What is "Live"?

"Liveness" is the central concept/selling point of the Met's Live in HD project. But what does it mean for something (a performance, a simulcast, a recording, an event, etc.) to be live? Here are some potential livenesses — if you like them, you can take them with you into our look at Live in HD. 

I. Paul Allain and Jen Harvie:

"Liveness describes a quality of live performance — the sense that it is happening here and now. It is an important idea because it apparently distinguishes live performance from recorded performance-based media such as film and television, indicating that live performance has some intrinsic qualitative and even political difference from other forms of performance...performance’s liveness is exciting because it cultivates a sense of presence…" (The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance, p 168-9)

II. Philip Auslander:

"Liveness is not an ontologically defined condition but a historically variable effect of mediatization. It was the development of recording technologies that made it both possible and necessary to perceive existing representation as “live.” Prior to the advent of these technologies (e.g., sound recording and motion pictures), there was no need for a category of “live” performance, for that category has meaning only in relation to an opposing possibility." ("Digital Liveness," p 3)

III. Jill Dolan:

"Live performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world." (Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, p 2)

IV. Peggy Phelan:

"Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility—in a maniacally charged present—and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control." (Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, p 148)

V. Rebecca Schneider:

"In theater (at least in theater staging plays) the live texts succeeds, surrogates, or comes after a precedent textual script. That is, in the dramatic theater the live is not first, or not only first. The live act does not necessarily, or does not only, precede that which has been set down, recorded. In the dramatic theater, the live is a troubling trace of a precedent text and so (herein lies the double trouble) comes afterward, even arguably remains afterward, as a record of the text set in play." (Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, p 90)

The bolded emphases are all mine: put them together and something emerges — a loosely sketched theoretical function into which we can perhaps plug our Live in HD test case:

sense of presence;
meaning only in relation;
people come together;
plunges into visibility and disappears into memory;
troubling trace of a precedent text.

But first, let's take a look at what, more literally, Live in HD is.