The differences among film, video, and live performance are distinctive peculiarities in the technology of the recording and playback apparatuses. The recording and playback apparatus that the actor constitutes is both more sophisticated and more idiosyncratic than its electronic counterparts.

The recording and playback apparatus of the human actor is more fallible, more vulnerable to error, more subject to variation as the recording process, accomplished in the repetition of rehearsal, works upon the complex psychic and neurological systems of the human body. When theatrical performance incorporates both live performance and technologically generated images of human figures and when the integration of the previously recorded and the presently performed constitutes part of the performance, that combination heightens an awareness that the live performance is subject to the same kind of predetermination as the technologically performed. The interaction of the human actor and the technologically represented actor exposes that both constitute technologies that function to recover artistic material previously generated. The stability of the technologically produced record demands that the actor approximate its predetermined rhythms.

The spectator plays a kind of game, exercising the illusion that the actions of the actor are spontaneously generated, immediate, original (rather than a repetition of the past), but the spectator is almost always self-consciously aware that this performance is one in a serial sequence of performances: it is not an original but a reproduction. This reproductive process, in essence, is the activity the technology of film and video imitates and appropriates. In the theater’s use of various forms of playback, the nature and quality of the transmitting medium is significant. My aesthetic experience is formed by the artifact produced by the technology of the acting or the technology of the film or video. My claim here is that the theatrical artifact is, almost always, an embodiment of the past in a complex process of imperfect recovery. If my assertion is true, the activity of performance uses the presence of the actor as both the site of the recovered past and the instrument of its return, a phenomenon that tends to erase the presence of the actor as a discrete subject with which I share space and time. I need to stop sentimentalizing my notion of the actor in humanistic claims and see that the actor is merely one technological device among others. The significant presence in which performance plays is always the consciousness of the spectator whether the stimulus to that image production is the empirical reality of the actor, video, film, or an interaction among media. I can, of course, celebrate the potential of the technology of acting to excite compelling aesthetic images within the spectator’s imagination–a potentiality that is justification enough to continue supporting the practice of live performance in this age of its mediatized counterparts.