The ninth draft was composed of 33 personal, customized letters.
As a part of its programme, the international Baltic Circle Theatre Festival organized a seminar on the influence of art, in which a collection of artists, researchers, funders and other influencers were invited. I received a commission to realize an “intervention” in the event.
I asked the organizers to provide me with a list of participants, based on which I wrote a personal letter to each registered attendee. The letters contained a shared structure, which functioned as a dramaturgy of reading, tying the readers into a partly similar rhythm. Within that structure some parts of the content were unique to each letter. Some of the participants I knew from beforehand and used our shared history and my knowledge of their work as material. In the case of the participants whom I did not know previously, I searched for information online, familiarising myself with their work as much as possible in my time frame.
As the participants arrived at the event, they received an envelope, which was marked with their name and an instruction to “Open at 2.30pm”.
In the letters I introduced the idea of an audience as a collective body. “The audience body looks into the space through the eyes of its members.” The letter throws out several ambiguous proposals: that the audience body “thinks as presence, transfers of attention, relations”, it is a “shared force”, a “possible monster” (Sofaer, 2009) or the “ghost of performance”. The audience body would later become a central concept of my research and the title of the second examined artistic part of the doctorate.
L i m i n o i d d r a m a t u r g y
After the troubled experiences in Drafts 4 and 7, I managed to create an artistically satisfactory form of liminoid dramaturgy for Draft 9. The distribution of the envelopes to audience members who entered the seminar and the information on the envelope: their name and the request to open it at a specific time a few hours later created an atmosphere of anticipation and mystery. The opening of a sealed envelope is both a symbolic and a concrete act of disclosure and irreversibility. First waiting for and then executing this act together, simultaneously with others, created a strong sense of preliminality.
Reading of the letter was in turn the liminoid space itself. The intertwining of the personal (the parts of text that the reader could recognize as custom-made for themselves only) and the shared (the act of turning the page together) enabled a collective and intimate experience of a condition outside of the everyday. The reader could also feel the time of this condition in their hands as there were less and less unread pages. The final page marked the end of liminality and the exit into the postliminal condition.
Arguably there was an audience also in all the previous experiments. However, an experience of a collective body, with its internal and outreaching charges, was enhanced by a dramaturgical structure which supported the emergence of a collective liminoid process of transformation.
I n t e n s i t y t h r o u g h t h e c o m p o s i t i o n o f t i m e
As can be seen in the section on liminoid dramaturgy above, the composition of time developed quite a lot by the time I realized Draft 9. There was the waiting between receiving the envelope and opening it. There was the simultaneous turning of a new page and the collective synchronization created by that. There was the time of writing the letter which was both marked as a datum at the beginning of the letter and tied to the amount of work that composing the letter had taken, which probably could be felt by the reader.
The audience body that this draft created was still roughly in the same format as before: individuals who had gathered to attend the work simultaneously. The aesthetic gestures listed above made this contemporaneous quality of time even thicker by emphasizing expectation, by using a personal address from me to each individual who had arrived and by pointing out the moments when the members of this audience were attentive towards each other.
Through customizing the letters for the actual members of my audience, I wanted to address the relation of the maker and the audience by explicating what is by default implied. Unlike in art in general, the audience members of Draft 9 were not fictive in the sense of Iser’s implied reader.
The personal address emphasized the singular quality of the event, which I further enhanced by referring specifically to my experiences of the Baltic Circle Festival across several years. This was due to the subject of the seminar, the effectivity of art, which was based on a multi-year research project conducted at these festivals. Artistic researcher Pekka Kantonen gave a lecture of his work in the project. Kantonen’s research was done with his generational filming method (Kantonen 2017), and I had been one of his interviewees1. In addition, I referred to the qualities of the room we were in. The letter was specific with regard to the context, the space and the attendees.
This specificity exemplifies the characteristics of esitystaide/beforemance art, within which the implied audience and the actual audience are superimposed and intertwined, creating a mode of complicity that still preserves an asymmetric relation between the performative and the resonant component.
The medium of print: the letter2
Like a book, a letter is often composed of several pages. The pages of a letter are normally not attached together, but still meant to be read in a specific order. Personal letters are also usually closed in an envelope and directed to a specific person by writing their name on it.
This letter had four A4-sized pages, each printed on one side and folded twice so that each page was divided into three sections by the horizontal lines of the folds. When folded this way, the letter fit into a 110x220mm envelope. This structured the content of the letter. Four pages became four parts of the performance and I used this to pace the collective reading: the letter instructed the readers to take a break at the end of each page and wait for everyone to finish it before turning the next. The folds further divided each page into three parts and I emphasized this by leaving empty lines between these sections.
As with Draft 7 (and the works from 2014-17 that inspired it), I was conscious of the amount of text in relation to the event of collective reading. There is a lot to perceive in an event like that and it can be difficult to focus on the text. So I attempted to make it short and light enough for people to be able to stomach it.
I used these methods (the reiterations of the collective pause in between the pages, the division of the text with pages and their folds, the limiting of the number of words and sentences) to control and ensure the emergence of a liminal dramaturgy. My aesthetic choices were governed foremost by the need to find a balance between the complicity of the audience and the asymmetric and subordinate relation between myself and them. I would continue iterating the medium of the letter in Drafts 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, A Reading of Audience, Drafts 24, 25, 27 and the Audience Body.
1 In Kantonen 2020 there is also a short video excerpt of Draft 9 as a part of a video portrait of me Henkilökuva: esitystaiteilija Tuomas Laitinen, at 11:00.
2 I had some background to using letters as the medium of a performance. In 2010, as a part of a series of works called 12 Etudes on Everlasting Life by the Reality Research Center, I realized an epistolary performance in collaboration with the artist and current doctoral candidate at Tutke, James Lórien MacDonald. In the 2nd Etude on Everlasting Life, we wrote 66 letters in three days and sent them by post to an equal number of recipients.