Draft 1
24.1.2018, Helsinki. Methodological pluralism -seminar. Performing Arts Research Center Tutke, Theatre Academy.

Introducing the concept of audience, the practice of drafting and the medium of prints


The studies at the Performing Arts Research Center in Helsinki are structured so that there were about two years worth of supporting studies: seminars and courses, which are scheduled to happen during one week each month of the semester. In these seminars doctoral candidates approach different aspects of artistic research, meet each other and present their work. During the autumn of 2017 I was intensely working my way into the context of academic artistic research through these seminars and at the same time orienting myself to the phenomenon of the audience by attending a set of performances that had an influence on my approach.


Amor Fati by Ami Karvonen and Anni Puolakka gave a strong affective, empathetic and multisensory experience in an intimate amphitheatre-type of setting. It was obvious that we as an audience were bodily involved in the work, without the need to explicitly perform anything. Performance Art in the spirit of Kalervo Palsa by Maximilian Latva, Katri Kainulainen, Antti Ahonen and Arttu Kurttila was dark humoured intermedial and intertextual homage and made me aware of how rare it is in the context of art to explicitly reference other art. The Actress and Channelling by Outi Condit exemplified a dense and meticulous texture of artistic practice, discursive thinking and experimentation. Condit’s works were inspirational to me as an artistic researcher, showing what kind of intense thinking could be possible within this context. Sleeping Beauty by the Reality Research Center’s Julius Elo and Xana offered a private, erotic and intimate yet artistic encounter between a sole performer and a sole audience member, along with an explicit negotiation about the rules of the situation and an aftercare session. It stretched the convention of a non-performative default audience function: the audience was offered plenty of agency in the encounter with the performer, and at the same time, it was still possible to stay passive, explicitly passive as if pretending to sleep, while the performer would approach you much more intimately than they ever do. Blab by Sonja Jokiniemi was also an intermedial performance, interwining dance and visual arts, making me aware of the genre-relatedness of conventions. And last but not least, the Skolt Sámi Village Council Sijdsååbbar by Pauliina Feodoroff invited audience members to witness an actual village council meeting. With this decolonial gesture it set a new level for what collective could mean in the context of performance. The long-term dedication to land, to an actual local ecosystem, which was evident in the meeting, helped me to become aware of the persistent disconnection that suddenly seemed omnipresent in the context were I worked. A disconnection from the basic resources of life that enable the development of any culture.


While it is impossible to trace the effects of these works on mine in detail, the terrain that they exemplify in combination, is noteworthy. Intermediality, referentiality, intensity, intimacy, expanded discursivity, collectivity, paying homage and, eventually, the materiality of the land below us would prove to be key elements of my research practice.


One of the seminars I attended during the first year of my doctoral studies was Methodological Pluralism led by Leena Rouhiainen and Kirsi Heimonen. During this series of seminars the participants took turns in presenting their research project from the point of view of methodology. In January 2018 it was my turn. I started my presentation by handing out programme notes in the form of a folded A4-sheet. The reading of this sheet was followed by a practical exercise and a lecture presentation of my methodological thoughts at the time. This small piece of paper with only few words in it turned out to introduce several methods that would permeate my research practice to come.

 


M O T I F S

 

T h e   t e r m   a n d   t h e   p h e n o m e n o n   o f   a u d i e n c e


When I submitted the last version of my application for doctoral studies in February 2017, I still used the terms spectator and spectatorship as central terms of my research plan, even if I had problematized them already at that point. In this experiment, which became the starting point of my draft series, I began using the term audience. Both these terms had the advantage that they were widely used and my readers or audiences would thus understand, which phenomenon I was referring to. The negative side of such wide usage is that the terms are used in multiple ways, all of which might not fit my needs. I switched to audience mostly because of its collective nature—it contained a tension between the singular and the plural. By using the term audience I could also avoid the emphasis of the sense of vision, which was not my interest.


In early 2018 I rewrote my research plan, switching spectator/ship to audience. Another issue was, what would I label audience, what would be the perspective to this concept. In the second draft, I wrote that I am posing the audience as a question. Later during the spring 2018, through being inspired by Michel Foucault’s concept of author function (Foucault 2000), I started calling audience a function. By 2019, now having read Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition (Arendt 2017) I referred to it as a condition. When working in a phenomenological research cell in 2019 (Drafts 11 & 14) I changed perspective again and started to use the term phenomenon. During spring 2020 the word travelled also into my research plan and I still use it at the time of composing this commentary.


By changing the central terms, also the phenomenon (sic) under investigation altered. Instead of spectatorship, which is a more abstract concept, and the spectator, who is an individual, an audience is a group of attendees. Prioritizing a collective at the expense of an individual anticipated the problematics regarding the modern subject, which would surface later.

The motif of audience continues here  —>


L i m i n o i d   d r a m a t u r g y

 

The liminoid is a concept by anthropologist Victor Turner, referring to an altered state of experience, which has kinship with the states induced by transitional rites but is not as intense and transformative. I did not yet at this point have even a faint idea of what I would later name the motif of liminoid dramaturgy, even if I was familiar with Turner’s conceptualization of liminality in transitional rituals and the three-part process required for it. Regardless of the lack of a conscious link to ritual theory, I intuitively used a three-part structure (see the next photograph below) anticipating the compatibility of my research experiments with the structure of a liminal ritual process articulated by Turner. In Turner’s (and Arnold van Gennep’s, from whom Turner borrowed the idea) theory a person going through a transitional rite, for example a ritual marking the transition from childhood to adulthood, would go through a preliminal phase, separating them from the everyday and their community, a liminal state, which is outside of the everyday and enables transformations, and a postliminal phase of re-joining the community and the everyday as its transformed member. (Turner 2007, 106-110; van Gennep 1960, 20-21) Later I would also discover the term liminoid, which would be even more appropriate for my purposes than liminality itself.


With liminoid dramaturgy I mean the structure, in which the three phases follow each other in specific order, and its usage in art experiences. While the structure of the liminoid experience is apparently temporal, it can be constructed with different tools, for example temporally, spatially, rhetorically, relationally and so on. The linearity of the structure itself is contrasted by the malleable temporality of liminoid experiences.

The motif of liminoid dramaturgy continues here  —>

 


M e t h o d s

 

Drafting & iteration


With the subtitle “Draft 1”, I suggested that this was something unfinished, an act of sketching something that might be realized in its readiness some time in the future. This was something I used also in my pedagogical practice, asking the students to perform a series of performance drafts. Drafting is a way of transferring some of the focus from the end product into the process, while still holding on to the act of showing something, to placing something before an audience. It also suggests a research-oriented practice of experimentation, in which the experiment works as source material for the next, enhanced experiment. In the jargon of Finnish performing arts, work-in-progress outcomes are often called “demos” (short for demonstration).


Later, I would articulate that I am “drafting the audience” and inviting the reader to take part in this drafting. That phrase had a double meaning. I suggested that the participants would draft a temporary bodily entity specific to that moment, a way to realize the concept of audience in flesh. This proposal held the idea that the form that the audience takes is not given. On the other hand, I was also drafting the meanings that the concept of audience could have—a definition of audience.


Drafting would also extend to the more theoretical levels of my research. I started to build different versions of a theoretical model that would describe the phenomenon of audience (in Drafts 3 and 12 as well as in the examined artistic parts) and approach these versions as drafts of a theory.


In addition to drafting, the subtitle contained a serial number: "Draft 1". When making this gesture, I did not yet acknowledge its consequences. By naming it number 1, I set myself a fateful future of working with a series of experiments, that would all be influenced by the properties of this first in the series.

 

Intermediality in esitystaide/beforemance art


The event fell into the genre of seminar presentations due to the context. Through the use of the programme printout, I superimposed on it the genre of theatre performances, where these kinds of programmes were used widely. Thirdly, when the participant opened the folded paper by turning the page, they saw another piece of text, listing the contents of the presentation. In this table of contents I used the term paragraph to refer to the three parts or sections of the presentation. This superimposed one more genre, that of literature or writing. The presentation thus proposed that in addition to a conference presentation, it can be viewed as a theatre performance or as expanded writing.


Intermedial practices that stretch across genre boundaries have been an important part of the development of the genre of esitystaide/beforemance art (on intermedia, see Chapter 1.3). A transfer from director-led theatre to more collective working methods, in which different areas of performance design and their experts engage in collaborative and even-handed dialogue, has affected how conventions of theatre have been reformulated. Lighting designer and artistic researcher Tomi Humalisto has used the term shared design (my translation from Fin. jaettu suunnittelu) to describe the leakage of traditional professional roles into each other (Humalisto 2012, 107-119). Collective working methods and shared design practices have evoked intermedial artworks, which in turn require ways of audiencing not defined by any single genre of art. Appropriate examples of this are many works of the artist collective Wauhaus, whose collective practice is explicitly intermedial and based on a horizontal power structure. As different disciplines invoke different kinds of audience bodies, superimpositions and entanglements of genres of art invoke unconventional audience bodies, which took place for example in their stage piece sky every day.


The audience of sky every day attend a theatre, but when the show begins, the first act unfolds as a 15-minute three-channel video work. In between the acts, a string trio performs Kaija Saariaho's Cloud Trio (2009) and the second act is an audio play through staged speakers. Then the string trio return to play a second part of Cloud Trio, and so on. Seemingly, the audience is as if any normative audience sitting in an auditorium. But through intermedial gestures of the piece, their position is contingent. As it is not the same thing to be an audience for a video artwork as it is to attend a contemporary music concert, we as an audience need to re-adjust our orientation several times during the piece, through which a unique audience experience is created. (sky every day 19.9.2023)


Similarly, the superposition of reading and attending a live performance, a gesture that continues throughout my research, aims to enable a reformulation of the collective audience body. As part of my methodology, an intermedial approach has enabled an experiential access to the similarities and differences in the formation of audience bodies in different genres of art. This has further led to my theorization of this formation and the role of performing arts in that frame. Intermediality has appeared especially as a superimposition of performance and literature, but further on the timeline of practice, also in combination to practices situated in the fields of fine arts and graphic design.


The medium of print: the program format

 

Programmes consisting of single folded A4-pages have been used especially on the local “free” scene of theatre and contemporary dance, where budgets are small and multi-color booklets are considered too expensive, but the artists want to share some info about the work in print. In the context of Finnish theatre, programmes like this became popular in early 20th century and started to expand to small booklets in the late 1920s (Arkadia Theatre 15.9.2024).  The 21st century programmes often contain credits and some introductory words from the director or the group. During 2020s this convention has started to change as event organizers have begun to use web-based digital programmes, accessible via QR-codes, instead of a printed one. The printed programme might be obsolete in a few years.

 

I wanted to use the programme, since it “framed” the performance itself with written language. In the genre of post-dramatic theatre and not-text-based contemporary performance it was the element that offered a link between the discursive and the live. It was also an underrated artistic gesture, usually used in a very conventional way. I had already early in my career started to think of it as a meaningful dramaturgical element (see Renunciation) and now, in the context of academia, it seemed even more relevant.

 

The programme had a simple structure: an outside and an inside, requiring the act of opening, of turning the page, from the audience member. I would continue using the programme format in Drafts 2, 4 and 5 and also in the second examined artistic part, the Audience Body.


Contextualization: discursive references in artistic works


The title “audience function” was inspired by Foucault’s lecture What Is an Author (Foucault 2000). Foucault proposes that an author is not primarily a person, but a function created by a cultural need (Foucault's text is addressed also in Chapter 2.1). I had started to wonder if there was something we could call an audience function and if I could continue the thought where Foucault had left it. This motif re-emerges and is further elaborated in Draft 4.

 



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Draft 2  —>

 

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