"In a live environment, the more bodies you put in a room, the more energy there will be. That's a real big payoff. That's really important, the live show, it's a big cycle of energy. If the audience is boring, it's tough to get excited about it."
-- Jay Reatard
There are different degrees of life in Live shows...
Oh, the energy, the freedom, the unchained spirit that rocks a dance hall... it's raw and fierce when released, it's a tribal urgency that seeps through the layers of super-ego slathered on top of the wild nature of humans.
Watching people on stage from the darkness of the rows is a totally different experience to that of watching TV or a movie, and closer to playing a roleplaying game. There's that fly-on-the-wall mermerising experience that probably also pushed people into watching "reality tv", but in person it's stronger than through a recording.
Going one step furhter and joining the performance has many levels. Partially, like in a show at Jubilations, where the actors move through the rows of spectators, and ocasionally pull them into the show. Deeper, fully immersed in a non-scripted, rule-bound game of roleplaying, where the audience is only the other players... up to the most memory-demanding but exhilarating privilege of being on stage oneself.
Standing in a crowd of people with similar focus is another deep and old human heartstring. That string vibrates with negative energy in riots and demonstrations, but is plucked positively by music.