I had joined a ‘research cell’ which was planning a section of the Research Pavillion, which was a project that the University of the Arts Helsinki was organizing in Venice, as an independent exhibition simultaneously with the Venice Biennale starting in May 2019. This research cell was convened by Alex Arteaga and its focus was the relationship of phenomenology and artistic research.
We had a meeting at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki in January 2019 and each of the participants presented something to the others. I decided to make an iteration of the letter format I had prototyped in Draft 9. This time, unlike in all the other drafts so far, the draft proposed reading aloud.
A u d i e n c e a s a p h e n o m e n o n
At the beginning of this motif thread in Draft 1 I described how my way of articulating the subject of my research changed over time. What to call the audience? A question? A function? A condition? A practice? Phenomenology offered a solution: it could be seen as a phenomenon.
Phenomenology has been an influential philosophical orientation in the development of esitystaide/beforemance art and the local research-oriented field of performing arts. Finnish phenomenologist Juha Himanka (who also participated in our research cell) explains in the preface to the Finnish edition of Edmund Husserl’s The Idea of Phenomenology that in Husserl’s phenomenology “the event and action take precedence over the static and completed” (Himanka 1995, 21, my translation). Husserl himself presents phenomenology as a “method and a way of thinking” (Husserl, 1995, 41). My feeling is that in the field of philosophical reference points phenomenology suites performing artists well since it offers a method, which prioritizes actual experiences and actions, at the expense of conceptual systems and abstractions. It seemed like a suitable way to position my issue as well.
There are examples of phenomenological research projects in my institution, the Theatre Academy in Helsinki. Leena Rouhiainen’s dissertation uses Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to interpret interviews conducted with Finnish freelance dance artists (Rouhiainen 2003). In their dissertation Kirsi Monni develops an ontology of dance based on Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology (Monni 2004). Dancer-researcher Kirsi Heimonen states that their research is related to phenomenology through “striking straight into the matter without preconceived theories or notions” and that the phenomenological method is present in their work through the attempt to write “as close to dancing as possible” (Heimonen 2009, 38). Actor-researcher Mikko Bredenberg follows Husserl’s method of reduction to conduct an investigation of “scenic imagination”, a phenomenon exposed by his acting practice (Bredenberg 2017).
My methodology was emergent and intuitive, it did not consistently follow Husserl’s challenge to methodically defer all belief in a world of beings in order to perceive the “pure phenomenon” (Husserl 1995, 63-64). However, the phenomenological method—initially presented by Husserl and developed in the context of artistic research by the above mentioned scholars—resonated with my approach. Articulating the parapractice of audience membership as a diary of attended performances (see Appendix 6.1) as well as the way I had used informants in Drafts 8 and 10 were inclined towards describing the phenomenon as it was experienced. I was trying to write, and invited my informants to write, as close to audience membership as possible, to paraphrase Heimonen. More importantly, the draft series started to become an attempt to facilitate situations in which my audiences could attain a phenomenological attitude towards audience membership; in which they could examine it when and how it appeared, in situ.
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
By now I had developed a style of performance, in which each audience member had their own text, which they read silently. This silence was not a rule or a request articulated by me, but an implicitly adopted way of behaving collectively. These silent readings presented different renderings of the habitual condition of an audience at a live event: even if the format was not conventional, there was no expectation of any individual member of the audience to take the stage and express something to the rest. The audience could linger in a seemingly passive role while being offered a way to be reflectively active without anyone else being able to distinguish how engaged they were. This absence of explicit and manifest participation enabled the audience to stay within their invisible protective bubble, which allows audience members to feel relatively secure.
I had however received, and would later on receive, some questions from audience members of my drafts about the issue of reading silently. Some were expecting a reading aloud, some fearing one. As a result I wanted to experiment with the issue. Also, in the first meeting of the phenomenological reading circle on the 17th of November 2018, we had engaged in reading collectively a text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty aloud. This was a beautiful experience of collective contemplation and thinking and I wanted to build on that.
So I wrote a letter addressed to “Alex and everybody” and handed it to Alex Arteaga. He opened the envelope and started reading. The text requested that Alex would read it aloud, referred to our shared experience of reading Merleau-Ponty and suggested also that Alex would hand over the letter at an appropriate point and the next person would continue, and so on.
Reading aloud in my experience created an atmosphere of sharing. It demanded that the audience members would perform and thus partly compromised their protected and primarily resonant position. However, my status as the author remained constant and my implicit voice could be heard throughout the event via the voices of the audience. The task articulated in the letter held the subordination to my performance intact and a liminal dramaturgy was supported by the aesthetics of the text. Audience members took turns in becoming the performer and then returned to the collective audience body by passing the letter on to the next person. I remained the author of the text as well as the director of the performative event of reading.
It was a specific type of an audience. I did not know everyone from before, but probably they all had an open attitude towards each other since we would be working side by side in the future. Reading in turns supported this mission by bringing the event close to the frame of a ritual (as presented in the chapter on Draft 5) or a workshop: everyone is a part of it and the external position of the spectator does not exist.
Phenomenological practice
Since the beginning of the draft series I had been proposing a self-reflective perspective or had offered self-reflective practices for my audiences. These proposals were the practical manifestations of my attempt to invite actual live audiences to enter my research in the making. The framework of phenomenology seemed to support this aspiration well.
Husserlian phenomenological practice is based on suspending the so called natural attitude, which means the way we are “in our assumptions and thinking interested of those things which are at each moment and self-evidently given” (Husserl, 1995, 33). Himanka gives an example: when we hear a song, we are inclined to hear more than the sounds—we hear a singer singing. The imagined singer can however be removed and the sounds remain as they are. Similarly in general the “things” that are “given”, our predetermined beliefs in a world that exists beyond our experiences, can be removed and phenomena remain as they are. (Himanka 1995, 18) Phenomenological practice based on Husserl’s thoughts would then begin with a deliberate suspension of the natural attitude, in Husserl’s terms a phenomenological reduction. Bredenberg describes this reduction as “an act detaching us from the blind habit of the natural attitude, in which our routine has turned into our reality” (Bredenberg 2017, 72). Interestingly, also one of the informants in Draft 10 articulated their experience of audience membership quite similarly: “We know that we are supposed to listen, keep silent, clap, ask questions and respect the speaker. We know this because these habits are taught to us since we were little. When we entered the room, we knew right away, what we are supposed to do” (see the source in Draft 10). The purpose of the reduction is to examine phenomena as they are.
In the research cell we engaged in reading Max van Manen, who has written particularly about phenomenology as a practice (I also quote van Manen in the letter). Van Manen writes that the purpose of the suspension of the natural attitude is to “open myself and try to bracket my presumptions, common understandings and scientific explanations” (van Manen 2014, page unknown). The term bracketing is used by scholars to account for the first phase of phenomenological reduction, i.e. the suspension of the natural attitude. Husserl himself used the Greek term epoché, and the English translation of Husserl’s Idees 1 by Fred Kersten reads that we put all our positions “out of action”, “parenthesize” them (Husserl 1983, 94-95).
Appropriately, I had concretely used the typographic gesture of bracketing as a way to distinguish a metalevel of text from the body of text in several of my drafts (see the metatext described in the chapter on Draft 2). This typographical bracketing had a similar function to the phenomenological one, i.e. making audience members aware of things that they normally would accept without stopping to consider them.
The phenomenological method seemed to articulate a clear framing for what I already was to some extent doing. As I wrote in the letter: “This natural attitude would usually direct the focus on stage and disregard the phenomenality of audiencing itself”.
Geometry
Draft 11 was the first time I used geometrical forms as one of the gestures with which I approached the audience. Geometry, and especially sacred geometry in the spirit of Western esoteric tradition, had been part of the work in the Mysteries of Love -trilogy. It was practiced especially by Visa Knuuttila, who would later on collaborate with me in the graphic design of Audience Body.
Towards Audience Body, geometrical thinking became more and more important to me, as I attempted to formulate my ideas into simple three-dimensional illustrations, that would deliver conceptual ideas better than mere words. This kind of expression would be prototyped in Draft 13.
