New dissertation in Theatre and Performance Studies
Leo Marko has defended his doctoral thesis Live Sense: Rethinking Liveness through Zeami’s Concept of the Flower.
Illustration: Oliver Habbe
When sense is made it is not making sense.
When something is live it’s the real thing, in real time. But it’s hard to draw a line between what is live and not. In this study, Leo Marko suggests that liveness is primarily about how things are experienced. A live sense is a sense of the situated, aesthetic and undefinable nature of things. This perspective is developed through a critical discussion of current scholarship on liveness joined with an exploration of Zeami’s 15th century treatises on nō theatre. Zeami’s understanding that the “flower” depends on secrets becomes a key to articulating a crucial connection between the live and the ineffable. By considering an eclectic range of phenomena from nō to Darth Vader and pop lyrics, these ideas are put into motion and expanded. In this way, Live Sense presents a productive approach to the question of liveness and encourages us to embrace meaning as fundamentally dynamic and ambiguous.
