Live performances involve complex interactions between a large number of co-present people. Performance has been defined in terms of these performer-audience dynamics, but little is known about how they work. A series of live performance experiments investigate these dynamics, through teaching a humanoid robot some stagecraft, contrasting live and recorded performance, and spotlighting the audience. This requires the development of methods capable of capturing the fleeting responses of people within an audience and making sense of the resulting massed multi-modal data. The results show that in live events interaction matters. Extending the idea that our experience of performance is shaped by interactions with others, namely by talking with people afterwards, analogous social patterns are identified within the event. Specifically, some of the interactional dynamics well established for close, dyadic encounters extend to performers and audience members, despite the somewhat anonymised nature of massed audiences. While individual performer-audience effects were identified, the primary axis of social interaction is shown to be between audience members. This emphasises how it is being in an audience - common across diverse performance genres - that shapes the experience of live events. This work argues that the term liveness is ill-defined, but need not be. These interactional dynamics have a functional basis and depend solely on what is externally manifest. Understanding liveness in this way allows a perspicuous account - relating the perceptual environment within the event to the social contingency of experience - and can provide a systematic basis for design.

This paper describes the process of evaluating an audience engagement tool developed by a company called Stagecast. It is evaluated using the system usability scale, which is a common and simple way of measuring the usability of an application. The process starts with developing a feedback moment for the application that includes questions from the system usability scale. The application is then first tested in a laboratory setting with the feedback moment launched after an event, and second, it is tested in a real live event. The results in this paper indicate that the overall satisfaction with the Stagecast application was average, based on scoring of previous usability tests, with a score of 65.96 for the SMASK live event, though the participation in the feedback moment was limited. / Den här rapporten beskriver processen för utvärderandet av en produkt för att engagera publiken under live event som utvecklats av företaget Stagecast. Produkten är utvärderad med hjälp av system usability scale (SUS), vilket är ett vanligt och simpelt sätt att mäta användarvänlighet för applikationer. Processen börjar med att utveckla en feedback moment för applikationen som innehåller frågor från system usability scale. Applikationen är sedan testad i en studio där feedbackmoment lanseras efter eventet. Steg nummer två är att lansera feedbackmoment efter ett live event. Resultaten i den här rapporten indikerar att generella tillfredsställelsen med Stagecast applikationen var medel, baserat på en sammanställning av tidigare undersökningar med SUS. Poängen blev 65.96 för SMASK eventet, men deltagandet i feedbackmoment var begränsat.