The Definition Of Live Performance

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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 on another.
(Auslander,P. (2008) P.60)
Liveness is something many of us feel a numerous amount of times throughout our life, watching a live performance cannot be beaten whether its football, rugby etc. liveness is something that theatre possesses deep within its roots, it allows audiences and performers to meet and react to one another, to forget about life and enter into a new world altogether, but what is it about it that makes an audience feel that way. Solo Performer Eric Bogosians’ book ‘Pounding nails in the floor with my forehead’ shares his opinion of how it feels for him to perform in the short introduction;
Medicine for a toxic environment of electronic media mind pollution…Theatre clears my head because it takes the subtextual brainwashing of the media madness and SHOUTS that subtext out loud… Theatre is ritual. It is something we make together every time it happens. Theatre is holy. Instead of being bombarded by a cathode ray tube we are speaking to ourselves. Human language, not electronic noise. Theatre is laughter, which is always a valuable commodity.
(Bogosian, E. (1994) P.XII)
Theatre is something that happens right in front of the audience unveiling itself before their eyes, it is never the same and can alter everyday within each performance feeling as though sometimes it has been created right there and then as we watch. It is the small amount of escapism that we can grasp in a human form, a chance for the individual to have their own physical interpretation on something without feeling wrong, as nothing is set in stone throughout one.
Is l...

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...y can relate to. Technology is used everyday for most of the globe, therefore liveness is an effect of that. Peggys argument is that performance happens when it happens, right in front of you. You can watch a recording of a performance, but you cannot gain as much from the recording as you would the real thing, the emotions will be less heightened and the relationship is lost, there is no liveness. By considering both of theses arguments you create a definition for what liveness can and cant be. It can’t be captured in anyway by the new technology that has been created, otherwise the liveness does not exist.
‘Like cinema, broadcasting does not suffer from the poor visibility and audibility that limit the theatre, nor from the artificiality of it sets and settings, but neither of course can it offer the two way relationship of the theatre.’
(Crissel, A. 2012. P.12)

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