“The hearts of the body beat,
the lungs pump air
the fingers radiate energy
The body thinks through presence, through shifts of attention, through relations
The body enjoys its mortality
The body reads the situation
The body wants
The body needs to pee
The body is flesh and blood
The hands of the body put down the papers, move into the time between pages.”
S u b o r d i n a t i o n t h r o u g h s l o w i n g d o w n
I traced tempo as one of the features of the subordinate relation between makers and audience members. I stated in the letter that “Often, when you give the audience agency to influence the progress of a performance, it will rush.” Slowing down the reader was something I had been doing since Portals in 2014. This had been especially important in the codex dramaturgies, in which I used a small amount of text on a large number of pages and the habitual pace of reading would work against my pursuit. I had often been explicitly instructive about it: “read slower”, “read even slower”, “read this page again” or “read the last pages again”. This was familiar to me also from my work as a theatre director. Manipulating audiences to function or experience in ways that are counter-intuitive to them was part of the artistic practice of making performances.
Rajni Shah and Tanja Tiekso, who have both worked on developing practices of listening, emphasize the importance of slowing down to actually perceive something. Shah opens their inspiring volume Experiments in Listening with a story of how they read the same book again and again, ever more slowly, and as a result enters a meditative mode of accessing the content of the text (Shah 2021b, zine 1). Tiekso in turn addresses the impatience of musicians to actually listen and describes her own development through boredom and fear towards a practice of listening, in which nothing happens but meaning emerges as experiences accumulate (Tiekso 2024, 17-19, 27).
What I was doing with my proposals to my audience members was much smaller than what Tiekso and Shah did, but my aim was similar: to become aware of the resonance taking place within oneself or within a collective audience, one would have to slow down, pause and repeat.
L i m i n o i d d r a m a t u r g y
At the end of the letter I brought up the genre-related traditions of ending a performance and releasing the audience from its position—the passage to the postliminal state.
If this would be a stage, there would be a turn at this point, simultaneously reflecting the whole work. Something that would stretch for a moment and then be discharged, giving the audience permission to applaude. Letters do not get applause.
This part in the text was based on observations I had made in my drafts—their audiences were sometimes uncertain, whether it was appropriate to applause or not. This would continue to be repeated at times throughout the series. For example in different iterations of the second examined artistic part, Audience Body, the behaviour of audiences would vary: some audiences would applaude, some not. I interpret this as a confirmation of my assumption that the works were situated between genres, each of which would have their own conventions of creating a context-appropriate version of liminoid dramaturgy.
R e s p o n s a b i l i t y
In this draft, for the first time I articulated the responsibility (coupled with privilege) of the audience, a topic that has been exhaustively experimented on by performance artists, when giving them agency over the course of actions taking place. To give an example, in Giorgio Convertito’s Hotel Room Encounters (which I would attend half a year after this draft) I received the responsibility for the whole course of events right at the beginning. As the audience member of this performance for one I arrived at a hotel and was directed to the door of a specific hotel room. Convertito came to the door dressed in a bathrobe and invited me in. Then he told that we have half an hour and we can do anything I want. (Hotel Room Encounters 29.1.2020)
...a new fragile body is born
bearing an unprecedent responsibility for its priviledged position
This responsibility is highlighted by works like Hotel Room Encounters. One can claim that they only render visible something that exists in all performances. In most cases this responsibility is not explicated by the makers, which can be seen as a measure that supports accessibility: to balance the intensity of the condition of art, the audience are partly released from the responsibility they would have in the modality of the everyday. An example of this release is the concept of the “fourth wall” in the tradition of theatre, denoting an implicit agreement that the actors behave as if the audience was not there. When the fourth wall is in its place, the audience is not expected to intervene in the performance. Conversely, in many works that belong to the tradition of performance art, this release is not exercised and the audience is challenged by the makers to take responsibility in a situation, the ethical rules of which are ambiguous. This was also the case with Hotel Room Encounters: while Convertito stated that we could do what I want, it was clear that there would be some limitations to that. As the content of those limitations was not disclosed, the condition was ambiguous and I was forced to contemplate my own desires and negotiate them with the performer. The work required response-ability.