In February 2019, approximately a year after the first draft, I presented at Tutke’s Research seminar. I had prepared a presentation in two parts, first one a two-part lecture, the second a reading. The more elaborate table of contents read like this:
Scene I: Backdrop (Auditorium 2, duration 15 min)
Scene II: Research Practices (Auditorium 2, duration 20 min)
Scene III: A Theory of Audience: draft 1 (Room 409, duration 30 min)
Break (location free, duration 15 minutes)
Discussion (Auditorium 2/Room 409, duration 90 min).
During the first two scenes I read a pre-written script, which was also projected bilingually on the screen of the auditorium. Then we moved to another space, where I had arranged a reading installation, composed of three tables arranged in a triangle shape and three A3-sized scripts on them—continuing the geometrical method. Each of the three scripts contained one chapter of the text I had named A Theory of Audience.
B u i l d i n g a t h e o r e t i c a l p r o p o s a l
For the thirteenth draft I drafted a second version of a theoretical model that would describe the phenomenon of audience (the first one being the one in Draft 3). This version could already be called a “model”—while the first version was a more an intuitive combination of characteristics, this one proposed a comprehensive system that would function as an outline of the phenomenon. Also, I incorporated the process of building a theoretical proposal in the work, as it contained and collected some materials from the previous drafts, for example the notes I took with Olga Spyropoulou in Draft 12. This inclusion and tracing of the experimental process inside new experiments, creating a super positioning of several layers of research on top of each other, has continued and is present here in the commentary as well.
The thesis of A Theory of Audience was a three-dimensional coordinate system, each axis of which corresponded to a dimension, and a polar tension, necessary for an audience to emerge. In this model, audience is a condition which one can enter and exit. When being affected by this condition, you are in a nexus of the three lines of tension, between three pairs of opposites. You are moving in between being inside and outside, in between being one or being many and in between what is familiar and alien to you.
Outside and inside
The first chapter dealt with audience being constantly in the tension between outside and inside: when entering a theatre, “we are within the event, immersed in the space of theatre, and simultaneously outside of the stage”. I proposed that as an audience, we do not want to actually be inside, but we want an experience of being inside. This charge is related to the condition of liminoid dramaturgy, a concept which I adopted at a later stage of my research.
Familiar and alien
Lastly, I suggested that an audience requires a tension between something familiar and something alien. Without familiarity, we would not dare to attend, without alienation, we would not have the interest. For an audience experience to be worthwhile and safe enough at the same time, a dynamic balance between the two is necessary. This theme is also related to liminoid dramaturgy: when entering the sphere of liminality, one steps away from the familiar everyday and when returning to that familiar sphere, one is changed by an alien influence. When viewed as a dramaturgical procedure, the tension between the familiar and the alien seems to have a teleological justification: it enables change by re-merging those who have been transformed by liminality, with the world that supposedly is more or less same as before.
L i m i n o i d d r a m a t u r g y
The relationship between theatre and ritual was something that had been present in my work and in the genre of esitystaide/beforemance art at large (see Draft 5). In this context rituals are mostly understood as transformational events, in which the participants enter a liminal space and return to the everyday changed in some way.
For A Theory of Audience, I coined the term ritualesque, to account simultaneously for the similarity and difference between performance and ritual, and the lightness of the transformational promise contained in performances, when compared to the promise of rituals in the context of ceremonial magic or neoshamanism. I proposed that when audiencing, we are playing a ritual. Later I realized that these wordings are close to Victor Turner’s definition of the liminoid, which namely is a lighter version of the liminal, a kind of quasi-liminal state.
A d e s i g n e d s p a c e
I had at first approached the variable of space by composing a dense audience body via gathering them into the same space, via rendering the entering of space as a threshold that marked the limits of the liminoid state and via acknowledging the locality of the specificity of spaces where audience bodies gather. In Draft 13 I experimented with spatial design to induce specific spatial behaviour and movement of the audience body.
Installing three chapters of the work on three tables that formed a triangle in the center of the room and placing some chairs on the sides of the room proposed and initiated a specific way for the audience body to situate itself and move in the space. The tables suggested standing in front of them reading, forming a triangle of audience body parts. The chairs suggested that one could also sit there and view the other parts of the audience body engaged in reading. Also the lighting design, three table lamps shedding light on the scripts, supported the idea of a stage in the middle of the room. It was relatively effortless to move between these two positions. Also, one could step out of the room, although I had not explicitly suggested that. Due to the installation-type format and the light in the centre of the room, it was quite easy to do that without drawing attention. One of the attendees also did step out and returned.
Installation
In addition to functioning as a carrier of liminoid dramaturgy, the way I installed the script in space proposed a non-linear reading. The three chapters were presented as equal and there was no suggested order of reading. Also the table of contents visible in an image above was non-linear. The draft superimposed the temporal structures of a theatre and a gallery. The time of entry was same for everyone and the duration was proportional to that of a performance rather than of an exhibition. Simultaneously, the parts were not set in a chronological order like they would be typically in the performing arts but each audience member could choose the way they attended or did not attend to the different parts of the work.
In the text I asked the audience to “take notice of ––– how theory takes form as a live event”. This was a re-iteration of the second dilemma (in Chapter 3.1), that troubled me when formulating my research methodology: the incompatibilities of the genres of discursive text and live events. One way of translating, or expanding, the three theoretical axes of the proposed system was the way of installing the text in a space. I attempted to engage in spatial design, in addition to the text itself, as a vehicle of my theoretical content.
Media of reading: footnotes
I used footnotes as a dramaturgical gesture, technique which I had prototyped in the private exchange with my supervisor Esa Kirkkopelto (in Draft 6).
The different chapters of Draft 13 used different iterations of the footnote aesthetic. In the prologue, there was no body of text (i.e. a pause, see Draft 7). In Outside and Inside on each page was one quote from an audience member I had interviewed, while my own research writing was located in the footnote. In One and Many the same continued, but I had composed dialogues from audience comments. In Familiar and Alien the footnote structure eventually disintegrated.
At the time of realizing the draft I was also aware of an interesting historical parallel: when sacred Christian manuscripts were copied and commented on by monks in the middle ages, their commentary was scribbled in the margins of each page. Similarly, the commentary of my doctoral research could be seen as notes scribbled in the margins of the live events conducted during the research process. After the draft someone also pointed out to me that the lines of text in the lower edge of the paper resemble rows of people in the auditorium.
A couple of years later I came across other examples of the footnote aesthetic. Riikka Simpura’s article Post scriptum dealt with texts that contained no body of text but only footnotes, using the short story Viitteitä (Eng. References) by the Finnish writer Harry Salmenniemi (Salmenniemi 2020) and the lyrical essay The Body: an essay (2002) by Jenny Boully as examples . I did not get my hands on Boully’s essay, but Simpura makes a point of how it thematizes the absence of the body (of text) and that the texts either question Roland Barthes’ claim about the death of the author (Barthes 1993) or take this death to its extreme, where only a shadow of the writer is left to haunt the interpretation made of the missing text (Simpura 2020).
This was clearly linked to my evolving research practice, in which I deliberately realized performances in which no human performer body would enter the stage, but which were nevertheless haunted by my absent body, making the absence of a performer body debatable. Through the introduction of footnotes with no text body this gesture was repeated on the level of the page. Even when only footnotes remain, the body of the reader is needed for the content of the text to resonate somewhere. The performer body could be removed from an esitys/beforemance without compromising its existence, but the audience body would still be required.
