ABSTRACT
That dance, music and theatre, along with live and performance art, are experienced live is something that is valued and celebrated by audiences and practitioners alike. Yet the status and significance of the live in contemporary performance has become contested: perceived as variously as a marker of ontological difference, a promotional slogan or a mystical evocation of cultural value. From something that might have been considered straightforwardwhat could be simpler than being live?—the exact nature, the ontology, of the live has become a recurring concern across a range of disciplines and contexts. Moving beyond debates about the relationship between the live and the mediated, this collection sets out to interrogate how liveness is produced through processes of audiencing-as spectators bring qualities of (a)liveness into being through the nature of their attention-and processes of materializing in acts of performance, acts of making, acts of archiving and acts of remembering.
