Since I applied for doctoral studies, I had been bothered by the limitations of my own personal perspective. In Draft 8 I tried to expand it by borrowing a method from theatre studies: using informants who attend a performance and then asking them to tell me about their experience. I tried it out with four different groups of people, three of which did not consist of my colleagues. At this point I was not yet sure if I would continue this method for a longer period of time or not.
I varied my printout format. On four occasions during November 2018 I invited a group of people to attend a performance I had chosen and as we entered the venue, I gave them a programme, which contained an orientation and an invitation to share something of their experience after the show. One could see this also as a ready-made version of my developing research practice—instead of organizing an event myself, I used something that was already there and added a layer on top of it.
The first performance was Radical Light by Salva Sanchis, attended on the 3rd of November 2018 in the context of the Moving in November festival, at the Cultural Center Stoa (Radical Light 3.11.2018). I attended with two volunteers who were customers of the Deaconess Foundation, an organization who among other things helps people with substance abuse. I had been working with their cultural services earlier and asked their producer Anssi Pirttineva, if there might be some interested people to take part in this kind of an experiment. Two persons volunteered and both wrote me some thoughts after the event.
The second was Over Your Fucking Body (work-in-progress) by Janina Rajakangas and Neil Callaghan, attended on the 5th of November, also in the context of the Moving in November festival, at Kunsthalle Helsinki (Over Your Fucking Body (work-in-progress) 5.11.2018). I attended the event with a class of drama students from the Rudolf Steiner High School in Helsinki, 11 of whom wrote me their thoughts after the event.
The third was Death at Work by Pop Up Teatr, attended on the 13th of November, in the context of the Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival, at Kanneltalo (Death at Work 13.11.2018). I attended this with the participants of a practicum seminar at the Performing Arts Research Center Tutke: my supervisor Esa Kirkkopelto, lecturers Laura Gröndahl and Pilvi Porkola, and doctoral candidates Karolina Kucia, Jaakko Ruuska and Henna Laininen. All of them wrote down their thoughts after the event and took part in a conversation in the local bar.
The fourth event was Audience by choreographer Valtteri Raekallio and his company Raekallio Corp, taking place at the Museum of Technology in Helsinki (Audience 30.11.2018). I invited theatre artists Helena Korpela and Hazem Al Sharif. With Nowat Theatre Al Sharif had hosted a part of the Palestine Performance Symposium, where I realized my Draft 5. Korpela had also worked and lived at Al Arroub Refugee Camp in Palestine. I knew that the work was in some way immersive and had something to do with exercising military power, so I invited people with personal experience about being subjected to such power. After the performance we had a discussion which I recorded (Al Sharif & Korpela 30.11.2018).
Translations of the excerpts from Finnish texts below are mine.
G a t h e r i n g
Through my invitation, I created an audience within an audience and a gathering within a gathering. The participants of my experiment could feel themselves part of both of these gatherings, with fellow conspirators infiltrated among the larger audience. The orientation given in the draft could also distance the participants from the general audience, since the participants had a different agenda from the others.
The phenomenon of a gathering within a gathering exists also in audiences in which there are no experiments of this kind at play. Friends and acquaintances attend performances together, observe and mirror each other’s reactions especially when situated next to each other and discuss the event in their own small circles in the intermissions and afterwards. Furthermore, experimental performances have their own professionally sophisticated typical audiences, in which many people are familiar with each other through collegial relations. In most cases, audiences have complex group dynamics that cannot be reduced to relations between separate individuals.
Several informants had experienced aspects of gathering and plurality.
An audience is born as a part of an event, as a part of a performance, from the witnesses of the event. The audience is one, and the audience is many. I sense or feel compassion towards the performers, but can I say if it is my own feeling or a collective, shared feeling?
An audience does not really emerge—I sit alone on my seat, even if there is a familiar person on both sides. The black space somehow isolates us from each other, all gazing straight towards the stage.
I regularly feel like coughing in the auditorium, as if my body wants to remind of its own disturbing presence. It worries me especially when the rest of the audience is quiet.
L i m i n o i d d r a m a t u r g y
I applied liminoid dramaturgy to the practice of using informants—or further enhanced the existing liminal structure present in the presentation of the artwork itself. Before entering the performance, they received my print, which offered a preliminal orientation to their following audience membership. The performance itself served as the liminoid phase. After the performance, the writing of a testimonial, as well as the discussion, served as the postliminal phase, re-orienting the participants towards the everyday.
In addition, several of the participants described how they felt like an outsider at the beginning and how this feeling of alienation turned into a feeling being a part of the whole—describing a transformational experience that was especially geared towards dismantling the separation from the others involved.
An uncomfortable feeling, hard to concentrate. I felt myself an outsider, which was enhanced by my choice of seating: the backrow, although in the middle. At first I experienced the dancers as machine-like individuals, in the end a community, a team. Peter Greenaway’s films and Chaplin’s Dictator crossed my mind. The music was good—possibly because of that, I joined the performance and in the end I experienced being one with everyone, I felt that the stage itself was an audience.
(A testimonial from Radical light 3.11.2018)
I feel like an outsider. I see people moving in front of me. They ask the audience to move themselves. Still feeling a bit outside. The next time I come in the room, they [the performers] are walked around [by audience members]. In my mind is the continuous possibility to influence, which makes me feel lousy; I am responsible for these people’s movement. Yet, when I get the chance to walk them myself, I feel like a performer and adapt to that state like a chameleon, outsiderness is left on the outside. A smile rises on my lips and I get inspired.
I felt the shaking really annoying. I had time to think that I am not gonna be able to watch, if it is like this. But the performance changed into something very interesting. The performers made the space something shared by everybody. I dared to join in and even enjoy it. The border between the performers and the audience became thinner and thinner. They directed the dance in some strange way and yet the audience remained free. I did not feel awkward at all.
The events baffled me but soon I got used to it. Because of the space I felt present as a spectator. When they started to include spectators in the movements, I felt more like we were a part of the whole.
At first I felt confusion and anxiety when the performers made contact with the audience. After a moment it made me interested. The audience became part of the performance. We were in a way all one. The so-called border between the audience and the stage did not exist anymore.
(Testimonials from Over Your Fucking Body (work-in-progress) 5.11.2018)
Some of the informants also referred to the oddity and discomfort induced by the experience, hinting towards the abnormality of liminoid states, but without any description of a transformation.
I felt relaxed, but weird.
Somehow it was fun to see how a child copied the movement of the performers. It affected me. The stage affects the audience and the audience affects the stage.
I think the performance was quite distressing, since it involved the audience so that the audience had to guide them, which felt to me very uncomfortable, since one right away thinks that this has to be done right in a specific way or the others will judge you.
I felt anxiety and fear in the audience. We were wanted in an “endless” performance. Fortunately you could be freely in the space.
The performance was very interesting. It still baffles me and brought somehow a really weird feeling. I felt confusion, anxiety, disorder, joy and elation.
(Testimonials from Over Your Fucking Body (work-in-progress) 5.11.2018)
A n a u d i t o r i u m c o n c e i v e s a u d i e n c e s
An audience belongs to the idea of an auditorium by default and we as spectators thus turn into an audience when entering an auditorium.
Audience appears at the moment of the decision is made to go to see a performance. Or is it only a potential audience of a potential theatre? Maybe the audience appears in proximity to the architecture of the theatre. Finally when stepping over the threshold of the theatre space.
(Testimonials from Death at Work 13 November 2018)
These two informants continued my proposal in Draft 2 that a spatial transition can be used to conceive an audience. They brought up the suggestive power of a space which is constructed in a way that attendees who are familiar with the cultural context recognize it as an auditorium or a theatre. People stepping into an auditorium or a theatre space transform into an audience by default, without having to think about it. This is useful for artists—if the maker wants an audience who is an audience without question, it is useful to place the work in a theatre or a similar venue with an auditorium. If the maker wants to question or challenge the conventions of forming an audience, it may be useful to place the work elsewhere.
I m a g i n a t i v e r e s o n a n c e s
I have the right to close my eyes, choose my sitting position. I can enjoy this state, rest in it, visit the border of sleep, I feel safe. The performance does not force me to follow it. I can think of other things. Maybe something that the performance brings to my mind.
One area of resonance are associative processes; the way the audience mind is triggered to travel to places unanticipated by the makers of the artwork. The audience is then complicit by allowing their imagination work.
I notice watching two simultaneous images: a performer on stage in the midst of chairs and heathers and my own memories of death-related moments that have happened during my life. The memories are more alive than the stage.
Contextualisation: appropriating art works
The appropriation of artworks for research purposes is a normal procedure in academic research, and attending art can be considered field work, through which the researcher collects material. Non-artistic research of art would be virtually impossible without appropriating art in the process and it is in general seen as a positive act, which enriches art itself and the discourse that concerns it.
In the context of art, a similar appropriative gesture could be seen as part of the lineage of ready-made works, in which a part of the existing reality is framed as art. These kinds of works are related to audiencing as a practice, discussed in Chapter 3.2.
Using informants
I appropriated this method of using informants from the field of humanities and have used it as a part of research practice sporadically, without a systematic approach. In this way my methodology has been, though somewhat consistent, intuitive and emergent, and thus faithful to an artistic approach.
Using informants reformulated their position as audience members radically. Even if I had discussed things with audience members of the previous drafts, this time around producing text was introduced as a part of their role and function, thus disturbing their assumed non-active position.
