A month later, it was my turn to present in the Practicum-seminar. This seminar, led by Esa Kirkkopelto and Mika Elo, had a specific format. There was no default presentation mode, like a lecture or a power point presentation. Instead, each presenter was asked to consider all the aspects of the event—the choice of space, the way of entering it, seating and so on. This form of presenting your research was called an exposition; you were exposing your research (instead of performing or presenting). The term is in relation to the Research Catalogue, where publications are called expositions. In Practicum, a parallel to the digital expositionality of Research Catalogue was created in a live format. I found this a brilliant way of sharing and developing research. After the exposition there was a discussion, which was composed of two parts: first the contents of the exposition were discussed, then its expositionality (i.e. how it was performed or presented). In addition, each participant had the responsibility to send a written feedback to each presenter via email, which was also highly valuable.
Based on the experience of the first draft, I decided to continue with the format of a programme note. I had an idea about how I might encounter the problems I had faced when starting to figure out my research methodology: the gap between the positions of the maker and the recipient and the gap between the modalities of academic text and an artistic performance event (see Chapter 3.1). I decided to make a text-based performance, where instead of stage events I would prepare an invitation to the participants to engage in a process of embodied research for the duration of the presentation.
I prepared a personal programme note for each of the 19 participants. They all had the same structure. Some of the sections of the text were similar in all of them while some were personalized, articulating something about my personal relationship to the specific participant and about the questions they were concerned with in their own research. I also proposed an individual way of attending the exposition for each of them.
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
I was processing one of the questions present already in my early research plans: who is the spectator? I started to further develop my Foucault-proposal, which I had already articulated in Draft 1: the audience function. I wanted to somehow work with the idea that the audience function contrasts Foucault's author function and my observations corroborated this hypothesis: audiences of the performances I attended were by default anonymous (their names were never mentioned anywhere), but embodied (their bodies were always there). In the case of the seminar, I knew more or less who were going to be there so the situation was very different from an ordinary performance setting, where the makers are relatively ignorant of who will show up. I decided to use this specific condition to disturb the expectation of an anonymous audience—through a customized address to each audience member.
On the last page, I added a short descriptive paragraph in red. My idea was that it could, and it later became evident that it also would, be repeated and re-iterated in the experiments to come. It stated that the body of work that would be a series of drafts
“poses audience as a question
considers the creation, or exposure, of a collectivity
a receptive, attentive plurality
perhaps”
I thus started the work of defining the audience. It was a genuine interest of mine, and it also was part of my effort to speak research—to adapt to the type of rhetorics used in the institutional environment I had entered. The definition was open to development (“a question”), aware of both the artistic (“creation”) and research (“exposure”) aims of my project and it pointed out some key interests of mine (collectivity, receptivity and attention).
S u b o r d i n a t i o n t o a p e r f o r m a n c e
After the first draft I decided to experiment with a format, in which I would suspend the entering of a (predetermined) performer body entirely. This was an attempt to address the first of my methodological dilemmas (how to stay resonant while doing research, see Chapter 3.1), and especially to draw my attention away from my own performing body. Thus my aim was to focus the research apparatus towards the audience by minimizing other inputs. In hindsight I can claim that through these minimalist aesthetics, I hoped to access the preconditions of the formation of audience bodies and in this case especially how a performance subordinates an audience: how the maker initiates and is the main carrier of agency, while those who inhabit the audience position follow.
The participants were already prone to following my lead due to their knowledge that it was my turn to present something. In addition I wanted us to examine my research question. I prepared the minimal performative gesture to engage them in contemplation of the question while the rest of the temporal and spatial structure was left unstructured by me. It appeared to be enough. During the 30 minutes I did nothing that would require more attention than what anyone else did and still the performance kept on taking place and a liminal dramaturgy appeared. The absence of performers resulted in an adoption of the performer position by the audience members. They could not avoid performing for each other and viewing each other’s actions as a performance. (Practicum seminar feedback 2018) However, this did not compromise their subordinate position in relation to my performative gesture as (based on my observations and the feedback) they did not try to rebel against my invitations and their action became part of the matrix of the esitys/beforemance.
G a t h e r i n g a n d c o m p l i c i t y
Addressing each audience member individually made explicit the plurality of the audience, all the way to the exact number of audience members and their status as unique individuals. By naming the audience members I also rendered them involuntarily involved in a way that challenged the assumed position of anonymity and passivity and distributed some of the responsibility for the emergence of the event to them.
I would later start to use the terms gathering and complicity to account for these aspects of audiences. Gathering came mostly from Denis Guénoun (2007) and Dorothea von Hantelmann (2019). Guénoun claimed that the essence of theatre, originating in Ancient Greece, was the act of gathering. von Hantelmann proposed that people can also gather asynchronously, like they do in exhibitions. Complicity was originally inspired by Reza Negarestani (2011), who wrote that artists can become complicit with their contingent materials through closure—not through an attempt to be open to contingencies or finding commonalities with them but by contrast through acts of closing: with patterns of intrusion, twisting and suspension. My address could be seen as such closure, as it forced, albeit in a friendly tone, the attendees into a personal and asymmetric dialogue.
I addressed the reader by name and in a straightforward, personal manner, using the format of a letter as a stylistic influence. The personal address was composed of four elements (as an example below photographs of the programme directed to artist Stephanie Misa):
- the name of the participant on the cover page
- the first paragraph of the text body, which was specific to each participant. In it I made a remark about the person or our relationship
- I proposed an orientation for each participant which was custom-made for each of them. This orientation suggested a way to take part in this exposition, based on their own research interests. This was my proposal of a way a research community could function: we can practice together in a polyphonic way while everyone has their own interests at stake.
This personal address was my way of exposing the implicit plurality of an audience. Plurality is a direct consequence when people gather; through the gesture of addressing multiple individuals I explicated this feature that is mostly taken as a trivial fact. As one of the participants wrote: “normally when attending a performance, spectators have their own personal reasons for it. Now it felt like this polyphony was emphasized, since everyone had a given way of spectating” (Practicum seminar feedback 2018). Also my observation was that this “polyphony” was implicit in audiences—the conventions of relative anonymity and assumed passivity render the plurality of experiences taking place within an audience invisible. One could maybe say that if the function of the audience requires an anonymous body, the anonymity of the audience body is secured by deferring from expressing its plurality. If someone for example laughs expressively in the audience when others are silent, they enable a partial disintegration of this expected anonymity and partly become performers, as happened in my experience of Elina Pirinen’s choreography Kosto I-IX, in which I was sitting in the back row and had some of the members of the working group behind me by the table from where lights were controlled. Elina, who has a remarkable and compelling laugh, repeatedly laughed in a liberated way, which affected my reading of the work strongly (Kosto I-IX 19.1.2017).
Personal address was an artistic method that had been cultivated during my years of working at the Reality Research Center, and especially with Julius Elo. For several years we developed different ways of encountering the bodies of spectators and composing their experiences, with small audiences where each individual received a lot of attention. Also my attendance of Sleeping Beauty was still in my bodily memory, with its exceptionally intimate and personal address towards me as an audience member through the possibility to carry out erotic fantasies in a one-on-one encounter with a performer. (Sleeping Beauty 30.10.2017) In draft 2 I used a version of this spectator-specific sensitivity, where the actual identity of each spectator is known by the maker and used as material when composing the work. I had recently coined the term custom-made to illustrate this kind of artistic practice (Laitinen 2017).
Several participants of the exposition mentioned in their feedback the strong effect of the personal address. It was “an intensive personal gesture” and created “spontaneous joy”, “tension” or an “affective avalanche”. It gave the feeling that the conversations I had had with them about their practice had been meaningful and that I had “really listened and considered the things we had discussed”. (Practicum seminar feedback 2018). This was something that we had also experienced with Elo several times. Personal attention is both unexpected and feared by audience members. The expectation can be that personal attention in a performance will break the “protective bubble”1 of the audience member and draw them from anonymity into the role of the performer without the protection of the practice that the actual performers have had for the occasion. Because of this we created strategies and practiced skills that would allow us to address the audience in a personal way while securing their experience of safety. We thought that through these methods we could enable extraordinary experiences for our audiences, for example 13-hour immersive performances (such as Renunciation) or private experiences for audiences of one.
In my research to come, the address became a way I would create a connection to the audience members, as a replacement for the real-time performing body. One of the participants of Draft 2 raised a practical problem: how could I familiarize myself in the future with audience members in advance, on short notice and then customize a work for them? The participant suggested the use of social media for that purpose. I made an effort to forward this to some extent in Draft 9, while in the future I would return to work with audience as an anonymous body.
L i m i n o i d d r a m a t u r g y a n d t h e d e n s i t y o f s p a c e
Continuing from Draft 1, the three-step process of Turnerian liminal/liminoid dramaturgy was further cultivated here by linking it to the traditions of theatre, literature and performance art. Prologue marked the preliminal state of separating from everyday life, act marked the transformative liminoid state itself and epilogue the postliminal state in which the audience members are reincorporated to the everyday.
The word “act” had several reference points. In theatre, an act is one of the parts of a play. In performance art, acts and actions are traditionally the main material of artistic work. The word could also be read as a command, telling the reader to act. It was in a contrast to the typical audience position, which was namely devoid of acting.
The liminal nature of the act was enhanced by separating it spatially from the other phases by stating that the act will begin when the reader steps into the room. The room itself was rendered liminoid and spatiality was introduced as a relevant feature of the phenomenon of the audience. Van Gennep’s research on transitional rites thematizes the door as a portal to liminality; the word itself is a derivative of limen, Latin for threshold (van Gennep 1960, 19-20). It came intuitively for me due to my background in performing arts and especially with practices that take into consideration the experience, consciousness and body of audience members—the dramaturgical gestures related to entering another physical space had proven to be very important during my previous career. I would use the same proposal also in Draft 4. Proposing that an audience appears through a collective spatial transition was anticipating an explicit thematization of spatial density towards the end of the research process. I would conduct most of my drafts in the local format of a spatially dense audience body, for which the members of an audience would gather in the same location.
C o n t e m p o r a n e i t y
My background in performing arts, as well as the structure suggested by the seminars, conditioned me to approach temporality and spatiality through a default setting in which the attendees gather into the same space at the same time. In performing arts it is typical that members of an audience body attend a work contemporaneous to each other.
In addition, in Draft 2 I introduced a format which would continue until Draft 5. I offered the participants an orientation in the beginning and informed them about the duration of the event. Otherwise I did not compose or organize the passing of that duration and left instead that task to the audience. In effect I offered only a very thin temporal structure.
The medium of language: typography, metatext and bilinguality
While I used language already in Draft 1, in the second draft it appeared on front stage, when the programme was in a way everything I offered. I made a strong typographical gesture by printing the text in two colours, black and red. Red marked a metatext: titles, parenthesis and a description of the draft series. Black marked the “body of text”. This division was borrowed from the tradition of theatre and playwriting, where stage instructions and lines are used as two levels of the text—one placed inside the (fictional) dimension of the play, one in the (real) dimension of the making of the play, surrounding the fiction2. On the main page, which contained the body of text, I also used square parenthesis around the red text to further help the reader to distinguish metatext from the body of text.
The use of metatext suggests becoming aware of one's own position as an audience member. I continued experimentation with this later extensively. The parenthesis proved to be a very useful structure for a research project, since it enabled a movement between an immersive art experience and a distanced perspective on that experience.
The use of individual papers for each audience member afforded me with the possibility to speak in several languages at the same time. I produced the programmes either in Finnish or English, according to each participant’s launguage skills. I would continue this practice throughout my research practice, except when performing abroad.
1 A term adopted from director Eero-Tapio Vuori (Vuori 2017).
2 An example of a similarly explicit theatrical operation in the context of research is Yelena Gluzman’s conference paper in which she, instead of “giving a talk” asked the audience to read her paper aloud, following a script through which Gluzman orchestrated their performance (Gluzman 2017, 120-125).
Note: the serial numbering in the prints, visible in the photographs, differs from the one used in this commentary. I originally numbered each printed iteration: for example in Draft 2 at hand there were 19 different prints, which were respectively subtitled Drafts 2-20. For the purposes of the commentary and its readability, I have counted the unique events instead of unique prints.