Mission Statement

Live Performance Matters (LPM) both describes an area of focus and advocates for the importance of live performance and research into it. Performance has long been central to how we make sense of our experience, nourish our emotional lives, build and sustain communities, and imagine otherwise. The category of liveness has a history too, linked to the invention of sound reproduction technologies in the late nineteenth century and the development of broadcasting systems in the 1920s. Its evolution is ongoing.  

Live performance continues to matter today – perhaps more than ever, in an era of accelerating mediatisation, AI, and poly-crisis, when the conditions for live, shared, embodied experience are being altered. We are living at a time in which those conditions are under pressure from multiple directions: the migration of social life onto screens, attention dispersal, challenges to public assembly, the erosion of public funding for the arts, and the existential weight of ecological and political emergency. In the UK, a wellbeing and mental health crisis – accompanied by high rates of young people not in education, employment, or training – makes engagement with live performance increasingly important as a resource for connection, shared experience, meaning-making, and resistance. That pressure, and that need, make the questions LPM asks both urgent and necessary.  

• Why does live performance matter now? 

• How does it matter – culturally, economically, socially, politically, personally? 

• How do the histories of live performance shape the present, and what might its futures be? 

• How does live performance document, resist, and/or embrace its own disappearance? 

• What affordances and complications do hybrid forms of live performance offer, and how do they reframe our understanding of in-person live encounters? 

• How does live performance build and sustain communities across places, languages, cultures, and contexts? 

• What are the ethical responsibilities of live performance – to its audiences, its subjects, and the world it inhabits? 

• How does live performance both shape and reveal what it means to be human and enable us to value that which is imperfect and ephemeral? 

• How does it help us to create imaginative experience between us, to share possibilities, to weather the stormy present, to imagine better futures, and to find new ways of being in the same world at the same time? 

LPM pursues these questions through a programme of events, collaborations, research publications, and public engagement. We host talks, performances, and discussions that bring research into dialogue with practice and with wider audiences. We support and showcase the work of researchers within and beyond the University of Exeter who are working on live performance in all its forms. We partner with arts organisations, educational institutions, venues, and communities to connect university research to the broader cultural life of which live performance is a vital part.