Like Draft 8, also Draft 10 used an already existing event as a context to collect material from informants. This time the context was not a theatre or dance performance but a research day organized by the research project How To Do Things with Performance by artistic researchers Annette Arlander, Tero Nauha, Hanna Järvinen and Pilvi Porkola. I had prepared a notebook with an invitation to describe the experience of being in the audience of the current event. At the beginning of the event, I gave the notebook to a member of the audience sitting in the end of one of the rows of seats. The book instructed the reader to give it to someone else once ready.
The task I invited the attendees to join was to gather observations, thoughts and ideas on how to audience; to describe the experience of being in the audience in situ.
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
The instructions at the beginning of the book suggested that in the context of a seminar the audience can be defined as a counterpart to each speaker, lecturer, presenter, performer or such. Following this I offered two ways to distinguish an audience in a seminar situation.
1. The audience are those who are present but are not presenting at a specific moment.
2. The one whose name is mentioned along the title of each session is not in the audience. The rest of the attendees are.
These points defined the audience in terms of a polarity, as an opposition or a contrast to a performance. In the first point the actual attendees of the event are divided into two groups—presenters and audience members. The membership of each group can change over time, as attendees take turns as presenters. The second point continued the Foucauldian train of thought, in which naming someone as the maker, author or a presenter would exclude them from the audience.
Medium of print: the collective notebook
To be accurate, this was not properly a print, even if I had printed instructions on the use of the book and had attached them to it. However, it was another iteration of things that are on paper and available for the audience to use. This time their proposed role was however more active—they were offered a book that was basically missing content and asked to produce something so there would be then something to read (for me). It was thus similar to Draft 8. When audience members entered the role of informant, their task was no longer simply to resonate—they joined the makers of the thinking process of my research and probably through this re-positioning gained some agency in relation to the presenters of the event.
