This volume brings together dynamic perspectives on the concept of liveness in the performing arts, engaging with the live through the particular analytical focus of audiences and experience. The status and significance of the live in performance has become contested: perceived as variously as a marker of ontological difference, a promotional slogan, or a mystical evocation of cultural value. Moving beyond debates about the relationship between the live and the mediated, this collection considers what we can know and say about liveness in terms of processes of experiencing and processes of making. Drawing together contributions from theatre, music, dance, and performance art, it takes an interdisciplinary approach in asking not what liveness is, but how it matters and to whom. The book invites readers to consider how liveness is produced through processes of audiencing - as spectators bring qualities of (a)liveness into being through the nature of their attention - and how it becomes materialized in acts of performance, acts of making, acts of archiving, and acts of remembering. Theoretical chapters and practice-based reflections explore liveness, eventness and nowness as key concepts in a range of topics such as affect, documentation, embodiment, fandom, and temporality, showing how the relationship between audience and event is rarely singular and more often malleable and multiple. With its focus on experiencing liveness, this collection will be of interest to disciplines including performance, audience and cultural studies, visual arts, cinema, and sound technologies.

This book uncovers how music experience–live and recorded–is changing along with the use of digital technology in the 2000s. Focussing on the Nordic region, this volume utilizes the theory of mentalization: the capacity to perceive and interpret what others are thinking and feeling, and applies it to the analysis of mediated forms of agency in popular music. The rise of new media in music production has enabled sound recording and processing to occur more rapidly and in more places, including the live concert stage. Digital technology has also introduced new distribution and consumption technologies that allow record listening to be more closely linked to the live music experience. The use of digital technology has therefore facilitated an expanding range of activities and experiences with music. Here, Yngvar Kjus addresses a topic that has a truly global reach that is of interest to scholars of musicology, media studies and technology studies.

Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture addresses what may be the single most important question facing all kinds of performance today. What is the status of live performance in a culture dominated by mass media and digital technologies? Since its first appearance, Philip Auslander’s groundbreaking book has helped to reconfigure a new area of study. Looking at specific instances of live performance such as theatre, music, sport, and courtroom testimony, Liveness offers penetrating insights into media culture, suggesting that media technology has encroached on live events to the point where many are hardly live at all. In this new edition, the author thoroughly updates his provocative argument to take into account the impact of the internet, and cultural, social, and legal developments. He also addresses the situation of live performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. In tackling some of the last great shibboleths surrounding the high cultural status of the live event, this classic book will continue to shape opinion and to provoke lively debate on a crucial artistic dilemma: what is live performance and what can it mean to us now? This extensively revised, new edition of Liveness is an essential read for all students and scholars of performance-based courses.

What does it mean for early modern theatre to be 'live'? How have audiences over time experienced a sense of 'liveness'? This collection extends discussions of liveness to works from the 16th and 17th centuries, both in their initial incarnations and contemporary adaptations. Drawing on theatre and performance studies, as well as media theory, this volume uses the concept of liveness to consider how early modern theatre – including non-Western and non-traditional performance – employs embodiment, materiality, temporality and perception to impress on its audience a sensation of presence. The volume's contributors adopt varying approaches and cover a range of topics from material and textual studies, to early modern rehearsal methods, to digital and VR theatre, to the legacy of Shakespearean performance in global theatrical repertoires. This collection uses both early modern and contemporary performance practices to challenge our understanding of live performance. Productions and adaptions discussed include the Royal Shakespeare Company's Dream (2021), CREW's Hands on Hamlet (2017), Kit Monkman's Macbeth (2018), Arslanköy Theatre Company's Kraliçe Lear (2019), and a season of productions by the Original Practice Shakespeare Festival. Early Modern Liveness looks beyond theatrical events as primary sites of interpretive authority and examines the intimate and ephemeral experience of encountering early modern theatre in its diverse manifestations.

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference THEATRE HISTORY STUDIES, VOLUME 38 PART I: Studies in Theatre History ELIZABETH COEN Hanswurst’s Public: Defending the Comic in the Theatres of Eighteenth-Century Vienna BRIDGET MCFARLAND “This Affair of a Theatre”: The Boston Theatre Controversy and the Americanization of the Stage RYAN TVEDT From Moscow to Simferopol: How the Russian Cubo-Futurists Accessed the Provinces DANIELLA VINITSKI MOONEY So Long Ago I Can’t Remember: GAle GAtes et al. and the 1990s Immersive Theatre Part II: The Site-Based Theatre Audience Experience: Dramaturgy and Ethics —EDITED BY PENELOPE COLE AND RAND HARMON PENELOPE COLE Site-Based Theatre: The Beginning PENELOPE COLE Becoming the Mob: Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson’s Coriolan/us SEAN BARTLEY A Walk in the Park: David Levine’s Private Moment and Ethical Participation in Site-Based Performance DAVID BISAHA “I Want You to Feel Uncomfortable”: Adapting Participation in A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre COLLEEN RUA Navigating Neverland and Wonderland: Audience as Spect-Character GUILLERMO AVILES-RODRIGUEZ, PENELOPE COLE, RAND HARMON, AND ERIN B. MEE Ethics and Site-Based Theatre: A Curated Discussion PART III: The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay from the 1038 Mid-America Theatre Conference MICHELLE GRANSHAW Inventing the Tramp: The Early Tramp Comic on the Variety Stage

The collection of essays Fictional Realities / Real Fictions. Contemporary Theatre in Search of a New Mimetic Paradigm tackles the problem of fictionality and reality in contemporary theatre practice and playwriting. It approaches this hotly debated issue in a larger context of the theories of theatrical and dramatic mimesis. The volume provides an answer to the most recent developments in performative arts, such as the widespread use of new media technologies, the popularity of site specific productions, and the flourishing of various post-dramatic forms of expression. The phenomena scrutinized in this collection call into question the basic dichotomy between the fictional and the real on which the theory and practice of the Western theatre has been based right from its inception. However, due to their extremely heterogeneous character, they pose a considerable problem for researchers and teachers, who still do not find a widely applicable methodology for the analysis of contemporary performances and texts for the theatre. Fictional Realities / Real Fictions sets the discussion of the onset of new mimetic paradigm in three interrelated contexts: the new perceptual patterns forged by contemporary theatre, the use of media on stage, and the strategies of todayâ (TM)s political theatre. The case studies presented here, in spite of their thematic diversity, are subordinated to a single theoretical framework. Thus they turn out extremely useful both for the scholars investigating the problems of contemporary theatre, and students of theatre and drama. Fictional Realities / Real Fictions offers them a rigid methodological scaffolding, supported by a number of illustrative examples from a variety of cultural context and theatre traditions, which gives them an opportunity to extrapolate from the main argument of the volume to their own research.

This wide-ranging look at the state of contemporary theatre practice, economics, and issues related to identity, politics, and technology contains a snapshot dissection of where theatre is, where it has been and where it might be going, through the voices of established and emerging theatre artists and scholars from the UK, US and elsewhere. It offers an examination of how to make theatre in a time of crisis and why it is a vital form of communication, asking questions such as: where is theatre now taking place?; what is the relationship between play and performance?; how does funding work?; what states does theatre flourish under?; and if there is a current crisis of theatre should it not be seen as a welcome opportunity to develop a vigorous theatre of crisis?

Within the wide range of writings on performance studies, theoreticians and practitioners have been using the concepts of performance and performativity as key terms for explaining different social, philosophical and artistic phenomena. The question «what are performance and performativity» is always already shaped according to what sort of 'performance' is being carried out, which performance is taken into consideration, which contexts and power-knowledge «stratum» operate in the formation of these concepts. Performance and Performativity primarily aims to find a way of grasping the maze of different positions that have become incorporated within the general and often overlapping terms of performance studies and performative theory. The book focuses on how «the power of discourse to produce what it names» is linked with the question of performance and performativity, rather than providing a general intellectual background and context for the modern idea of performance and performativity.