been
had. Most today accept Auslander’s argument that “the historical
relationship of liveness and mediatisation must be seen as a relation of
dependence and imbrication rather than opposition.” (106)

If it is true that my arguments enjoy such broad acceptance, this en-

ormously gratifying situation was reversed almost instantaneously by the
COVID-19 pandemic that gripped the planet beginning in early 2020.
As soon as it became clear that live performance could not happen
because of the uncontrolled spread of disease, the traditional arguments
for the value of live performance that I query in this book gained
renewed force.
Relatively early in the COVID-19 pandemic, rock musician Dave
Grohl (2020) of the Foo Fighters wrote an impassioned essay extolling the
virtues of live performance:

There is nothing like the energy and atmosphere of live music. It is

the most life-affirming experience, to see your favorite performer
onstage, in the flesh, rather than as a one-dimensional image glowing
in your lap as you spiral down a midnight YouTube wormhole … .

Referring to the “the tangible, communal power of music,” Grohl goes on

to say,

We’re human. We need moments that reassure us that we are not

alone. That we are understood. That we are imperfect. And, most
62 Live performance in a mediatized culture
important, that we need each other. I have shared my music, my
words, my life with the people who come to our shows. And they have
shared their voices with me. Without that audience—that screaming,
sweating audience—my songs would only be sound.

Grohl’s essay reflects the almost instant nostalgia for live performance that
resulted from the sheltering in place and social distancing necessitated by
the pandemic. The rhetoric of this moment entailed a return to the es-
tablished discourse around liveness that emphasizes the differences
between live and mediatized performance and what was lost when tradi-
tional live performance was not possible. This rhetoric configures the
relationship between live and mediatized performance as one of opposi-
tion in which the live event precedes, and is necessarily superior to,
mediatized performance, as Grohl suggests in his description of the sensory
plenitude of the live event and the sense of community it is said to
generate versus “a one-dimensional image glowing in your lap.” I argue
here that liveness can be perceived or experienced only by contrast with
an Other. In my initial argument, the Other in question was recording
media whose advent allowed liveness to become visible by contrast.
During the pandemic, the Other, the ground against which liveness be-
came visible once again, was its own absence from cultural experience.
Alternatively, one could argue that the situation drew attention to the
other side of the equation, to the way mediatization figures against the
backdrop of the live or, more precisely, its absence. Implicitly, we com-
pared what we could have under the pandemic, which was various kinds of
recorded or mediatized performance, to what we could no longer have and
missed.
In some ways, the way life unfolded on the screen during the pandemic
was a replay of what happened with the domestication of television in the
1950s, only this time primarily with the internet rather than broadcast.
Like television before it, the internet offered itself as an equivalent re-
placement for the experience of live performance in a way it had not done
earlier, as discussed in the previous section. Also, like television before it,
the internet was posited as being just like theatre, only better, because it
allows you to have the experience of live performance without leaving
home and maintaining social distance. In the 1940s and 1950s, the “an-
tiseptic, electrical space” (Spigel 1992:111) created in the home by
broadcast technologies meant that suburbanites could steer clear of the
uncleanliness and inconvenience of the cities, where theatres, concert
halls, and arenas were located, and of the denizens of those cities. In 2020,
social distancing no longer related to ideological discourses around urban
and suburban environments as much as it reflected a belief that your home
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 63
is, or should be, a safe haven from literal contagion, though the fear in
both eras is of other people. If you shelter in place and follow the endlessly
reiterated protocols for hygiene, you can maintain some control, or at least
the illusion of control, over its cleanliness. Outside the home lurks po-
tential contamination over which you have no control. Whereas televi-
sion viewers of the 1950s were encouraged to act as if they were at the
theatre by dressing up and having an “evening out” without leaving the
house, the internet inverted this schema by holding out the promise of
being able to be at the theatre in your pajamas.
The pandemic saw an unprecedented conflation of work and leisure as
well as of domestic and professional spaces. The technologies that produce
liveness and mediatization became perceptible in ways that underline the
apparatus at work, from visible microphones in the homes of local television
news anchors to the composite images of anchors and correspondents in
various places that came to look like products of the teleconferencing
platforms with which many of us suddenly had a great deal more experience
as they were used to substitute for the workplace, the evening out, the family
reunion, the holiday meal, and many other kinds of social gathering. The
ever-present on-screen grid of faces, each in its own box, negated distinc-
tions between education, business, and art: everything took place in the
same virtual space. Because of its association with teleconferencing, this grid
became an indexical sign for liveness in all of these contexts, even when the
event depicted was not live, such as musical performances in which each
musician was recorded separately and then edited together onto the grid.
The grid presented stubborn obstacles to theatrical production because
it does not function well as a fictional or representational space. It is
very difficult to make the teleconferencing grid represent anything other
than itself.
Lockdown conditions encouraged creativity and the emergence of a
variety of novel genres of cultural performance as people applauded es-
sential workers at shift changes, performed music for each other and to-
gether from apartment building balconies, and took advantage of one of
the few remaining opportunities to step outside, trash disposal, to dress up
and entertain the neighbors. Although such performances were intensely
local, they were inevitably reported by the news and communicated
through social media, thus becoming global phenomena. The impossibility
of physical co-presence, particularly indoors, under potentially deadly
circumstances created an urgent need to find ways of using the internet as
the infrastructure that could support experiences equivalent to live per-
formances, as well as endless debates as to whether or not this was pos-
sible. Opinions ranged from those who saw the situation as an opportunity
for innovation, even suggesting that finding ways of performing during the
64 Live performance in a mediatized culture
pandemic would lead to redefinitions of forms such as theatre and opera, to
those who argued that the performance possibilities of the internet could
not meaningfully compensate for the absence of live performances.32
Efforts to use the internet as the primary site of live performance during
the pandemic took on two basic forms: live-streamed performances of
music, dance, theatre, and sports, and the repurposing of recordings as live
events. The idea of live-streaming performances was well-established:
New York’s Metropolitan Opera began its Live in HD program that
streams live performances to movie theatres in 2006, while National
Theatre Live began streaming live performances in real time across the
United Kingdom and Europe in 2009, joined in 2011 by the Tate Modern
Performance Room, which streams live performance art events online.
The difference, of course, is that live events were now streamed to people
in their homes. During the pandemic, the internet was populated with
many much less formal live-streamed performances than those that had
been offered by the Met and the National Theatre, featuring musicians,
dancers, and actors who were also at home, performing in their domestic
spaces for the audience to witness in theirs, creating an effect of intimacy.
Some theatres, faced with the prospect of closing down, hurriedly re-
corded a production to stream as a substitute for the live event. This
practice triggered a conflict in the United States between two unions,
Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) and Screen Actors’ Guild (SAG-
AFTRA). The former represents stage actors and stage managers, while
the latter represents screen actors and broadcasters, a division of labor that
itself asserts the traditional dichotomy between the live and the media-
tized. The conflict stemmed from the fact that, normally, recordings of
theatrical productions fall under the aegis of SAG-AFTRA even if the
productions themselves are governed by AEA. The dispute was essentially
a turf war in which SAG-AFTRA sought to regain jurisdiction over re-
corded theatrical productions it claimed had been usurped by AEA, while
AEA, for its part, felt that because the practice was instituted as a way of
keeping stage actors who were not necessarily members of SAG-AFTRA
working during the pandemic, it should be under its authority. The dis-
pute, which erupted in October of 2020, was resolved the next month
through an agreement between the two unions dated November 14, 2020,
and effective through the end of 2021.
In this document (SAG-AFTRA 2020), the unions reaffirm their former
domains while also permitting AEA rather than SAG-AFTRA to enforce
agreements concerning “work that is recorded and/or produced to be ex-
hibited on a digital platform … as a replacement for a live theatre pro-
duction … that cannot take place because of the pandemic … .” As the
document demonstrates, this conflict was in part a dispute about what could
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 65
count as a live performance under pandemic conditions, and therefore be
under AEA’s authority, and the way formerly clear distinctions between live
and mediatized performance had eroded in a context in which the live could
persist only in mediatized forms, necessitating a new understanding. The
agreement draws a line between recorded performances “intended to be
similar to a live performance that the theatre typically offers to subscribers
and ticket holders” and those “more in the nature of a television show or
movie.” This distinction is defined in terms of production technique: ex-
cluded from AEA’s purview are productions “shot out of chronological
order,” or “substantially edited prior to exhibition, or that includes visual
effects or other elements that could not be replicated in a live manner … .” I
have said here that how liveness is defined and what it means are situa-
tional. For the purposes of these labor negotiations, a recording made in real
time was defined as representing the liveness of theatre.
The agreement also stipulates aspects of the relationship between the
performance and its audience: “the digital platform on which the work is
to be exhibited is a restricted platform that can only be accessed by
ticketholders or subscribers of the existing Equity bargaining partner … .”
Additionally, the size of the audience and the length of time the pro-
duction can be available are dictated:

the aggregated digital audience will not exceed 200% of the size of the
theatre’s house for the contractual run of the production, and the
performance may only remain on a digital platform for the lesser of
three (3) months or the duration of the run … .

These means of artificially re-creating the supposedly limited reach, ephe-

merality, and event-like quality of live performance in the digital context
were already in place before the unions reached their agreement. Jeremy
Wechsler, artistic director of Theater Wit in Chicago, whose production of
Mike Lew’s Teenage Dick was recorded at its only live performance in March
of 2020, then streamed online, noted, “it’s important for a theatre to pre-
serve as much of that experience as possible” (quoted in Pierce 2020). This
extended to having patrons buy a ticket to watch at a specific time (the
ticket price was the same as it would have been for the live performance in
the theatre), beginning with “a short pre-show video that leads you from the
door of the building to your seat, handing you a ticket along the way,”
limiting the audience for each viewing to 98 people, the number the theatre
seats, and making it impossible to restart, fast forward, or rewind the re-
corded play (ibid.). Some of the material and experiential aspects of going
to the theatre were thus re-created online, as was the physical act of en-
tering the theatre.
66 Live performance in a mediatized culture
In some ways, the question of what to do about the audience was more
pressing during the pandemic than how to present performances. Even if a
viewer knows that they are watching along with 97 other people, the
presence of those others is conceptual rather than directly perceptible. I
stated earlier in this chapter that whatever sense of community emerges in
live performance takes place primarily among the members of the audi-
ence rather than between performers and spectators. This prospect be-
comes problematic when spectators are largely isolated at their own
personal computers, as discussed in the previous section of this chapter.
One of the early solutions to the problem of presenting a sense of an
audience’s presence to those watching baseball on television was to place
cardboard cut-outs of fans in the stands. Louisa Thomas (2020) observes
that the cut-outs were “made to simulate communion when the usual
community provided by sports wasn’t safely attainable. There was some-
thing hopeful in them—a mix of silliness, and humility, and the sense of
making-do.” Thomas also notes that the National Basketball Association
went one better by employing a digital process

which connects people in different places and puts them against a

shared background … . Fans were placed into ten groups, which were
projected onto three L.E.D. boards surrounding the court. Seating
arrangements were automated. Fans within each group could actually
talk to one another … .

Fans could thus have the uncanny experience of being in two places at once,
watching themselves watching a live game and conversing with other fans.
Another means of enabling people to talk to one another about a commonly
shared experience was the omnipresent watch party, often sponsored by
streaming services, employing platforms that enable people to watch a film
together while talking to one another through chat. Creating a sense of
audience collectivity proved to be crucial to imbuing a televised or streamed
event with a sense of audience presence, and therefore of liveness.
The 2018 concert by Phil Lesh and the Terrapin Family Band recorded
at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, and streamed online as
That Show Was Epic! (Relix 2020) brings together many of the strategies
for framing a recorded event as live and providing a sense of audience
presence I have been discussing. Lesh is the former bass guitarist for
the Grateful Dead, and the Terrapin Family Band is a jam band of flexible
membership whose repertoire consists largely of the Dead’s catalog. The
live-streamed event incorporating the recorded concert took place on May
7, 2020, framed as an ephemeral event in which the online audience could
participate. It started out as a conventional concert film that alternated
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 67
shots of the musicians onstage with occasional shots of their in-person
audience until, after about 12 minutes, two windows appeared on the
screen, one containing the concert, the other containing a bearded man
who was watching the streamed concert at home while wearing ear buds,
emphasizing the solitude typical of online spectatorship. Spectators of the
stream appeared numerous times over the course of the concert; at some
points, a group of spectators in individual boxes appeared around the edge
of the screen with a single musician in a larger box at the center. They
behaved appropriately for a jam-band audience by engaging in freeform
dancing or just relaxing and grooving. At times, the person watching the
streamed concert shared the screen equally with one of the musicians; at
other times, images of these spectators overlapped those of the band. In
these moments, the musicians and their listeners shared space on screen
much more intimately, and the virtual audience become part of the per-
formance in a much more substantive way, than they ever could in
physical space. The audience watching the stream thus became part of the
stream, and the spectators’ real-time presence thus reframed a recorded
event as a live one.
At the same time, the in-person audience for the filmed concert became
part of the performance for the audience of the streamed version. As if to
underline the differences between in-person and online spectatorship,
these two audiences were bound by somewhat different rules. Whereas the
audience at the Capitol Theater was expected to participate vocally by
cheering and singing along, the audience for the stream was asked to
remain muted. Whereas the audience for the concert adhered to con-
ventional theatre etiquette, the audience for the stream was encouraged to
put themselves (and their pets) on display in order to be selected for in-
clusion by the moderators. The captured stream of That Show Was Epic!
that is available on YouTube after both the live event and the live stream
is a multifaceted palimpsest that juxtaposes different temporal registers;
relationships between spectators and performers; spectatorial roles; and
the possibilities for performance in physical, virtual, and hybrid spaces.

On a personal note
For me, one of the most moving and effective performances live streamed
during the pandemic was opera singer Andrea Bocelli’s Music for Hope, on
YouTube on April 12, 2020, Easter Sunday (Bocelli 2020). Bocelli sang
four religiously themed selections inside the empty Duomo in Milan; the
organist accompanying him was the only other person present. Leading up
to, and interspersed with, Bocelli’s singing were aerial shots of the deserted
city, unpopulated because of a strict lockdown imposed by the Italian
68 Live performance in a mediatized culture
government for the holiday weekend. No one was visible on the streets in
these shots, just the occasional bird flying past the camera. Rarely
glimpsed cars and streetcars were the only testimony to human presence.
After singing inside the Duomo, Bocelli moved outside to sing “Amazing
Grace,” where he seemed small by comparison with the church’s monu-
mental façade. Like the streets of Milan, the piazza in front the church,
which undoubtedly had been teeming with people the previous Easter, was
completely vacant. The live stream was not just about feeling uplifted by
Bocelli’s singing—his lone voice and diminished presence in the massive,
empty urban space of Milan spoke to how people were feeling at the time.
It was both moving and very reflective of the situation. It was therapeutic,
but at the same time, a powerful dramatization of the isolation for which
people needed therapy.

Notes
1 Phelan’s writings and my response have been configured by some as the
“Auslander-Phelan” debate. See, e.g., Kim (2017); Meyer-Dinkgräfe (2015),
and Power (2008).
2 For a fuller discussion of the relationship between performance art and its
documentation, see Auslander (2018a).
3 This position is central to my Presence and Resistance (Auslander 1992), where
I argue it in detail.
4 I have borrowed these categories from Pavis (1992:104–7). They are 2 of
15 vectors identified by Pavis along which live performance and media may be
compared. The others are: relationship between production and reception, voice,
audience, nature of signifiers, mode of representation, conditions of production,
dramaturgy, specificity, framing, norms and codes, repertoire, fictional status, and
indices of fictional status.
5 Phelan (2003:294–5) subsequently clarified that she was moved to formulate
her analysis by seeing the ways the art world had moved away from the critique
of the reification of the art object enacted by performance art in the 1970s. “By
the time I was writing [in the 1990s], however, that impulse had been over-
taken by the usual capitalist worldview in the United States, and especially in
New York, where the galleries, and museum culture more generally, had be-
come so dominant … . Performance’s ephemeral nature, I was arguing, is
absolutely powerful and can serve as a rejoinder to the ‘preserve everything’,
‘purchase everything’ mentality so central to the art world and to late capit-
alism more broadly.”
6 For a discussion of other challenges to the idea that performance is necessarily
ephemeral, see Auslander (2018:1–5).
7 Curiously (to me), Tobin Nellhaus (2010:7) accuses me of technological de-
terminism on the basis of this statement and a few others because audiences are
unaware of the workings of the technology. This may be a point worth dis-
cussing, but it doses not correspond with my understanding of technological
determinism. A basic definition comes from Raymond Williams (2003
[1974]:5): “New technologies are discovered, by an essentially internal process
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 69
of research and development, which then sets the conditions for social change
and progress.” As far as I can see, I make no claim here about the deterministic
impact of technology on social change.
8 This quotation is from Christian Metz.
9 One significant change in the medium itself was the replacement of highly
volatile nitrate film stocks with safety stocks, a transition that was not com-
plete until the 1950s. The early nitrate stocks would frequently ignite in the
projector; nitrate prints were often discarded after only a few showings because
of the stock’s dangerous instability. Following Raymond Williams’s critique of
technological determinism, I would insist that how technologies are used
should be understood as effect rather than cause (Williams 2003 [1974]:3–8). In
this case, I would argue that the transition from the evanscent experience of
film to the experience of film as repetition was not caused by such technolo-
gical changes as the development of safety stocks and the advent of video.
Rather, the development of those technologies was the intentional result of a
social need for cultural forms offering an experience of repetition, a need
perhaps related to the desire for reproductions cited by Benjamin and discussed
earlier.
10 Sontag (1966:31, original emphasis) makes two points that challenge the
distinction between film as repeatable and live performance as nonrepeatable:
“With respect to any single experience, it hardly matters that a film is usually
identical from one projection of it to another while theatre performances are
highly mutable … a movie may be altered from one projection to the next.
Harry Smith, when he runs off his own films, makes each projection an un-
repeatable performance.”
11 In this case, even though the producers promised to use the film medium in a
way that corresponded with the economy of representation rather than re-
petition, they could not resist the latter. Both an expanded version of the film
and a soundtrack album came out in November of 2020.
12 For a discussion of the circumstances surrounding this decision, see Quinn
(2008:286–93).
13 For a discussion of the interactive theatre phenomenon, see Peter Marks,
“When the audience joins the cast,” New York Times, April 22, 1997:B1:7.
14 Paul Rinzler, whose ideas about jazz I discuss in Chapter 3, disagrees, since he
argues that imperfection is a value in live jazz performance (2008:76).
15 See Auslander (2018b) for a discussion of the centrality of repetition to theatre
and performance.
16 Isaac Butler (2022:376–8) discusses Marlon Brando’s refusal to “freeze” his
performance in the stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire and the havoc
this created for the director, his fellow actors, and the production at large.
17 Boal also sees theatre as originating in what Blau calls an “original splitting.”
For a comparison of Boal’s and Blau’s thinking, see Auslander (1997:125–7).
18 I agree with Simon Frith (1996:9) that Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural
capital and symbolic capital can and should be extended beyond his original
usage. Bourdieu’s “interest … is in the creation of a taste hierarchy in terms of
high and low: the possession of cultural capital, he suggests, is what defines high
culture in the first place.” Frith’s rejoinder “is that a similar use of accumulated
knowledge and discriminatory skill is apparent in low cultural forms, and has the
same hierarchical effect” of differentiating those who are truly adept in a par-
ticular cultural arena from those who are not (see also Shuker 1994:247–50).
70 Live performance in a mediatized culture
Cultural capital and symbolic capital, in this extended sense, must be understood
as determined contextually. Particular subcultural and taste groups attribute
symbolic capital to experiences that other groups do not recognize as valuable.
19 Considering the concept of symbolic capital in the context of taste or fan
cultures, as I am implicitly doing here, makes certain aspects of the nature of
symbolic capital visible. Randal Johnson argues that Bourdieu’s various “ca-
pitals” (e.g., cultural capital, symbolic capital, linguistic capital, economic
capital) “are not reducible to each other” (Johnson 1993:7). Within fan cul-
tures, however, cultural capital does translate into symbolic capital: the more
you know about a particular rock group, for example, the more prestige you will
have among fans of that group. Among collectors, the symbolic value of an
object is generally a function of its rarity and inaccessibility, which also de-
termine its economic value. It is roughly true, then, that the greater the
economic value of a collectible, the greater its symbolic value. (One class of
exceptions would be those in which an object that is worth very little eco-
nomically carries great symbolic value because it attests to the rarefaction of
the owner’s taste. There are, for instance, rare but not particularly valuable
psychedelic rock albums. Owning these records is a sign of expert knowledge
and an indication that your taste for the music extends well beyond what is
known to most fans, even though the records have little actual economic
value.) Even taking into consideration Johnson’s admonishment that
“Bourdieu’s use of economic terminology does not imply any sort of econo-
mism” (ibid.:8), it becomes apparent that symbolic capital can be quantified,
relatively even if not absolutely. In considering the symbolic value of atten-
dance at live performances, rarity, distance in time, and proximity to an
imagined originary moment are determining factors. It is clear, for example,
that having seen a Rolling Stones concert in 1964 is worth more symbolic
capital within rock culture than having seen them in 2022, for all the reasons I
just mentioned. It may even be that having seen the Beatles live is worth more
than having seen the Stones, even in 1964, precisely because the Beatles’
performing career was relatively short. Whereas one may still see the Stones,
one will never again be able to see the Beatles.
20 Lohr (1940) treats television as a domestic technology, thus implying that the
uses of the technology had been decided definitively that early. In fact, the
situation was somewhat more complicated. As Gomery (1985) has shown,
Hollywood’s major motion picture corporations hatched a scheme in the late
1940s to co-opt television by installing television projection equipment in
movie theatres and offering programming, including live coverage of sports and
newsworthy public events, to a paying public in those venues. This experi-
ment, known as “theatre television,” proved not to be cost-effective and was
abandoned in the early 1950s.
21 Lynn Spigel (1992:99, 106–9) traces the phrase “home theatre” and the
concept it embodies as far back as 1912 and discusses how, in the period after
World War II, suburban homeowners were encouraged to construct their
television viewing areas on the model of a theatre. It is significant that
throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the home theatre was
imagined as a domestic version of the dramatic stage. Now, that phrase is used
to describe equipment intended to transport the experience of the cinema, not
that of live theatre, into the home.
 Live performance in a mediatized culture 71
22 For a useful overview of theatrical presentations on television from the 1940s
through the 1980s, see Rose (1986).
23 The immediacy of televised drama was harrowing for actors. Even as seasoned a
trouper as Jose Ferrer (1949:47), writing of his first television appearance (as
Cyrano de Bergerac on the Philco Television Playhouse in 1949), described the
“‘this-is-it’ feeling” of performing on television as “a bad psychological han-
dicap.” This insecurity was apparently brought on by television’s character-
istically brief rehearsal period and the absence of a prompter. Television
production manuals of the 1940s monotonously repeat the assertion that a
basic requirement for television actors is the ability to memorize lines, leading
one to speculate about the exact state of the art of acting in the United States
at the time.
24 Alla Gadassik (2010:12) points out that televisual liveness was defined by the
medium’s relationship to its predecessors as much as by the intimacy and
immediacy attributed to it: “the additional influence of wireless technology
contributes further qualities to television’s ‘liveness.’ Earlier transmission
models like the telegraph and the radio were adapted and ideologically cir-
culated as technologies that conveyed authentic and important information
across broad (already mediated) spaces and times. This information was em-
bedded within a viewer’s daily life and domestic space, and, more importantly,
it was often factual (relaying facts about current personal or social events).
Thus, the ideology of liveness was invested as much (if not more) in the au-
thenticity of the information, as it was in the spatial or temporal delivery of
the event.”
25 Andy Lavender (2003) argues that we have seen a re-theatricalization of tel-
evision in reality programs like Big Brother through their emphasis on liveness,
frontality, evocations of theatrical space and temporality, and the manner in
which contestants perform their identities.
26 Altman (1986:47) describes what he calls television’s “internal audiences,”
which can be studio audiences, newscasters, announcers, commentators, or
even characters in fictional programs. The reactions of the internal audiences
focus viewer attention and response by functioning as a “sign that someone
else thinks an important phenomenon is taking place on the screen,” thus
manipulating viewer attention.
27 For a useful overview of cable television’s involvement in the presentation of
theatrical productions, see Rose (1986:229–33). Although Rose does not
discuss the involvement of cable networks in the financing of live theatre, he
does take note of the fact that cable executives lost interest in theatre around
1982 when they realized that an original television movie can be produced for
less than the cost of mounting a theatrical production for broadcast
(ibid.:231). As discussed below, this interest was rekindled in the same year by
the Walt Disney Company, a harbinger of the involvement of media con-
glomerates in the production of live entertainment.
28 Whereas the theatre is traditionally characterized as a communal medium and
television as a mass medium, there are dissenters from these positions. Gregory
Sporton (2009:65), for example, describes the theatre as “a solitary experience
carried out jointly rather than a social one contextualized by the presence of
others.” Paddy Scannell (2001: 410) states, “Television … does not construct
its viewers as a collectivity. It is precisely not a mass medium in that sense.
Rather it treats viewers as having the particular views, tastes and preferences to
72 Live performance in a mediatized culture
which they are entitled by virtue of being the person that they are. Each
viewer has their own ‘take’ on something to which millions of others have
access at the same time.”
29 Eirini Nedelkopoulou (2017:215) seeks “to displace the centrality of human
agency” she sees in my descriptions of the relationship between audiences and
digital technologies in favor of a concept of implication that applies equally to
both human and non-human agents. I have argued several times in the past
that machines and software can be understood to be performers, even live
performers (Auslander 2002, 2006, 2008a) and that non-human agents can
exercise degrees of agency in performance. Nedelkopoulou observes that in the
work she analyzes, mazes are constructed in real time through feedback loops
generated between the participants’ actions and the system’s algorithms (ibid.:
223). I have no difficulty with the idea that both human and non-human
agents are implicated in the construction of these mazes, but they are not
implicated in the same ways. Only the human participants have to navigate
the mazes.
30 Behrendt (2019:254) observes that pieces intended to focus participants’
perception on environmental sound are called soundwalks, while pieces of
which recorded sound is a component are sometimes called audio walks.
31 Brenda Laurel in her pioneering work Computers as Theatre rejects that idea
that a computer user can be a performer and a spectator simultaneously, ar-
guing that “People who are participating in the representation aren’t audience
members any more … they become actors” (2014:27).
32 For a sense of the range of commentary around the prospects for live performance
during the pandemic, see the following published roundtables: Midgelow (2020),
TDR Editors (2020), and Gillespie, Lucie, and Thompson (2020).

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