Amy's Keyword: LIVENESS

Keyword Presentation: Liveness

Try to recall a performance for someone who wasn’t there to see it live, and what you present is a shallow duplicate (or surrogate)—a hallow, flattened representation of not the performance exactly, but how the performance made you feel.  According to the Reason article, liveness is rendered meaningful by the process of putting that experience into language. Sure you might mention a few plot points or retell a joke, but what you’re really saying is, “I felt moved. I felt uncomfortable. For a second, I thought of death and the passage of time and I knew—in an uncanny way—the people around me felt it too. According to Sartre, each member of the audience asks himself what he thinks of the play at the same time asking what his neighbor is thinking.

Essentially, we ask each other, “what is it we just saw?”

Central to liveness is the centrality of shared memory—to see a comedian together is to share an inside joke—a private event in which intimacy is created. The feeling cannot be remanufactured through its mere explanation if one wasn’t there to begin with, much like love.

Also crucial to liveness is the potential for performance to go horribly wrong. To be present for a live performance of Saturday Night Live, let’s say, is to welcome the opportunity for an actor to forget their lines or blunder a joke in a way which seems impossible to recover from. For the audience member, a mistake like that would feel historical in its significance. What that audience member would retell her family or friends is not, ultimately, the wording of the joke that went wrong, but the terror she felt watching the blunder unfold. In a performance like SNL, the live studio audience is immediately implicated in the show’s success or failure. The performers on stage vie for that live audience’s laughter, the television audience at home is now only a distant, unformed idea—a memory from the last time an episode aired.

It is for this reason that watching improvisation is so often terrifying. The joy is watching performers save themselves—and each other—from embarrassment and ruin on stage, and it is for this reason that so much of the laughter has the pressure of relief behind it, as though you’ve shaken a soda can and waited for the contents to explode. It is sometimes with a shred of delight we watch a live performance crash and burn, another kind of relief—thank God it wasn’t us up there. As a live audience, we are the ultimate rubberneckers, we know we shouldn’t watch the crash from the side of the road, but after all, we drove cars or took Ubers to get here, perhaps we paid money to sit in these seat, and the seats are stiff and uncomfortable, how could we possibly look away? To see the failure live is to commit it to memory, a knock-on-wood gesture, now that we’ve seen it and we’ve felt grateful that it wasn’t us, we’ve made the silent prayer it never will be.

According to Phelan, performance becomes itself through disappearance. We don’t know the value of having been present until we are no longer present in that space—until our present-ness has become our past—until our moments spent among others in an audience have become the stuff of memory, already inaccurate, blurred by every other performance we’ve ever seen, and every time we’ve ever performed, and essentially, every moment we’ve ever lived before and since then.