2.4  Beforemance

As stated already before, the incompatibility of the terms performance and esitys (or their implications) have been acknowledged by scholars of the field since early 2000s—regardless of which they continue to function as each others translations in practice. For the purposes on my research, this terminological difference has been inspirational and I have felt it appropriate to adhere to the Finnish term. When using it in the midst of English text felt clumsy, I started to think of a word that could communicate its meaning into English. Thus I have used the neologism beforemance in its stead or as its amendment.

On locality and impurity

While esitystaide is a local term and I emphasize its locality in this research, it has not developed in isolation. By contrast, it can be seen as an offspring of the international, especially Euro-American, scene of performing arts, with some idiosyncratic features. Like the philosopher Tere Vadén argues, impurities and inauthenticity are necessary conditions for local thinking (Vadén 2006, 229). That said, Finland’s geographical location in the north-eastern corner of Europe has made the local context somewhat isolated. My experience of working as an artist in Helsinki-area for two decades depicts the local scene as being both international and on the margins of Europe. Discourses (even literacy itself) have arrived here with a delay, the effect of Finnish artists on the international discourse is minor and many high-quality works that have been developed here never get any attention beyond local circles. This often troubles professionals working in the field, but it has also fostered some originality in the art developed here. Even an offspring of imported contemporary art can become a distinctive genre in this cornered location.

In the previous chapter I articulated how the charged relationship between esitystaide and performance art contributed to the emergence of the former. However, esitystaide is even more often parallelled with the British genre of Live Art. My personal experience of the context of Live Art is minor and thus the following considerations are merely indicative, but it seems relevant to address the similarities and differences between it and the Finnish esitystaide scene. What seems to be common to the two scenes are experimental audience relations—if in theatre and traditional performance art audience relations are more or less conventional (even if audiences are complicit in genre-specific ways), in Live Art and esitystaide the ways audiences are included are subject to constant experimentation.

The British scene has emerged before, as larger, more diverse and inclusive than the Finnish one. Kira O’Reilly, who has experience of both, emphasizes the meaning of scale. In the Britain of the 90s there were several art schools, where you could study either theatre or performance art, and these schools were distributed across the country in several towns. In the mean time, Finnish art education has been strongly centred in the capital and the dominance of the Uniarts Helsinki, and the academies that predate it, is obvious. Regarding diversity, while due to its colonial history Britain has been culturally diverse for a long time, Finland in the 90s was still very homogenous and white. Conversation on ethnicity, gender and heritage, which has developed in Finland only in the 2010s and 20s, was vibrant in Britain already decades before. (O’Reilly 2025)

In terms of artistic style and genre, the artists identifying as Live Artists seem to come from diverse backgrounds also education-wise. For example the contributors of Agency. A Partial History of Live Art (Schmidt 2019, 2-3) come equally from a background of fine arts and theatre and some also from dance and choreography. Like I have postulated in Chapter 2.3, the Finnish esitystaide-scene emerged as a reformation movement of theatre and as a theatre-based reaction to the genre of performance art, and even accentuated their difference. In Britain the genre of Live Art was created from the start with an inclusive ethos. Esitystaide is almost always created in groups and collaborative formations, while Live Art encompasses more equally both solo and group practices. In addition, Live Art, as well as performance art, is often described not merely as a genre of art but a cultural strategy, offering a space for underrepresented voices to perform. When it comes to esitystaide, such ethos of political activism is, if not absent, at least not explicit. As a movement, if I dare to call it that, it is has been artistically inventive, especially regarding audience relations. But it has not in my opinion articulated any political agenda or clear antagonism towards the powers that be.

Linguistically, Live Art refers to the aspect of liveness, while esitystaide refers to an asymmetric relation. These attributes do not exclude either genre; Live Art most probably contains asymmetric relations and similarly esitystaide is closely tied to liveness. Still, we could say that names do tell something relevant. When calling something live, liveness is emphasised, when calling something relational, relations are emphasised. A linguistic perspective therefore supports my proposal of seeing esitystaide as an art of audience relations.

The incompatibility of English and Finnish terminology has encouraged me to consider that we should not only settle for using imported words for local phenomena. That would in worst case lead to an unnecessary levelling of things that are not equal. That said, the description of esitystaide offered here by no means claims that artworks with many similarities are not made in other locations or contexts. The purpose is not to create superfluous boundaries. Rather I aim at articulating something that in my experience has remained unarticulated, something evident in the collection of artworks that I refer to and which have emerged precisely in this place.

Performance + audience body = esitys

A performance in a reciprocal and asymmetric contact with a resonant and subordinate audience body equals an esitys. Reciprocal contact renders an audience body complicit of the appearance of a performance. The complicity of an audience and experimentation with its varieties are distinct features of the artistic practices that belong to the genre of esitystaide.

The common English translation for esitys is performance. However, my proposal is that a more suitable translation would be beforemance. As mentioned in Chapter 2.4, the root word of esitys, esi,denotes a relation to another and is something taking place before something, both previous to or in front of. The relation to another is both spatial and temporal. When something takes place before someone in space, a spatial asymmetry is created. The performance takes place before an audience and not vice versa. When something happens before something else in time, a temporal asymmetry is created. The thing that is placed before an audience has a history. It has been prepared for the actual event to take place. Those who have been involved with the preparation are distinguished from those who have not—an audience is created through their lack of agency and knowledge in comparison to the makers.

Here also a local arts tradition can further illustrate the proposition. Poetic singing is a Finnish musical tradition, among which there is a practice where a lead singer and the other attendees take turns. The lead singer sings something and the others repeat it, a part of it, or the same chorus line over and over. This lead singer is called the esilaulaja, the foresinger. The foresinger knows (or invents) the story and recites it while the audience is listening and holding the rhythmic and tonal structure with their simple responses. The structure contains a relational asymmetry, as the foresinger gathers most of the attention (spatially before), is prepared and sings first (temporally before). At the same time, it is a collective effort and both the lead and the response are necessary for the esitys to happen.^{1 2} While contemporary live art works in many ways with different dynamics from this old-school (or pre-school) format, it illustrates the structure which is at the core of my proposal: an asymmetric relation between leading and following, realized in time and space, through a distribution of complicity among all those who take part.

In the context of this work, performance is defined as the activity of making something, in this case art. This is a broad definition, including the making of all art—also for example the painting of a painting, sculpting of a sculpture, writing of a book or editing of a video work. While all art forms thus require a performance, in some of them this performance is put in contact with an audience body, hence terms performing arts and performance art³. In performing arts a performative action coincides with the reception of the work or, following the terminology of this work, the resonance taking place in an audience body. An audience body is defined as the collective body whose primary role is to resonate with a performance.

In performing arts and performance art the performative action is emphasized as the focal point and the material of artistic work. These genres require a contact between the work and an audience, but the focus is elsewhere: on stage or in action. Esitystaide/beforemance art, instead, shifts the focus to the contact between the performance and an audience body as well as the contacts between audience members. When these contacts are weaker, the audience body and its reciprocal relation to the performance are compromised, making the work in question less of an esitys/beforemance. When the contacts are stronger, but the asymmetry between the performance and the audience body is preserved, it would be more of an esitys/beforemance. Contact originates from the same Medieval Latin root as contingent—namely from contingentem; happening, touching. The contact between a performance and  an audience body renders the performance contingent. As the complicity of the audience body increases, the performance is more risky—the complicity of the audience may compromise the aims of the work done in preparation.

Esitys is thus not merely a performance. It is also not merely an event, a happening or Live Art, all of which do not (terminologically) presuppose a reciprocal or an asymmetric relation. Events, happenings and liveness can take place without an audience. Esitys/beforemance is an asymmetric and reciprocal contact between a performance and an audience body. It is a relational event, in which someone performs before an audience. A performance is situated spatially and temporally before an audience body, subordinating that body in relation to the performance itself. The contact between a performance and an audience body strengthens when the density, contemporaneity and complicity of the audience body increases. Thus an artwork can be defined an esitys/beforemance more clearly, when there is more contingency created by the contact between a performance and an audience body.

Esitystaide/beforemance art in turn is an art of contact. It is an art form, which takes esitys/beforemance as its medium and is based on playing with, experimenting on, reiterating or reformulating the beforeness of performances. In the equation “performance + audience body = esitys/beforemance”, esitystaide/beforemance art focuses on the “+”.

<—  2.3  What is ‘esitystaide’?

Table of contents

3.1.  A two-pronged methodology  —>