{"id":508,"date":"2022-06-09T19:19:23","date_gmt":"2022-06-09T19:19:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/25\/?p=508"},"modified":"2026-06-19T07:16:54","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T07:16:54","slug":"but-how-will-they-know-its-live-anonymous-ensembles-digital-performances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/25\/but-how-will-they-know-its-live-anonymous-ensembles-digital-performances\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cBut How Will They Know It\u2019s Live?\u201d: Anonymous Ensemble\u2019s Digital Performances"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jessica Del Vecchio<\/strong>*<\/a> and Eamonn Farrell<\/strong>**<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

As opportunities for in-person performances were rendered impossible by the COVID-19 pandemic, institutions and artists lamented the loss of those things that \u201cmake theatre theatre\u201d\u2014its liveness, its anything-can-happen quality, its ability to assemble audiences to experience something together in real time. Artists made digital work and often demonstrated a desire to replicate these sensations of liveness for audiences as a way of showing off the virtuosity of the artists involved and, perhaps more importantly, as a means of inspiring a sense of connection in audiences across the internet. As evidence for this phenomenon, this essay explores the work of video designer Eamonn Farrell and his company Anonymous Ensemble, a group that presented live performance to remote audiences long before the pandemic forced artists across the world online.

Keywords:<\/strong> digital performance, online performance, video design, Anonymous Ensemble, Eamonn Farrell<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, theatre companies across the world adapted their work for digital platforms. Audience members gathered, not in physical theatres, but in Zoom<\/em> rooms and on streaming platforms such as YouTube<\/em>, Vimeo<\/em>, and Facebook Live<\/em> to watch work made miles and miles away. This shift from the physical to the digital realm raises questions unasked of in-person theatre; when audiences are not in the same room as the artists, they are prompted to wonder if the work they are watching is really live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Viewed through a screen from the comfort of an audience member\u2019s own home, a live-streamed performance becomes compellingly indistinguishable from a pre-recorded one. An archived performance that retains its \u201cLive\u201d label when streaming on YouTube<\/em> might convince an audience member that what they are seeing is happening in real time. Audiences awed at a production\u2019s cinematic effects might assume what they are watching has been pre-recorded and edited. If the perception of liveness matters to the production team, they must find a means by which to signal their production\u2019s liveness to their audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the liveness often does matter to the production team, to the actors and to the audience. As opportunities for in-person performances were rendered impossible by the pandemic, institutions and artists lamented the loss of those things that \u201cmake theatre theatre\u201d\u2014its liveness, its anything-can-happen quality, its ability to assemble audiences to experience something together in real time. Artists made digital work and often demonstrated a desire to replicate these sensations of liveness for audiences as a way of showing off the virtuosity of the artists involved and, perhaps more importantly, as a means of inspiring a sense of connection in audiences across the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As evidence for this phenomenon, this essay explores the work of video designer Eamonn Farrell and his company Anonymous Ensemble, a group that presented live performance to remote audiences long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced artists across the world online. A collaboration between Farrell and performance scholar Jessica Del Vecchio, this essay functions as an interview, an archive, and an analysis; a hybrid piece of writing that we hope illuminates the complexities of digital performance as an artform as it makes an argument about internet performance\u2019s unique ability to bring disparate audiences together in real time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Brooklyn-based experimental company Anonymous Ensemble (AnEn) has been making theatre together for twenty years. Their goal as artists is to \u201ccreat[e] community wherever we are and . . .  ask how the audience can be co-creators of each performance event\u201d (anonymousensemble.org). Since the early 2000s\u2014before the existence of Zoom<\/em>, YouTube<\/em>, or even Facebook<\/em>\u2014Eamonn Farrell, Jessica Weinstein, Liz Davito and Lucrecia Brice\u00f1o have experimented with digital performance as both an aesthetic and a medium.[1]<\/sup><\/a> In works such as The Best <\/em>(2003\u201308), The Return <\/em>(2010\u201311), LIEBE LOVE AMOUR! <\/em>(2012\u201318) and, more recently, Flight <\/em>(2019\u201322) and Llontop <\/em>(2020\u201322), AnEn has used media in increasingly sophisticated ways. In their in-person performances, they call attention to the intricacy of its live manipulation. In their online digital performances, however, the audience\u2019s perception is completely controlled by the camera view and limited to what the artists choose to show to them on screen. AnEn, therefore, needs to make the conscious choice to reveal their \u201cbackstage labor\u201d to their audience, and this reveal can sometimes ruin the magic of the performance. Rather than expose the mechanism, then, AnEn often finds other ways to ensure the audience knows that the performance is live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the proto-social media era, AnEn created a five-year-long transmedial internet project called The Best, <\/em>reaching audiences far and wide through forms such as the video podcast and using platforms such as Myspace<\/em>.<\/em> The episodes of The Best<\/em>, which combined ancient Greek narratives and American Idol<\/em>-esque aesthetics, followed a group of anti-war revolutionaries as they sang, danced and offered political opinions, competing for \u201chype\u201d from fictional online audiences. The project imagined a world in which a group of narcissistic online content creators became obsessed with accruing huge followings all over the world by posting videos online and live streaming musical performances\u2014all in the service of their somewhat vague political agendas. Shows featured a live rock band onstage and wildly deconstructed costumes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A response to the United States\u2019 2003 invasion of Iraq, The Best<\/em> was set in \u201cThe Homeland,\u201d a fictionalized country engaged in never-ending warfare. In the post-9\/11 New York City culturescape, these performances employed a dark, post-punk aesthetic to channel the anger and frustration at the notion that the city\u2019s own tragedy was being used as a pretext for engaging in unrelated wars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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