I used the absence of the performing body in almost all the experiments, but in the first and the third drafts I performed as a lecturer. Nevertheless, both were important steps in developing my methodology as well as the content of my research.
Draft 3 took place in a dance studio on the 7th floor of the Theatre Academy. On the floor I composed two semi-circles: one made of books related to my work and one made of printed programmes from shows I had attended during the previous years. The semi-circles invited the attendees to sit on the floor in between the books and programmes, also in a semicircle as if in an ancient Greek amphitheatre. In front of the seated audience was a mirror covering the whole wall. On the mirror I had written some main points of my talk.
I performed between the audience and the mirror1. The lecture was composed of two parts, each with three points. First, I explained what I had been doing during the first months of doctoral research:
1) writing a draft of an article called When the Subject of Research is in the Audience,
2) drafting the audience via live experiments (i.e. Drafts 1 and 2) and
3) attending performances made by others (some of them are referred to in the chapter on Draft 1)
Secondly, I proposed three parameters necessary for an audience to emerge:
1) not being prepared,
2) being multiple and
3) receptivity.
The printout aesthetic did not develop much for this draft except that I tried another kind of variation of collective dynamics. I prepared two kinds of programmes and distributed them to the participants randomly. They had a small difference: in half of the programs, I wished that the reader would find “ways of consenting”. In the other half, the I hoped for “ways of dissenting”.
The theme of consent and dissent was inspired by Jacques Rancière's writing (Rancière, 2010), but it also reflected the uniform appearances of audiences in most performances that I attended. Audiences implicitly consented on everything that was asked of them: they entered the room when asked, sat where they were supposed to, followed the work in silence and clapped when it fit the convention. In a theatre play, no applause before the end, in a musical or a slapstick comedy, applause after each number (in the local context of Helsinki). When a performance would leave this kinds of issues unclear, the audience would feel uncertain. This happened for example in Joitakin keskusteluja merkityksestä (Eng. Some Conversations on Meaning, my translation) by Q-theatre. The performance style was situated somewhere in between a serious contemporary theatre work and a slapstick comedy. The audience, while seemingly enjoying the work a lot, was also indecisive with regard to the appropriate applause style. Applause would sometimes emerge, sometimes not, sometimes linger in between hesitantly. (Joitakin keskusteluja merkityksestä 22.9.2023)
The other side of the conventions of consensuality was that while audiences seemingly consented about everything, they were free to dissent about anything privately. The expression of the dissent would virtually never happen during the performance, only in private conversations during intermissions and after the show (in the local context—somewhere else the convention might be different).
B u i l d i n g a t h e o r e t i c a l p r o p o s a l a n d r e s o n a n c e
Along with the iterative series of practical experiments, throughout my research I have been engaged in a process of thinking about the phenomenon of the audience on the level of concepts and theoretical models built from them. Someone has pointed out that my research question “what is an audience?” is a question to which we cannot expect to find an answer. Still, I have not been able to refrain from answering—by contrast I have composed several versions of a three-fold model that would describe the phenomenon of the audience in a general sense. The first was formulated for this research seminar. It was obviously the least developed of the models, but it contained some themes that are still valuable. The three characteristics of an audience in this model are a lack of preparation, plurality and receptivity. Further developments of this three-fold conceptualization and its components can be found in Draft 13 (A Theory of Audience), both of the examined artistic parts (A Reading of Audience and Audience Body) and finally in Chapter 2.3 of the commentary (The Formation of an Audience Body). Towards the end of this research process, lack of preparation and receptivity developed into subordination to a performance and resonance; while plurality became gathering, in addition to which I developed several other concepts that were not yet present at this stage.
Characteristic 1: A lack of preparation
One of my early proposals regarding the nature of audience was its unpreparedness in comparison to the makers of an artwork. My idea was that the audience is inevitably submissive because they have less knowledge and practice regarding the content of the work than the makers have.
This idea raised criticism in the research community. In the discussion after Draft 3 someone pointed out that audiences of more experimental contemporary performance are quite prepared, since the audience is to large extent an expert audience, namely peers of the makers. Likewise, one of the participants of Draft 2 wrote in their feedback that performers are unprepared as well, since they do not have any control over the audience members’ previous experiences and thus their disposition.
These critical points were justified and useful for further development, namely of the concepts of parapractice and subordination. I still think that the difference in preparation regarding each specific performance is the grounds for the subordinate position that the audience takes in relation to the makers. This asymmetry is also related to the differentiation between a practice (explicitly exercised by the makers) and a parapractice (implicitly exercised by the audience).
Characteristic 2: Plurality
Plurality as a characteristic of an audience had already emerged in Draft 1 (through using the term audience) and Draft 2 (when experimenting with personal address). Audience is by definition plural, or as a participant of Draft 8 articulated “audience is one, and audience is many”. Plurality is more thoroughly considered in Chapter 2.1.
Characteristic 3: Receptivity
This is a characteristic that felt at the time almost too self-evident, but still necessary to articulate. Receptivity and reception are terms used a lot in research dealing with audiences, spectatorship and related subjects. There is even a whole field of research called reception theory or reception studies. Due to insightful feedback from Gareth White during the writing of the commentary I reconsidered the term and switched it to resonance (also inspired by Ana Pais, Pais 2016). The issue is dealt at length in Chapters 2.1. and 3.2. In my interpretation an audience can also act, but their default state needs to be subordinate and resonant in order for them to stay an audience.
Contextualization: The parapractice of audience membership
During the Christmas break I had been diving into the research literature to see how researchers position themselves in relation to performance works; or how experiences of audiencing live performance are articulated in these research publications. I titled the text I scribbled based on these readings “When the Subject of Research is in the Audience”.
I had two sets of materials: a collection of volumes that dealt with participatory performance and 50 bibliographies of dissertations from my own institution, the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. I made a couple of observations. The first was that live performances were often referred to without positioning the writer in relation to them. In most cases it was not possible to distinguish whether the writer had attended the performance in question, or had they seen a video documentation instead, or possibly read or heard about it. This lack of positioning created a disturbing sense of objectivity and was incompatible with the plurality of audiences, I thought. Later I started to think of audiences as complicit to works of performing arts, which would also contradict an objective perspective.
The other observation was that artistic researchers in my institution did not refer much to artworks made by other artists, in comparison to discursive sources, which were referred in abundance. Referentiality was in my experience the main difference between artistic research in the academy and outside of it. Academic research was based on a system of explicit referentiality. To have a work published one would need to contextualize it via referencing other related works and take a position in relation to them. The art field was in contrast based on a lack or implicity of referencing. It is very rare that an artwork would explicate, which works by others had influenced the making of it, or what is its original contribution in relation to them.
Since artistic research had emerged in between or as a combination of these contexts, the question was inevitable: how and what to reference. I made notice of the fact that the doctoral candidates of the Theatre Academy used mainly academic literature as references of their commentaries. Respectively, the artistic parts of the same research projects (at least those I had attended) did not explicitly reference anything. Hanna Järvinen, a lecturer at Tutke, commented that the fact that artworks are not much referenced in the bibliographies of commentaries might just be a symptom of the reference system itself—the system is created for literary purposes and referencing art has been historically only a sidenote.
The text I was writing was never finished or published, but during the academic year 2019-20 I took part in a process of “Mapping the Evolution of Artistic Research” led by Leena Rouhiainen and Laura Gröndahl. Inspired by Järvinen's comment, I chose a more limited source material and looked at it more closely. I went through six commentaries published by Tutke between 2014-19 and searched for references to artworks. I thought that if refraining from referencing artworks is a trait of the bibliographical system, maybe artworks are then mentioned in the text itself, but not added to the bibliographical section. The survey corroborated my original hypothesis: the writers of those commentaries used mostly theoretical texts as their context, instead of works of other artists. This would inspire me to explicitly include my own audience membership in my research process and to develop the concept of parapractice to describe it.
1 After the presentation an audience member pointed to me the similarity to Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975).