I’m told music, dance and theater are performing arts, distinguished from “plastic arts” in that the medium of expression is the (frequently augmented) human body moving in time, the realization inseparable from interpretation. While such distinctions continue to die the death of a thousand qualifications, I can’t help but wonder at what point the categories collapse entirely.

Widely available recorded performance complicates matters further. I love recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, but I heard Ella in person several times and Sarah not once. With both now gone, does that make a difference?

And where do words—poetry, fiction, and so on—fit into such a scheme? I can’t read the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks or Scott Cairns without hearing the poet’s voice. Is the work performed on the page, in the voice (remembered or present), or in my eyes, ears and brain? Let me know when you have the answer.

Such have been my thoughts since I heard Over the Rhine, my hometown band and longtime friends of IMAGE, play the opening concert for a new venue on the banks of the Ohio River. Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler chose as a set list their 2003 double album, Ohio, performed in sequence from song 1 through 21, with a short intermission between “disks” one and two.

To summarize: You should have been there. In between songs, the band seemed less chatty and more business-like than I’ve seen them before, but the album format required elaborate choreography of performers and stagehands, with the mix and number of instruments changing frequently. The resulting music was glorious.

Much of the audience knew the album by heart, but we understoood this was no slavish recreation, like some costumed tribute band duplicating Beatles 45s. From the moment Bergquist walked, alone, to the piano for the opening song, until the subdued trio version of the album’s concluding gospel number, the band engaged the work from where they are now, changed in and by the five years since the album was released. Ballads were less melancholy, politically-tinged pieces edgier, gospel songs more steadfast and yearning.

There’s much to be said for the uncontrollable surprises and glitches of live performance. Nothing gets adrenaline flowing quite so freely as playing in the face of imminent disaster, and performances are more fully alive when inherently dangerous: think of Charlie Parker’s bebop explosions or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony played to original metronome marks and with natural horns. Caught up in the moment, creativity burst from the stage, as when drummer Mickey Grimm, whose sensuous brushwork once again slew me, engaged percussionist Nick Radina in a complex and fiery song-ending, back-and-forth duet of drums, bells, cymbals and blocks.

So, when I listen to my CD of Ohio now, I hear it differently. Which performance—CD or show—is definitive?

Part of the problem with these metaphysical questions is that, in receiving any work of art (to use C. S. Lewis’ contested phrase), the receiver is a moving target. I’m continuous with, but not identical to, the Brian Volck who listened to Ohio straight from its cellophane wrapping. Last Saturday’s concert changed me. So have other life experiences. Each hearing is a new performance for a different audience. That’s one reason why we listen to some music over and over, and why we reread certain books.

The best performances—and here I’m thinking of reading as performance, too—alter us in the reception, though it may take some living to render us properly receptive. When I read Dante’s Divine Comedy at nineteen, it pleasantly fascinated me. When I read it again at thirty-five, I was deeply troubled that the poet was reinterpreting my life from the distance of seven centuries. Dante’s words refuse to stay on the page. They make a claim on me, dare me to live into that new reading.

For Jews and Christians, scripture is the unparalleled source of words refusing to stay on the page, especially words which poke the flesh like thorns: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” “Love your enemies,” “Take up your cross and follow me.” Such words dare us to become fully alive, playing in the face of imminent disaster. Steve Fowl and Greg Jones write eloquently of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s witness as “performing scripture,” and Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison is surely an encounter with someone fully alive. Bonhoeffer is a model of how, in our own lives, words can still become flesh.

In other ways, literature, music, images and movement dare us into risky performances, too. I hope you can come up with examples from your own life, but a single Over the Rhine concert may do as much for me. In any case, it’s time to get busy. As Karin Bergquist reminds us on the band’s latest album, “This ain’t no dress rehearsal.”