The Swedish choreographer and artistic director Efva Lilja visited a seminar at Tutke and as a consequence, invited me to present at an event organized by Danse Hallerne, a national centre for dance and choreography she was leading in Copenhagen. The event was called Choreography in Action and it was a place for artists to share practice and discuss.
I prepared eight different handouts, each presenting a perspective on the phenomenon of the audience through a specific idea introduced by a theoretician. The Emancipated Spectator and Dissensus were inspired by Jacques Rancière (Rancière 2009, 2010), The Narcissistic Participant and The Entrepeneural Participant by Adam Alston (Alston 2016), Autopoietic Loop by Erika Fisher-Lichte (Fisher-Lichte 2008), Co-Understanding by Hans-Thies Lehmann (Lehmann 2009) Community without Community by Jean-Luc Nancy (Kurki 2005) and Aesthetic by Claire Bishop (Bishop 2012).
Continuing from Draft 2, the selection of several simultaneous orientations invoked the element of polyphony, or perhaps polyreception or polyattention, among the collectivity of the audience. As there were eight different prints, from which each participant could choose according to the title, there were several different, even contradictory, orientations in the room. Through this I wanted to experiment with organizing plurality and distributing agency, in a different way from Draft 2 (in which the orientation was personalized and not of their choice) and Draft 3 (in which the orientations were distributed randomly).
The programmes were laid on a table by the entrance of the theatre space. As the participants arrived, I asked each of them to choose one of the programmes based on its title and read it before entering the space. When everyone was ready, we entered simultaneously. Then there was 40 minutes of time unstructured by me. At first, the participants situated themselves silently in the auditorium which was at the end of the space close to the entrance. After a while someone moved on stage and looked back towards the others. Then there was more taking of different positions and after some 20 minutes, the curator Lilja opened a discussion, which started to dominate the situation and dismantle some of the effects of multipositionality created by the orientations. After the 40 minutes was up, I closed the session and opened a post-discussion.
In the discussion, I received some useful feedback. One participant said that the architecture of the theatre affected them so much that they forgot the instruction given in the handout. Another participant brought up the context of choreography, in which the event took place. They said that this was only the second time they attended an event of contemporary dance and in both cases they had experienced that the event was only about talking. The experience that this was only a discussion was probably invoked by the discussion instigated by Lilja, drawing most of the people in and turning the contemplative atmosphere into a conventional discussion mode. A third participant made the observation that the structure of the room (a stage and some rows of seats) guided people to sit in the seats at first, and the ones whose assignments were related to risk-taking and dissensus, stepped onstage and started to spectate back to the auditorium from there.
Some days later, I also received an email from one of the participants, who wanted to mention that the discussion after the draft itself could be better structured. In their experience, it did not allow for everyone to voice their thoughts as those with more power controlled the space. They proposed that I would take more control in order to create an optimal reflection space after the experiment.
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
In addition to creating a polyattentive/polyreceptive/polyresonant space, the fact of having multiple simultaneous theoretical reference points proposed that I would address the phenomenon of audience with an eclectic approach in my research.
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 a n d
t h e l i f e c y c l e o f l i m i n o i d d r a m a t u r g y
The orientations given by me at the entrance in the form of the prints were the performative gesture, with which I subordinated the audience—much like in Draft 2. This time the gesture was however not strong enough to carry through the 40-minute duration with these specific people. Some of the audience members were dispositioned so actively that they would not remain in the primarily resonant and subordinate role that the membership in an audience body would normally require.
As a performance (or to be more precise, an esitys/a beforemance) artist, I felt instinctively disappointed by the fact that my performance was diluted into mere conversation with no transformational potential and no meaningful re-emergence on the other side of the liminal passage. My hope was that the event would become a revelational collective experience that would change the lives of the audience members and make them remember the moment forever. Instead of this transformation, the audience gained so much agency that they could not as a collective hold the resonant function any longer. Their condition changed back to the “normal” everyday mode, in which resonation and agency fluctuate more or less freely—or unstructured by a performance maker—between those who are present.
The failure of artistic ambitions shows my personal expectations, but from a research perspective it can strengthen my proposal regarding subordination as a precondition of audience bodies. In the form of a hypothesis: in order to emerge and persist, an audience has to be subordinated by a performance. If the subordinate position of the audience is compromised, liminoid dramaturgy may fall short and the phenomenon of audience can as a result become diluted into the everyday. An audience body can then cease to exist. It would suggest that the phases of a liminoid dramaturgy need to be pronounced enough to hold the asymmetric distribution of agency and submissive resonation required for the existence of an esitys/a beforemance and an audience body.
Minimalist artistic gestures test this border and expose themselves to the danger of loosing their audience. To keep their audience, those gestures need performative strength, which was obviously present too scarcely in this experiment. Due to weak subordination, the existence of a liminoid dramaturgy became ambiguous.
G a t h e r i n g
Two of the prints had complementary proposals that address the plural quality of audiences. Jacques Rancière writes that politics is a situation with dissensus, which means that two worlds exist in one. Hans-Thies Lehmann says that viewing is not the same as co-viewing, understanding not the same as co-understanding. Following them, gathering (and as its consequence, the plurality) of an audience means that people come into each other’s sphere of influence to perceive and understand together. This togetherness contains several worlds that may dissent or be in dissonance with each other. Disagreement coupled with resonance is one of the ways in which an audience can appear as a charged condition.
Referencing: discursive references within artistic works
If in Draft 3 one of my concerns was how art is or can be referenced in the research context, in Draft 4 I engaged in a way with a contrasting perspective: how can theory be referenced in art? Both the application process for doctoral studies and the seminars for doctoral candidates involved situating my artistic work in the context of art theory, continental philosophy, humanities and the like. This made sense to me—since we were in the academic context, it was appropriate to familiarize oneself with the language and habitual presentation modes it was composed of. Still, I struggled with it. How to bridge the gap between theory and practice, or academic readings and artistic events? How to not subjugate art and its inherent complexities and idiosyncrasies in terms of the theoretical canon?
This terrain had been slightly touched already in the title of the first draft, referring to Foucault’s lecture, and in the custom-made perspectives of Draft 2, but in Draft 4 I approached this problematic head on. I was drawing on a work I had done eight years earlier called Comparative Religion. It was a part of a research year I had been directing, with the theme “Can the Sacred Be Performed?”, a five-part performance based on five theories of the sacred by Émile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade, Rudolf Otto, René Girard and Georges Bataille. In the work, I tried to condense an elaborate thought system into a simple performative gesture.
In this draft I had a similar desire, to extract a thought from a theoretical text, simplify it into a short description and an assignment, which would ideally enable a state of collective contemplation.
