Performance artist and at the time professor of the Live Art and Performance Studies MA programme at the Theatre Academy, Ray Langenbach, invited me to take part in Recall Reflect Return—Palestine Performance Symposium in May 2018. The symposium took place on the week preceding the 70th commemoration of Nakba (Eng. catastrophe), the deportation of Palestine population in connection with the founding of the State of Israel. The symposium was realized in three locations in Palestine: Nowat Theatre at the Al Arroub refugee camp, Bethlehem and Kahlil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah.
Before the trip itself we had some meetings in Helsinki to prepare. Langenbach proposed that the most important part of the symposium would not be us performing for the locals but instead our own act of witnessing the political situation in Palestine and the consequences of Nakba.
I performed twice. At the Nowat Theatre in Al Arroub I realized a version of Reality Research Center’s work Circle.
Circle is a participatory performance, in which the audience and the performers form a circle. Then simple rules are recited: in the centre of the circle encounters take place—they are witnessed from the perimeter. When the centre is empty, anyone can enter it. When a second person enters the centre, an encounter begins. The form, content and duration of an encounter is free. When the encounter is over, the encounterers return to the perimeter and the center of the circle is available for someone else. The circle ends after a predefined time, which was in Al Arroub 30 minutes.
The circle was attended by a variety of locals and visitors: members of the family of Hazem Al Sharif, who had with his brothers founded the Nowat Theatre; neighbours; Live Art students from Helsinki; performance artists from Europe and the USA. It was an exciting and entertaining half an hour, which included several cross-cultural and intergenerational performative encounters.
A few days later, at Kahlil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, I performed the fifth version of the programme print.
In parallel to the Circle, I used the duration of 30 minutes. Each audience member at Kahlil Sakakini Center received the same printed programme (again a folded A4), available in Arabic and English. The programme framed the draft with the question of an “us” in the violent political condition, which had inspired the symposium and caused myself and other non-local artists to take part in it. Within this frame, it invited the audience to use 30 minutes of audience time to create something, to create itself as an audience.
It evolved into a lively improvisation, in which the participants were actively communicating with the environment: running in circles, touching the walls, adjusting lighting, reading aloud, eating and so on. Most of the active participants were the artists visiting from abroad, but also some locals took part.
I n t h e f r i n g e
I have suggested that the concept of the audience body has emerged in my research specifically via the influence of the local context of esitystaide/beforemance art. However I also present it as a concept that can exceed this context and describe a phenomenon that appears more broadly in the arts. Did these experiments in Palestine shine a light on this? Did audience bodies appear and if they did, were they different from the ones in my habitual context?
The Circle accentuates the difference between performing and audience membership while making it possible for all attendees to move between these positions. There is a resonant collective entity witnessing events on stage. At the same time, its membership is constantly under negotiation, offering audience members an access to the stage and the agency residing there. Audience membership is in constant tension due to this possibility of an exit and individual audience experiences are significantly different before and after the time on stage. It is fair to say that the Circle summons an experimental audience body. In my experience, this took place equally in different Finnish contexts and in Al Arroub.
The Al Arroub Circle was in my experience especially warm in its tone. This may have to do with the fact that the hosting family, neighbours and children attended, brought with them an atmosphere of care and humour. It may be related to local traditions and ways of life. And it may concern the political weight that burdened the themes of collectivity and inclusion. The question is, who can access the circle? In the Israeli State, there is no circle, into which everyone would be welcome. The Palestinians are not included as equal citizens and have been pushed outside of the circle of people for seven decades. During the visit it became clear to me that also I was not welcomed by the state to witness the misery of the Palestinian people. Might the warmth that I experienced be also partly a consequence of the oppression? Be as it may, even in this gruesome situation the attendees were open for experimentation and stepped into the ambiguous role of beformance audience membership.
The relationship between theatre and ritual has been one of the core themes of performance studies and in the context of the Circle it can shed some light on the conceptualisation of the audience body. My argument concerning esitystaide/beformance art is that in its context audience membership is under experimentation: audience exists in a non-predetermined form. More precisely, spectatorship is replaced by artistic and embodied speculation on the phenomenon of the audience. In the circle at the Nowat Theatre the position of spectation was in my experience compromised by the emergence of a collective experimental body. My long-time collaborator, theatre director and ritual artist Jani-Petteri Olkkonen states: “In theatre, spectatorship is distinct, the relation is namely to the spectator. In ritual, the spectator, the position of spectation, does not exist [...] you are a part of [the ritual] also in the fringe” (Olkkonen 2016, 163, my translation).
This fringe is relevant here. In my definition, if in theatre the fringe is institutionalized as an auditorium where audience membership is exercised in a predetermined way and in ritual the fringe is dissolved into sheer participation, in esitystaide/beformance art the fringe spreads across the room, encompassing the whole audience body in its experimental, ambiguous state of collectivity. This state would also best accommodate an audience body, residing in the charged liminal space between inclusion and exclusion, subordination and complicity.
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 m i n o i d
There was an interesting detail in the draft performed at Kahlil Sakakini Center. If in Drafts 2 and 4 I had defined an actual room as the liminoid space, this time I used the eyelids of audience members as the curtain, the raising of which would be the threshold between preliminality and the liminoid. I had written in the print:
Ray Langenbach, who was taking part, did not open his eyes. Instead he moved and acted in the space his eyes closed for the whole duration of the draft and opened them only when the time was up. This did not however compromise the existence of the audience body, or his membership in it. Why? I had just witnessed in Draft 4 how the asymmetric relation could evaporate if the members of the audience did not respect their subordinate position. My interpretation is that Langenbach’s action was clever, or sensitive, enough to support my performance even when explicitly rebelling against it. It took into account the experimental nature of the work and the way it distributed agency to the audience generously (challenging the typical position of the audience). Respectively Langenbach’s choice was equally experimental, taking part in the ethos of my proposal. It also did not provoke the other members of the audience body to an uprising like Efva Lilja did in Draft 4—in contrast it merely provoked in them the use of their imagination when finding their own response to my gesture.
Along with Langenbach, the other (European) attendees who already knew me, held the liminal dramaturgy together. With the local audience, the limitations of my textual approach were obvious. It seemed like the problems with subordination, experienced already in the previous draft, were repeated. My performative gesture gave so much agency to the audience that they needed to work like makers in order to persist with the liminal process. Again, I was too minimalistic to really help the attendees in maintaining the existence of an audience body.
P o l i t i c s o f c o m p l i c i t y
Langenbach’s initial suggestion was reflected in my experience of the symposium: the main event was the commemoration of Nakba itself. It did not matter so much, what we performed, as long as we had arrived, that we had been invited, that someone had organized everything. The gesture of gathering from different parts of the globe to acknowledge, mourn and express dissent with the ongoing history of political violence on Palestinian land, was evidently the point of the event (on the political situation and its history, see e.g. Chomsky & Pappé 2015, Räsänen 2024).
As we were witnessing performance art at the Nowat Theatre inside Al Arroub refugee camp, on the half-built second floor of the home of Al Sharif and his family and the smell of tear gas entered from the street, the meaning of the “we” was something that could not be created in Helsinki. It put my habitual environment into perspective—it made visible the privilege, safety and comfort that permeate the local field of art where I normally work. I was complicit also in that distanced and secured position, but taking part in the gathering of our bodies on Palestinian land enabled exposure to and affective experience of this complicity. This experience is based on the visitor’s perspective: it is debatable how valuable this kind of raising of awareness is when those oppressed continue their lives as before.
Collective, local and contemporaneous gatherings render an audience complicit (a live audience has an effect on the performers who can sense their affective responses), but it can also expose a more fundamental underlying complicity. Violent and destructive conditions such as the apartheid system that is in place in Palestine do not exist separately from the inhabitants of other countries; through news feeds everyone is aware of the cruelty taking place at the moment. We are complicit, but this is acknowledged only minimally—Teemu Paavolainen calls this bourgeois relationship to the world “passively spectatorial sensibility”. He quotes Nicholas Ridout: “defined by its spectatorial relation to a world of its own making,” the bourgeois spectator “know[s] they are responsible for the plight of others but will do nothing to take responsibility for that responsibility.” (Paavolainen 2024, 124-25)
The trip to Palestine thus introduced a political level to the concept of complicity that was still dormant and unarticulated in my research. Resonating with Reza Negarestani’s article (Negarestani 2011), I started to think that we are linked to everything, that all those involved with an artwork are responsible for it and that it exists via collective efforts and resonances. This observation holds promise of political meaning for the concepts of the audience body and beforemance introduced in this study. The gathering of subordinate and complicit audience bodies may expose our implicit responsibility and educate us on our choices in this condition. Artworks that experiment with the phenomenon of audience can make us more aware of an underlying, constant complicity, while they also create circumstances of temporary and idiosyncratic complicity. They might function as a resistance to the production of distance and irresponsibility generated by the current media environment and attention economy.
