Judy Radul is recognized for her visual art, creative and critical writing. Her practice includes text, audio, video and installation works, performances and readings. Judy's work has been performed and exhibited across Canada, the USA and the Netherlands. She recently_ presented a pertormative talk entitled How Not to Act at Art Beatus Gallery, Vancouver.

Judy has been published in numerous publications and collections. She has two books, 'Character Weakness' and 'Rotating Bodies'. Judy is currently working on a series of photographs of fictional performances called Documents for Performance which will be shown at the Or Gallery, Vancouver in May 1998.

My thoughts about the live situation and its relation to my work are always shifting. Recently I have moved from a commitment to "live" performance to a rethinking of the parameters of the "live" situation.

What can or should be considered "live" is a philosophical question but wittingly (or unwittingly) it is also a question which performance engages with. Is the live situation best defined in terms of humans, sentient organisms, matter, conjunctions of time and place or an intensity of lived experience? What we accept as "live" structures a hierarchy between the live and the inanimate. It also structures our understanding of time. The present is alive, and dies with each passing moment. The death of not only the mortal body but of experience is something capitalist society uses to trigger a panoply of consumptive responses through anxiety. But, if, like many other cultures, we broaden our understanding of what is "live" or "alive" we may be able to work in the interstices of these hierarchies for an oppositional effect.

By complicating assumptions about "live-ness" we are able to engage with fundamental questions concerning existence. These are the questions being asked at the close of "the mechanical age" and the dawning of "the virtual age" (to use Rosanne Stone's provisional terminology). Media-such as radio, telephone, television, video, surveillance, film, photography, digital, virtual and cybernetic forms-provide variants to the traditional liveperformer-live-audience-same-place-same-time scenario. A film is not-live but it is not inanimate. In fact the animation of still images is its defining characteristic. Many things are like this; not "live" and yet not inanimate. If we talk on the telephone what degree of "live" is that? Playing the potentialities, the qualities, and the politics of these different "live" situations off each other seems more interesting than creating a special category of traditional live performance.

Brechtian distantiation works against the live moment in so far as the live moment presupposes our enmeshment within it. Distance is needed for analysis, too much closeness tends to produce immersive and manipulative scenarios. The twentieth century has been charted via the disappearance of distance (Jameson), similarly live "presence" in performance works against distance to provide a sense of immediacy, a tangible connection to the performer. Paradoxically, our present moment seems bereft of live performance - yet besieged by compulsory liveliness, presence and animation?!. Let me crassly overstate the point': we crave animation because we want to feel alive. We have a distrust of contemplation and things passive, and an overdeveloped belief in "action" and "dialog". Thus, even within the "live" there exists a split evidenced in the performative situation. The performer is seen to be more "lively" than the audience member because he or she is acting, doing, or talking. All the audience is "doing" is watching, listening, receiving, and contemplating. Even though the audience may number in the thousands (and the performer only one), it is not considered a live performance if the audience is live and the performer prerecorded or via satellite, as in a sports event. (Of course this also has to do with the aura of the performer, and the role of the unique performative object in the marketplace.) The rectifying of this "one way" situation has resulted in interesting audience-interactive performances, but these do little to rethink the hierarchy between pas I sive and active "liveliness" (what the ancients called vita contemplativa and vita activa).

Nothing disappoints like the live human body presented without lights, makeup, microphones etc. Extraordinary abilities of voice or body constitute a victory over the underwhelming presence of the average human, and this forms the subtext of much skill-based performance. Many of the performances I enjoy play upon this edge: the failiure of the live to appear lively!

The other night I saw a live performance by Vancouver artist Warren Arcan at Artspeak Gallery. For me, it was the essence of a live work which resists seduction by its own liveliness, its own presence. Warren was working in particular with resisting language as the mode of performative delivery. He substituted sound making in an attempt to break down the positions of performer/audience, I/you, through the physicality of sonic vibration. He was using the musician rather than the actor as a performative model. There was a great moment where Warren pulled a number of small stones out of his pockets and placed them on the floor as if they were the other "players". They remained inanimate and yet provided a looking back point - a reference- for the audience's and Warren's own presence. It's quite difficult to explain how a few rocks tumbling out onto a gallery floor could pose the question of "live" experience-but for me that is how they operated.

So today, in response to your question about the live performance situation, I am wondering how we work with the animations and spectacles of media culture which spill back into the live situation, thereby changing the nature of liveliness and its possibilities - not only by alternately rejecting, embracing and attempting to compete with these possibilities, but by radically contextualizing them through strategies such as muteness, in-animation and sound (a special liminal category of the animate/inanimate). Arcan's few rocks introduced the inanimate into the live situation, and, in producing no effect, simultaneously made the audience more aware of our own liveliness, while challenging our tendency to self absorption in that liveliness.