In August 2018 I took part in the Summer School of Artistic Research in Malmö. The participants were doctoral candidates of artistic research from different universities in the Nordic countries. Each of us prepared a presentation about our research.
After the experiences from Draft 4 in Copenhagen and Draft 5 in Palestine, I felt that the format I had been iterating so far, a single folded A4-sheet, was too limited. It was a stingy aesthetic, which left the audience members with a lot of responsibility and almost no support. I offered them virtually no dramaturgical temporal structure and thus little help with liminal dramaturgy. These artistic disappointments in fact made me aware of the necessity of both subordination and liminal dramaturgy—in the case when a maker aims to create and hold an audience body. While it had made sense to start a practice in a minimalist way, I felt the justification for this stylistic scarcity had run out.
For the sixth draft I prepared three versions of a booklet, sticking with the A5-sized pages but increasing their number. The three versions had the same rhythm, but their content was partly different, in a way this was similar to the eight printed programmes of Draft 4. The cover text of each of the three versions were printed with a different colour (blue, yellow and pink), to signal to the participants that there were different versions.
There were three chapters in the booklet, separated from each other by a geometrical figure, which was of different colour after each chapter. The figure represented the floor plan of the room in which the draft took place. The first chapter was composed of an introduction, which included instructions on how to read the book, and an orientation to a perspective on the phenomenon of audience. These three perspectives, one of which each booklet had, were spectacle, reading and collectivity. In the second chapter this perspective was further elaborated. The third chapter was an epilogue to close the experience.
The summer school gave me two long lasting collaborators: sound designer Carolina Jinde from Stockholm University of the Arts and architect Alexander Furunes Eriksson from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. They would collaborate with me in Draft 22 and the final artistic part of the doctorate, Audience Body.
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
Draft 7 re-iterated the eclectic variety of reference points for the phenomenon of audience offered in Draft 4. According to this, an audience is a collectivity, even a “we”, in which names are irrelevant and which is not defined by a mere attendance of an event but through a series of aesthetic, relational and dialogical procedures (paraphrasing Foucault 2000). This definition claimed that the phenomenon was complex, but also within the reach of a theorist, through attending these procedures with scholarly precision. Meanwhile, referring to Denis Guénoun (2007) and Roland Barthes (1993) side by side rendered the participation to these procedures an act of political commitment. Through the addition of Guy Debord and Jacques Ranciére (2009) the aim of these political commitments were problematized: were they made in order to alienate ourselves from life or by contrast to medicate ourselves against this alienation? Was membership in an audience an escapist or a responsible move? I posed it as a question, but I also offered my work as the cure, as a Debordian practice of attending to the fabric of life itself. Whether my work would live up to this challenge I gave it would be possibly seen later as the practice evolved.
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
Draft 4 showed me how the lack of support with liminoid dramaturgy may eat away the subordinate relationship during the event: my performative gesture created an audience body and began a liminal process but could not carry it all the way. The experiment conducted in Draft 7 was in turn informative (and a failure) regarding the moment of instituting the subordinate position of an audience and the simultaneous first phase of liminoid dramaturgy: the separation from the everyday, and the related distribution of agency (to the makers) and conditions enabling resonation (to the audience).
I had placed the booklets around the space. In the foyer people were chatting as I stepped up to give instructions. I raised my voice to catch their attention: “You may enter the room. There are booklets waiting for you there. Open the first page at the same time with the others.” Without further ado I opened the door and let the crowd in. This was a mistake. I had disregarded the dramaturgy of attention at play when a performance is about to start. People who enter a performance space are flooded with new information, be it verbal or non-verbal. They try to adjust themselves to the precarious situation, find a safe space, understand what is awaited from them and so on. My instruction was too hasty: some of the participants probably missed it or parts of it while trying to finish the conversations they were having or to orient themselves to listening. This resulted in the partial disintegration of the dramaturgy: the participants were not able to enter a liminoid state in the way I had envisioned. Subordination was insufficiently instituted.
Basically, some of the participants did not follow my instruction of opening the first page at the same time with the others. They started reading when others were still searching for a place to sit. As a result, the latecomers were disoriented. How should they act now when it was no longer possible to open the first page at the same time? Somehow everyone found a way to navigate the situation. The reading event was again artistically disappointing, but rewarding as a research experiment. It contributed to a hypothesis regarding the first phase of liminoid dramaturgy: an audience body needs sufficient support and time in order to form and for the transition from the modality of everyday into a liminoid state.
Additionally, the dispassionate Foucault-inspired articulation, that the audience is defined through series of aesthetic, relational and dialogical procedures helped in viewing the maker-audience-relation without value judgements: through a procedural perspective, as a kind of technical issue, in which it was important to secure that the maker came first and the audience was secondary.
S t r u c t u r i n g t i m e
I started to structure time more elaborately than in the drafts before. I used the method I had applied already in 2014 (see Pre-doctoral practice) and linked the time passing during the event to the rhythm of turning pages and small personal intermissions proposed by the text. It did not work as I had imagined, as described above, but it was very different from the previous drafts, which had almost no temporal organization on my behalf.
S u r r e n d e r
The phrasing I found from the writings of Roland Barthes was a beautiful and poetic way of articulating the motif that I would later name complicity: an event to which we surrender, will reveal us and we will commit (... or at least that is how I wrote it down... I cannot find the source anymore). Barthes gave a task to the carriers of the non-performative, non-active, resonant component of art: surrender. Following Barthes, via surrendering to the subordinate position we would become complicit in two ways. Firstly the “event will reveal us”—not only the performers, but also the audience would be revealed. Secondly “we will commit”—the commitment made by the audience is to resonate.
Medium of print: the codex, the paper and the pause
I returned to a dramaturgical gesture I had developed before entering the academy, starting from Portals in 2014, continuing in Trialogue (2015), Plato’s Cave (2016) and Plato’s Republic (2017). It was the format of a book composed for a collective dramaturgy of reading.
This dramaturgy was based on maybe the most particular feature of the act of reading a book: repeated turning of pages. I placed words and sentences on pages in a specific rhythm, to make the page turning frequent enough to become a significant element of the work. I was inspired by a work by two of my colleagues from the Reality Research Center, Risto Santavuori and Eero-Tapio Vuori. They had devised a performance for one audience member called Mail Order Experimance (January 2008, Santavuori & Vuori 2011). The audience member receives an envelope via mail, with a specific time to open it. The envelope contains a booklet, which is to be read alone in a private toilet. The structure is similar to Draft 7, as the rhythm of the words on the page and the act of turning pages are central dramaturgical features.
My works from Portals to Draft 7 had a different form of collectivity from Mail Order Experimance. I was interested in relationality and collectivity and aimed at enabling onsite gatherings of audiences in different constellations. The books and their contents distributed agency between individual audience members and the collectivities they formed, making this balance fluctuate according to the details of the text. It gave me the possibility to reach and manipulate these tensions, always present but mostly implicit in a live audience.
Compared to my previous works, the Malmö booklet had a different version of the address. So far my texts had presented themselves as mediums, through which my (the author's) voice communicated with the audience. This time the book itself claimed to speak. The stack of papers was the subject, not just a conveyer of human thoughts. “I am a codex”, was written on the first page. One of the participants said in the feedback discussion that this flamboyant phrase gave a “religious” tone to the work. With the term codex, denoting the historical ancestor of the modern book, I wanted to draw attention to the format of a stack of pages attached from one side to each other, enabling the repetitive act of turning them over.
In the feedback discussion, I received critique on the materiality of the booklet. According to the feedback, it was not thought through or developed enough—just a basic stack of A4-papers stamped together. Could the materiality of the print be aligned with its content? Could it also take part in the thinking of the reading event? At the moment of receiving this critique, I felt misunderstood. Did they not see where my practice was situated? Why did they point to something unrelated or unimportant?
Later, I realized the value of these comments, as my practice turned more and more towards intertwining the material choices of each draft with its content. The next development with materiality took place in Draft 13, through a collaboration with lighting designer Tülay Schakir.
Turning pages also brought with it the element of pausing. The act of turning was kind of a cut, and each page presented itself as a whole with limits. The next page would always be on the other side, and by turning the page one would shift there. I also started to use a pause, or a lack of content, on the pages themselves to provide space and to create rhythms. As a result, especially later on in letter dramaturgies, the pause also became a way of distributing agency from the maker to the audience, since the pause itself was not structured by me and left room for the audience to use it as they please (see also Territories of emancipation in Draft 17). The performance left them with no support for that period of time, but in a more structured way than in the previous drafts, in which the course of time was much less guided. In a pause, the audience was provided with both an entry to and an exit from this “free” condition. In the experiments, in which I had experienced the failure of not maintaining the liminal dramaturgy, I did not give them enough support for navigating these entries and exits. When dropping out of the subordinate relation, they could not find their way back.1
I continued the use of discursive references I had started in Drafts 1, 2 and 4, but now I referred not only to writings but also to live performances. My attempt was to link my (not-yet-named) parapractice of audience membership to this practice of writing, and to include contemporary and local artworks into the research as a substantial part of source material.
Each of the three versions of the book had a different reference: Trajal Harrell’s In the Mood for Frankie (30.7.2018), Joel Teixeira Neves’s Voyer (26.9.2017) and an anonymous performance (29.4.2016 & 20.11.2016) by Milja Aho, Anna-Mari Karvonen, Anna Mustonen and Emmi Venna.
1 Drummer and pedagogue Aakusti Oksanen has stated that the maker’s skill in a reciprocal system relies on their ability to compose pauses (Oksanen 27.10.2024).