A living moment, revisited

Recently I’ve been doing something I never used to be able to do. After attending a great theatre or concert or dance performance, I look online afterward, and I usually find an excerpt of that performance somewhere on YouTube. I’m sure most of these recordings are illegal, but there you are.

The videos on YouTube, which are usually of inferior quality (bad lighting, worse sound) don’t really stand on their own. But if you’ve seen the live performance, they take you back to the excitement of the moment, when you saw Placido Domingo or Sutton Foster or Yo Yo Ma or Nellie McKay — the sense of excitement in the audience as everyone realized there was something magical going on this particular evening.

I wonder whether somewhere in here is the answer to the “reality versus cyberspace” debate, for here is a case where the power of the internet to archive and preserve is perfectly meshed with the ability of live performance to capture a living moment.

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