Debate #1: 1st speaker negative summary

Hey guys, here is what I spoke about in my speech...

I started out by rebutting two points from the affirmative team's argument. Unfortunately I lost the palm cards I was referring to, and my teammates were unable to remember what I spoke about either. From my memory, I think it was about the affirmative team's point regarding our attitudes towards mediated performance and the media in general. It is seen as a live performance that we can view in our own homes, that we trust and is an integral part of our everyday life and being able to replace live performance. I brought up the issue that (perhaps as a result of our heavily mediatised culture), most audiences probably wouldn't take this attitude towards the media anymore, of trust and certainty. In our current society, the more popular attitude to take towards anything mediatised it one of critical thinking. I think I also spoke about media networks such as TiVo and YouTube because they contribute to a mediated society of repetition and mass production, where it is more like we are being told how to feel about a performance, rather than taking certain memories away from the performance, that can very rarely be revisited, and putting our own impressions and interpretations onto it. I can't recall which affirmative point this was in response to though....

Peggy Phelan

Unmediated live performance allows for the subjective experience of memory after the disappearance of the performance, whereas most mediated performance allows us to watch again. In a sense, we learn the experience rather than absorb it and interpret it. In “the ontology of performance”, Peggy Phelan makes a poignant statement about the nature of live performance, that its "only life is in the present. It cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance". Phelan goes on to define this fundamental concept of “liveness” as “writing towards disappearance” as opposed to preservation. She believes that the experience of subjectivity comes from the after-effect of disappearance – since we cannot go back and revisit the live performance, all we have are our memories of it and our own personal meanings and associations that combine with the memory to form our own personal and unique experience that nobody else can touch. In a sense, with truly live and non-mediated performance, we have the opportunity to make it our own. This, Phelan believes, is the essence of subjectivity and art. Whilst there are some performance works which can be interchangeably mediated and non-mediated due to the fact that they we written that way, Phelan calls for written performance works that are “answerable to the consequences of disappearance", or “performative”, as she puts it.

Different visual experience of watching live vs. mediated performances

In his book, Auslander refers to the TV production textbook written by Bretz. It is quoted as saying that “the TV medium is the medium of camera and as such has departed almost as far from the live theatre as has the medium of film.” This follows a discussion of the bringing of cameras onto the stage for different shots and angles that a regular audience member would not be able to obtain. So here, a professional in the field of television admits to the fact that the visual experiences of watching a live theatre production and a mediated one have become totally different.

As well as this, we can choose where to look in a live performance. This is a lot more restricted in mediated performance as the frames are smaller than our actual frame of vision, and the editor ultimately decides what we look at. Although Auslander counters this by saying that the director of the live performance has control over what we pay attention to by using visual directing techniques, the audience still has the CHOICE: the choice whether to look at the old man with all the lines at the front of the stage, or the attractive supporting actor in the back corner! We even have the choice to look at members of the audience around us and see how they are reacting to the show. This creates an inherent opposition between live and mediated performance: one enables visual choice whilst viewing and the other does not.