Live Liturgy: Worship, Technology and Performance

This lecture uses tools from Theatre and Performance Studies to examine the questions which arose during the COVID-19 pandemic around the role of place, liveness, and mediation in Christian worship. It traces the history of the 'antitheatrical prejudice' in the Christian church, from the Church Fathers through major figures of the Reformation, to the present day. It then draws on work by Matthew L. Pierce to think about why certain forms of liturgy might 'feel like a performance,' suggesting that this has as much to do with familiarity as with any inherent quality to any particular act of worship. After this, it begins to look at liturgy from the perspective of performance studies, acknowledging that the liturgy has always developed in conjunction with the advent of new technologies. It draws on Philip Auslander's discussion of 'liveness' and how liveness is not an ontological concept but dependent on contemporary technologies of reproduction. Liveness promises to remove the distance between performer and spectator but can never do so. The final section of the paper considers the question of 'presence' in relation to the digital, the embodied, and the eucharistic. It concludes in a slightly polemical mode, that the Eucharist is /not/ live, in Auslander's sense, because in the reception of the eucharist achieves the removal of distance which liveness promises but can never achieve.