Dispersed and Dislocated: The construction of liveness in live intermedial performance

This article focuses on an analysis of the live intermedial performance, The Mark of Affect. Using the theories of Philip Auslander (2008), Erika Fischer-Lichte (2008) and Roberta Mock (in Power 2008) as a starting point, three moments from the performance are analysed in relation to liveness; specifically, how it is constructed and manifests itself within this performance. In all cases, the combinations of live and mediatised acts are seen as creating hybrid forms of liveness, which exist both within and through the technology employed on stage. Introduction When I first started developing an intermedial performance medium, my concern was much more with how the technological tools I was employing could serve the content I wanted to present on stage. However, as I started to work with these tools, both in preparation and performance, something started to shift and I became much more interested in what such tools were able to do in combination and in the moment of performance. What became evident was that, as a solo performer, my intermedial kit offered me a number of diverse opportunities to ‘make things live’; that is to construct intermediality in the moment of performance. This led me firstly to occupy a dual role on stage, both performing and activating the various elements of performance. It also led me to want to investigate how liveness manifested itself on a stage, where the performer/activator could construct the performance in real time and in the presence of the spectators and where the mechanics of this intermedial construction were part of the performance. Live Intermedial Performance Live intermedial performance is a medium of performance I have developed through practice-as-research and which now I am employing specifically as a space and vehicle to research and test theories of liveness within intermediality. Live intermedial performance can be defined as performance whereby the performer is also the activator and manipulator of the various elements which make up the intermedial mise-en-scène. My use of the term mise-en-scène relates directly to Andy Lavender’s (2006) definition of such, in that it represents not just what is “put on stage”, but also, ‘the continuum that gives staged elements their effective relation one to another’ (in Chapple and Kattenbelt 2006: 63). The notion of continuum and placing elements not just in space, but also in time, is particularly relevant to this practice, in that the decision-making of the performer/activator within the unfolding real time of performance represents an engagement with both time and space in terms of where, when and how to position the elements of the performance. The elements of the live intermedial mise-en-scène are live and recorded projected images; the live voice – amplified, looped and layered; objects and the performer’s body in space. Sitting loosely within a compositional framework, the different ‘movements’ of the performance are defined by combinations of the above elements, which, as mentioned, are generated by the performer/activator in real time and in the presence of the spectators. As part of my ongoing research in this area, I developed a piece of live intermedial performance called The Mark of Affect, which was performed at Central School of Speech and Drama on 4 and 5 July 2011. The piece took place in a large studio, where a traverse staging arrangement was used to define the space of performance, but also to make a clear separation between one end of the traverse, where the technical equipment was located and the work or ‘activation’ of the performance was taking place and the other end, where a large projection screen displayed the results of the image manipulation (see Figure 1).