The desacralized aura of live performance

Aura is the power that radiates from a work and seizes us, and it is also what places us in a position of being dominated by it. The digital has shifted that aura from the original to its reproduction, and in doing so has desacralized the moment of live performance. To lose the aura is not to lose the importance. I want to say why this is good news, and how one can make something of it in one’s practice.

What Benjamin held against aura

Walter Benjamin is often quoted for a simple claim, that the original of a work possesses an aura, a unique presence tied to its place and its moment, and that technical reproduction, photography, cinema, destroys that aura by multiplying copies. This is true, but to stop there is to make him say the opposite of what he defended.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), Benjamin does not mourn the loss of aura, he welcomes it. Aura, for him, is not a neutral quality; it gives the work a cultic function, inherited from ritual and the sacred, and that function places whoever looks at it in a position of being dominated. The auratic work carries authority, it imposes a distance, it demands deference. Benjamin writes at a moment when he sees this power serving the aestheticization of politics by fascism, and that is why he takes the side of cinema, an art that has far less aura, precisely, and that in return allows a freer, more collective, more democratic appropriation of works.

It is worth pausing on what this appropriation means, because that is where everything is decided. A work that has lost its aura does not lose its reach, it gains a reach of another kind. As long as it functions as a cult object, one stands before it, admires it, receives it. Once it is stripped of aura, one can take hold of it, comment on it, extend it, express oneself through it, and in this way become a little more oneself. Reproducibility, in his eyes, tears art away from its cult and makes it available for everyone’s use. What is lost in sacred presence is gained in the power of appropriation, and that power is worth, for Benjamin, far more than the deference one gives up.

He had, moreover, seen further. Cinema, he observed, has no original; the cinematic work is its own reproduction, it exists only in copies, without this stripping it of its force. Aura was therefore already, for him, no longer the condition of a work’s power.

The reversal the digital brought about

I lived through an experience that forced me to take up this question for myself. With participants in a workshop, we had made collages, small, fragile, made of cut paper. We digitized them with care, then projected them very large onto a wall. It was at that moment, in the projected reproduction, and not in the object lying on the table, that the works became charged with power, to the point that their makers wanted to take care of them, to exhibit them, to compose music from them. The aura was not in the original. It was in its digital reproduction.

What this reversal reveals is that Benjamin’s terms have been inverted. In his time, what founded the aura was the original, the painting hung in its place, and it was that original that dominated, that functioned as a cult. Today, what legitimizes a work, what makes it exist in everyone’s eyes, is no longer the original but its digital circulation. The digital is no longer a tool of reproduction set alongside the real, it has become one of our milieus of existence; our identity, our relationships, our traces pass through it. A work that enters this space is not copied there, it comes into being there. The digital reproduction of a fragile collage is the moment when that collage becomes public, shareable, inscribed in the world we inhabit.

It is now reproduction that legitimizes, and therefore reproduction that occupies the place the original held in Benjamin’s day. The sacred has changed sides. And one must follow Benjamin to the end of his logic to measure what this implies, for if aura is what dominates, then today it is digital reproduction that dominates, and the original that is relieved of it.

Live performance no longer has to pretend to an aura

It is here that the question reaches the theatre, and takes an unexpected turn. Live performance is the art that has clung most to its aura, and for good reasons in appearance, since its heart is co-presence, bodies gathered in a shared space, now, and nowhere else. From this comes a reaction one often meets, the refusal to record, to broadcast, to share, as though any digital mediation betrayed the essence of theatre and profaned the unique moment of the performance.

What the reversal I have just described suggests is that this moment has already been desacralized, not by artists but by the displacement of the sacred toward the digital. Live performance is no longer the site of the aura, because the aura has settled elsewhere. And rather than lament this, I believe one must seize it, because it is a liberation. When a thing no longer has to function as a cult, one can at last practice it for what it is, without having to maintain the prestige that kept it at a distance.

I know that in saying this I go against a received idea, the one that would have the value of live performance lie in its sacred, irreplaceable character, in that surplus of soul that no recording could restore. But that surplus of soul was also what placed the audience in a position of deference, before legitimate artists and a work that had to be admired without being questioned. Desacralization removes that overhang. It removes nothing from the encounter; it removes the cult that weighed on it.

A bond woven around an object

What remains then, once the aura has gone, is another kind of relation. Live performance ceases to be an auratic work set before spectators who receive it, and becomes a bond woven between people around a shared artistic object. Cultural rights and participatory approaches have long worked at this shift, replacing the transmission of a legitimate work to an audience presumed to be lacking with the construction of a space where everyone, with their own culture and their own ways of seeing, takes part in what is happening.

Theatrical performance adds to this something I do not find elsewhere. By placing us explicitly within a staging, it makes us aware that we are making a representation, and through this that our everyday life is another one, which we had forgotten to see as such. I have developed this awareness in relation to the link between theatre and life (Theatre and life), and to the displacement a performance can bring about in those it gathers, on the stage as in the house (De-coincidence). What live performance is capable of has never rested on its aura, but on what is transformed between the people present, the audience as much as the artists, and that, no reproduction legitimizes or replaces.

Replacing aura with experience

It remains to say how one works with this, in a practice. The shift I am describing is not only an analysis, it is a choice of posture that changes the way one prepares, performs and welcomes.

A comparison with the classroom makes it concrete. A teacher can hold their class through a form of aura, obtained by domination: whoever speaks is punished, whoever disturbs the adult’s power is punished, and the silence one obtains is the silence of deference. Another teacher builds conditions in which the pupils know that, through what is about to happen in this moment, they will live something that will enrich them, and know too that the teacher will come out of it enriched in turn. From the outside, the two classrooms can look alike, attentive pupils and an adult who leads. They are nonetheless two almost opposite dynamics. In the first, an authority dominates; in the second, an experience is lived and shared.

It is this substitution that I propose for live performance. In the place of aura, which is domination in Benjamin’s sense, put lived experience. One goes somewhere because one knows one will feel strong things, that one may be transformed, and that what unfolds that evening will be unique, because the people present will be gathered in this configuration only once. This uniqueness no longer rests on the sacred aura of the moment, it rests on the real encounter. And it is because there is no longer a dominating aura that this experience can take place.

It will be objected that the digital allows this too, since on social networks people comment, appropriate, create in their turn. This is true. What confers aura today is digital reproduction, but this does not forbid investing, in that space as well, dynamics of bond and appropriation. Already in Benjamin’s day, artists conceived exhibitions and performances by working to undo their aura, so that something would play out in the bonds rather than in deference. This is desirable everywhere, and it is in live performance that it can unfold most fully, because the people are truly together there.

It still requires that those who do this accept that posture, and that is where a concrete difficulty lies. One meets, in live performance, artists who experience themselves as superior, and who, when someone comes to speak to them, take no interest in that person. Everyone has a right to their private life, and whoever is besieged by a crowd of course has the right to withdraw. But when a person comes toward us, it is because there is a meaning to their coming, and one can learn to receive it, to convey that in the bond being woven there, we meet and connect. It is not a bond of admiration in which one would expect to be contemplated. When an artist needs to be validated by admiration, often for reasons that have to do with ego or with lack, they seek to maintain their aura, hence their domination, and make everyone miss the experience that could have transformed them. To give up the aura is also to give up that demand.

Recording without profaning

There remains the concrete question of recording, which is then no longer a betrayal to be feared but a gesture to be thought through. There are very different ways of recording a performance, and the choice of one or another is never neutral. A recording made with the care one would bring to digitizing a fragile collage does not claim to give access to the performance; it keeps a trace of it, one that circulates, that reaches people who were not there, and that creates the desire to be there next time. It does not cancel the value of presence, it places it where it belongs, on the side of the encounter and not on the side of the cult.

To think this through requires yielding neither to defensive resistance, which sacralizes a moment the digital has already desacralized, nor to surrender to the logics of platforms, which would turn the performance into content. Between the two, there is work that the teams of live performance still largely have before them, and that begins, it seems to me, with this good news, that we no longer have an aura to defend, and therefore something to invent together.