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 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.

Performing Institutions: Contested Sites and Structures of Care builds upon scholarly work rooted in the social and cultural histories of education, self-organization, activist practices, performance, design, and artistic research, (at)tending to the ways that institutions are necessarily political and performed. By evoking the idea of Performing Institutions, it foregrounds all kinds of 'actors' that engage with (re)imagining creative practices - social, artistic, and pedagogical - that critically interact with institutional frameworks and the broader local and global society of which these institutions are part. With case studies and critical reflections from Denmark, Ireland, Finland, the UK, Canada, the USA, Chile, Asia and Australasia contributors show how they envision or pursue performing artistic, cultural, social and educational practices as caring engagements with contested sites, addressing the following questions. How do current institutions perform - academically, spatially, custodially and structurally? How might we stay engaged with the ways that institutions are inherently contested sites, and what role do care, and counter-hegemonic practices play in rearticulating other ways of performing institutions, and how they perform on us? These are the questions central to this book as it stages a productive tension between two main themes: structures of care (instituting otherwise) and sites of contestations (desiring change). Some of the texts in this collection stage a productive tension between ideas about caring contestations and contestation as a caring engagement in practice, with a view towards institutional transformation. Other contributors investigate the idea of caring contestations as a critical concept that draws attention to questions of power and to the exclusions produced and reproduced in and through specific institutional practices. As such, this collection of writing puts forward caring contestations as a critical mode for (re)enacting institutional engagements. This also brings forward questions of agency and how, for those of us who perform within institutional structures, we care to engage and/or contest those institutional engagements. It is primarily aimed at scholars, educators, research-practitioners and postgraduate students in the fields of performance studies, theory, creation and design, those working at art institutions and art schools Also relevant to researchers working across various fields of organizational as well as educational approaches to performance culture.