The Context is the Thing

WaPo classical music critic Anne Midgette brings up an overlooked point in performing arts criticism: does watching a truncated clip of a performance ultimately help or hurt the production?http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat/2010/06/video_killed_the_opera_product.html

he short video of the Achim Freyer staging that I posted at the end of the review gives you a kind of Cliff’s Notes version of what went on. It doesn’t, however, communicate any of the things I most liked about the production, which had to do with the use of physical space and the pacing -- things that had to do with the experience of being present, physically, in the room -- and I’m not sure the snapshots it affords are an adequate representation of its strengths.

Is watching clips of longer-length productions like reading an exerpt of a book, or listening to half a song? It might be worse, in fact, in that the spatial dimensions of the performance will be lost -- how an actor moves around a stage set, for instance, the resonance of the room, and the audience's reactions.