Entangling liveness : the embodied experience of youth-oriented live music events

This thesis is an ethnographic study of young people’s embodied experiences of youth-oriented live music events, including both festivals and single-headliner shows. The study draws on material generated through semi-structured interviews with twenty-one eighteen to thirty year olds, as well as my own experiences as a participant at live music events. The interconnected concepts of ‘embodiment’, ‘liveness’ and ‘entanglement’, are central to the analysis of this material, and are developed throughout the thesis. The works of both Drew Leder (1990) and Tim Ingold (2000, 2006) are utilised throughout the thesis to develop an understanding of the body as an open and dynamic entity always enmeshed with its environment. This understanding of the body-in-the-world allows for the concept of liveness to be extended and developed. Embodied experiences of liveness are multisensory, but also involve the corporeal depths and are triggered or enabled through attendees’ interactions with the live environment. Drawing from the work of Paul Sanden (2013), which discusses liveness as a fluid and complex concept, the thesis argues that liveness involves a fleeting, shifting and dynamic entanglement between body and environment that produces, enables and shapes the embodied experience of young people at youth-oriented live music events. The embodied experience of liveness involves an ongoing and dynamic process through which things, forces and feelings momentarily combine, clash or coalesce. Attendees actively and purposefully negotiate or re-negotiate elements of their entanglements, such as their body-technic relationship, to enable or reconfigure the experience of liveness. Karen Barad’s (2007) work develops the concept of entanglement and is used through the thesis to explore entanglements as always involving the active emergence of bodies and things, both human and non-human. At live music events a transient and shifting entangling occurs, and the embodied experiences of attendees are pulled, at times powerfully, into their attention. During such moments the body, the environment, and their entwinement are felt. Utilising Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson and Helen Owton’s (2015,p.247) notion of ‘intense embodiment’, it is suggested that attendees can experience moments of intense entanglement. Attendees attune to the dynamic aspects of their environment in these moments and at live music events, such dynamism can include the constantly shifting atmosphere. These atmospheric shifts shape, colour, and texture the experience of liveness and draw attention to the continuous movement of music, emotion, affect, bodies, weather and other things that entangle to produce live music events. Such movements also occur through the research process and in particular through interviews, as the inter-affective atmosphere and inter-corporeal experiences of the interview shift, intensify and diminish. The concepts of diffraction and intra-action are central to Barad’s discussion of entanglement and as demonstrated through the work of Lisa Mazzei (2014), Barad’s work has important methodological applications as it forces the reconsideration of the position and role of the researcher, understandings of data and how that data is generated. Here, the concepts of entanglement and intra-action are used to explore the methodological development of this research that unfolded not as a linear progression but instead as a messy meshing and tangling of things, thoughts and feelings. The interwoven concepts of entanglement, liveness and embodiment are therefore central to both the research topic and the research process