Week 3 2nd Debate Affirmative Team First Speaker

We define the topic as live and mediatised performances are mutually dependent. We the affirmative team believe that this statement is true.

According to Auslander, “the default definition of live performance is that it is the kind of performance in which the performers and the audience are both physically and temporally co-present to one another” (p.60, 89). But the inventions of radio, television, telephone and computer give rise to different perceptions of liveness. Performances transmitted or recorded through media technologies like television, films and DVDs are thus mediatised performances.

Today as first speaker I will be talking to you about the mutual remediation of live and mediatised performances to demonstrate that they are actually interdependent.

Our second speaker will rebut and talk about the changing concept of liveness in historical context and in contemporary media scope. She will further demonstrate that today’s live performance is actually highly mediatised.

Our third speaker will rebut and sum up our team case.

Media technology is always evolving. Each time the emergence of one major media technology brings about huge impact on the existing ones. But this is not to say that new ones oppose old ones. They are both changing, remediating and being remediated by each other.

In the early stage, both film and television were aiming to be theatrical, according to Brewster and Jacobs. The development of cinematic staging and editing in the 1910s was the attempt to model the well-established theatre practice, rather than laying the basis for a specifically cinematic approach to narration (Brewster and Jacobs p.15). Also, the narrative structures and visual devices of cinema, including the close-up and the fade-in/fade-out, and parallel editing, all came from the theatre (p.14).

Television’s essential characteristics came from live performance. It was originally proposed as the live theatre in the home. Its ability to broadcast events while they happen is identical to the experience of live performance. The intimacy and immediacy of television were borrowed from theatre. The multiple-camera setup in a television studio was also to recreate the perceptual continuity of the theatre. P. 19

While the mediatised derive from the live, the live is incorporating the mediatised.

For example, The use of big screens is more and more common in big concerts and sport events. In such events, although physically and temporally the performer and the audience are co-present to one another, but due to geographical limitation, not all audiences can feel the intimacy of the events, so the mediatised big screens are there to facilitate the liveness of the live performance, bringing bigger and closer looks of the events.

At the same time, the audience’s media consumption habit is also changing. People no longer feel the need to distinguish live and mediatised performances. Also according to Auslander, contemporary live performance spectators are “modelling their responses to the live event on those expected of them by television” (p. 25). “Theatre audiences today respond spontaneously to the same sorts of cues that are often used in a television studio because the studio audience has become the culturally engrained model for what get applause and how audiences behave (p.26).

In conclusion, as Auslander points out, “whereas mediatised performance derives its authority from its reference to the live or the real, the live now derives its authority from its reference to the mediatised” (p. 39, 28). Today’s media-scope is becoming more and more convergent and thus open to various types of performances. Live and mediatised performances are getting more and more interdependent. So the statement that There is no inherent opposition between live and mediatised performance is true.