Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance ii: audience and embodiment 179
the audience changes. In Chapter 6, we noted David Osipovich’s remarks
to this effect in defense of the “liveness” model of theatrical performance.
Our concern there was with Osipovich’s claim that the “unscriptability” of
theatrical performances defeats the attempt to subsume them under the
classical paradigm. But, we may recall, the reason why theatrical perform-
ances are unscriptable, according to Osipovich, is that theater requires the
co-occurrence at a given time of an act of showing and an act of watching
what is shown. Unscriptability is a consequence of the fact that the performers –
those who are doing the showing – must always be sensitive to, and willing to
respond to, the responses of those who are watching. Osipovich talks here of
audience and performers having to “contend” with each other: “Each affects
the other and is affected by the other. Noting that audience and performers
have to contend with each other in shared space and time is just another way
of saying that theatre is live” (Osipovich 2006, 466). It is only the liveness of
theater, so construed, that differentiates it from live television, he maintains.
To deny the liveness of theater is, then, to mask one of its important distinc-
tive aesthetic features.
The role that Osipovich assigns to an actual audience cannot be played by
a non-actual intended audience, or at least this would call for challenging
psychological gymnastics on the part of the performers who would have
to somehow “contend” with their own intendings. But Osipovich’s claim
that “contending” between performers and audience members is a defining
condition of theater seems to beg the question at issue. This is certainly an
essential feature of live theater if we define the latter in terms of the pres-
ence of an actual audience. But why should we assume that all theater must
be live in this sense? Why, indeed, assume that we no longer have theater if
the audience is viewing the performers live – in the different sense of “simul-
taneously with the performance” – on a television screen? Or, indeed, why
assume that the status of what is being done by the performers as theater is
further compromised if it is transmitted to the same audience with a short
time delay? In both cases, why should we deny that the audience is seeing a
televised transmission of a theatrical performance? A televised broadcast of
a football match played in a closed stadium is still a broadcast of a football
match, after all.
Osipovich’s argument rests on the assumption that the liveness – in his
sense – of theatrical performances is a source of aesthetic features that dis-
tinguish theater from live television and cinema. But this runs together two
different questions. First, what grounds the relevant aesthetic differences
between theatrical performances and films? The answer is that the former
are live in a third sense – they unfold in real time without the possibility of
revisions. Second, what distinguishes theatrical performances from live tel-
evision broadcasts of theatrical performances? The answer is that the latter