What is liveness in performance art? What does it mean? How is it produced? Does it really matter? To whom? These are some of the questions addressed in Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof, the book brings together twelve full-length essays and seventeen ‘shorts’ from scholars and artists originating from diverse fields, such as theatre, visual arts, music, dance or literature.
The editors’ aim, stated in the Introduction, is to reformulate the classic definition of ‘live performance’ as a staging which happens in spatial and temporal co-presence between performer and spectator. All authors part from the notion of the ephemerality of performance, and discuss further concepts based on previous interventions by Philip Auslander, Peggy Phelan and Erika Fischer-Lichte, among others. Three of the theoretical chapters offer especially helpful introductions to deeper research into live performance: Martin Baker argues that there are different ‘working notions of liveness of what makes up “liveness”’ (p. 22), which are varied and contradictory, depending on the field of study. Gary Peters, on the other hand, speculates on what might constitute a live event, drawing from a broad philosophical approach grounded on Heidegger's, Deleuze's and Badiou's work. Meanwhile Jonah Westerman, drawing performance art's historiography, presents the current status of research regarding liveness's main issues.
Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof structure the book in two main parts: ‘Audiencing’ and ‘Materialising’, both of them divided in two sections: six academic articles and several shorts. They state, ‘These shorter texts … often have a different kind of tone [and] are frequently oriented around practice’ (p. 13), which gives the volume a unique dimension which combines theoretical and artistic points of view. It is interesting to note that each chapter is an independent article and all can be read separately in any order, while the collection as a whole offers a vivid dialogue on liveness in art.
The first section, ‘Audiencing’, focuses on the spectator's role during performance, and ‘recognizes that attention is a constructive or performative act’ (p. 17) in itself. The chapter entitled ‘Affect and Experience’ by Matthew Reason understands audiencing as a holistic experience, an assemblage of ‘memory, interpretation, narrativisation’ (p. 93), reflection and affect. All these elements connect to Lynn Lu's essay on ‘Empathy and Resonant Relationships in Performance Art’. Lu describes spectators’ response to her own works, calling them an ‘implicated audience’ (p. 116), underlining the ‘“empathetic resonance” which occurs pre-reflexively and without conscious effort’ (p. 109) with people who participate actively in her performances.
The second part of the book, ‘Materializing’, discusses the characteristics of a live performance, its material, temporality, composition and inner processes. The eight shorts from this section give profound insight into varied practices where liveness is embodied in a direct and mediated way. Particularly interesting are the testimonies by Craig Dworkin and Paul Forte; they both reflect on their own experience of research-based practice, which led them to discover different ways of being present ‘live’ through their art. Through an unusual way of writing an ‘academic’ essay – the first two pages consist of describing the actual act of writing it – Dworkin draws attention to the idiomatic phrase ‘“live” recordings’ as apparent oxymoron. Forte, on the other hand, presents his experiment performed in 1977, where he sold his time and certified it with ‘a simple two-page document listing the seconds, minutes, and hours in a day’ (p. 259). In this way the liveness of the encounter ‘materializes’ and might be recorded and saved.
‘We do not need to be there to experience it as live, but we do need to be able to believe that it is occurring at the same time we experience it’ (p. 297), states Philip Auslander in the ‘Afterword’. In this way, the loop of Experiencing Liveness, a collection whose purpose is ‘to take the discussion further after Auslander’ (p. 12), is closed. It must be emphasized that each essay is very well documented, offering extensive and updated references. The collection offers a new perspective on traditional notions of ‘live performance’, leading to broad reflection on art and life. Thanks to such an approach it will be attractive for a wide range of readers, from visual-art scholars and theatre practitioners to amateurs interested in this topic.
