“Maybe I Can Land on his Feet ?” Multiple Agencies in the Preparation of a Show DVD from its Live Capture

If audiovisual representations of large live performances and their narrative codes are easily recognized by their viewers, their socio-technical organization and the technicians’ work who perform these tasks are much less known. The article reports on the activities of a television crew in charge of the production of the live recording and the DVD of a large-scale performance. It follows the details of coordination work between participants who are sometimes distant both spatially and temporally and whose homogeneity cannot be presupposed from the outset without erasing their meticulous articulations. Organized around a specific episode, the treatment of a problem (the technical failure of an element of the show) visible in the live performance and then in the editing of the DVD, it explores the details of the interactions –and in particular the modalities of addresses used by the participants –during the resolution of this problem. We show that in this situation, the reworkings and reconstitutions of the work of others sometimes constitute entanglements and sometimes clear distinctions of the roles and places of each participant.