Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol. 14, No. 1 1 Imperfections and Intimacies: Trebling Effects and the Improvisational Aesthetics of Pandemic-Era Livestreaming Laura Risk On March 10, 2020 Canadian banjo player Allison de Groot flew with her bandmates in the American roots trio Molsky’s Mountain Drifters to Oslo for the first show of a ten-day Norway- Sweden tour. Ten minutes after landing, they learned they were heading home. As de Groot posted on Facebook three days later: “That was a crazy 48 hrs. We left the US on Tuesday afternoon, and by the time we arrived in Oslo, our gigs had been cancelled.” In Québec and across Canada, as elsewhere, the live performing arts disappeared overnight following the World Health Organization’s declaration of the Novel Coronavirus (COVID -19) pandemic. Theatres, clubs, bars, dance halls, and community venues closed their doors in tandem with hair salons, restaurants, and garden centres. While these latter spaces have gradually reopened (albeit in accordance with strict public health guidelines), as of July 2020 1 there had been little to no equivalent reopening for the live performing arts. A handful of venues have experimented with reduced seating and some bands are performing at drive-in movie parks, such as at the Ciné-Parc Châteauguay in Mercier, Québec and the Théâtre Ciné-Parc Royalmount in Montréal (Thibault; “Royalmount Drive-In Event Theatre”). But Montréal’s legendary Casa del Popolo has turned to selling posters, art prints, jewelry, and stationary, and the Oliver Jones House of Jazz, also in Montréal, closed for good in June (Sigler; Bourgault- Côté “Le jazz”). Some spring tours were rebooked for the fall, but even that timeframe soon came to seem unrealistic. When Le Devoir profiled four “new faces of unemployment” in early April, the first was a freelance musician (Bourgault-Côté “Christian Leclair”). Online performance has moved, ostensibly, to fill the void, backed in Canada by a call from both national and provincial funding agencies for artists to reinvent themselves along digital lines. The Canada Council for the Arts and CBC/Radio-Canada launched a $1 million Digital Originals program in April 2020 to “help the country's arts community pivot work to online audiences” (“CBC/Radio-Canada”). In Québec, the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec (CALQ) offered new funding for “diffusion de spectacles vivants” and made its Exploration et déploiement numérique program accessible year-round (“Plan de relance économique”). This governmental largesse focuses on new creative projects to be shared with the public in a digital space and although some artists and cultural workers have refused to go gently into this new world—as playwright and theatre director Olivier Kemeid wrote in a widely-shared letter, “Non, le numérique n’est pas la panacée des arts vivants”—public health considerations suggest that the arts sector may have little choice. As Zeke Emanuel, Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and Co- Director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, noted in an April 2020 interview, large gatherings such as concerts “will be the last to retur n. Realistically, we’re talking fall 2021 at the earliest” (Bazelon). In this article, I develop the concept of an improvisational aesthetic of imperfection and intimacy for “trebling-effect” pandemic-era livestreams, or webcasts where listeners may interact with each other (and possibly with the performer) during the stream via text chat. Following Auslander (“Digital Liveness”), who describes liveness as a “claim” made upon users by a technology, I argue that livestreams make a claim upon listeners not only to liveness, but also to the affective intensity of participating in a real-time exchange that offers the possibility of feeling heard, seen, and understood; livestreams, that is, make a claim as sites of human connection. I use the term “human connection” in full recognition of the fact that such connections are always