I was invited to prepare a manifesto for the future of the artistic doctorate by Artistic Doctorates in Europe (ADiE)-project. ADiE was a three-year project organized by three Universities and five art organizations in Finland, Sweden and the UK. It was aimed at reviewing, supporting and developing research level degrees in dance and performance in these three countries. The event at the Zodiak Center for New Dance in Helsinki, where I performed along with the UK-based dance artist Rachel Krische and Sweden-based choreographer Anne Juren, was the final event of the project. It took place in connection with CARPA6—the 6th Colloquium on Artistic Research in Performing Arts. The late and great artistic researcher Kirsi Heimonen mentored me during the process.
I iterated my letter performance again. As the commission was about future of artistic doctorates, I decided to work on a curriculum of the future and prepared 21 versions of a letter, each of which contained a different part of that imaginary curriculum. I problematized the notions of manifesto, future and curriculum and envisioned a wonderous composition of educational contents. Each of the letters also had additions made with a pencil on the paper, making each of the 63 letters unique. In addition, I organized an unconventional seating arrangement for the performance space at the Zodiak Stage using the black chairs available at the site.
The letter included a recap when the reader was halfway in their reading, outlining the basic ideas:
The draft was large-scale compared to the previous ones and anticipated the scope of the coming examined artistic parts. Since there were 21 different versions or “chapters”, there were a lot of references and materials considered that are related to the content of my research. This is evident in the table of contents and the list of references added below. It shows how research processes can branch out into manifold directions. I will not however go through these perspectives here to avoid expanding the commentary even further, but the letters are available in the appendix in case the reader wants to dig deeper.
An edited video of the work and a post-performance discussion is available on ADiE’s website (Three Manifestos for the Future of the Artistic Doctorate, accessed in 24.1.2025).
I had started to choreograph the audience body in Draft 13 through spatial desing and thematized the chair as an audience-related instrument in Draft 14. In Draft 17,
which took place in a contemporary dance space and was thus related to the notion of choreography, I developed this line of inquiry further and constructed an elaborate
spatial chair composition to be used by the collective body of the audience. This body would have multiple perspectives at the same time. The initial idea for the chair composition had emerged at the Christmas party of Performing Arts Research Center
nine months before, when I had improvised a Christmas tree as a part of the decoration
of the party space.
The text did not mention the audience body, but emphasized the importance of the collective—since all letters were unique, the whole would be read by “us”.
This suggested the existence of a being which was “more than the sum of its parts”, a cognition that was essentially plural, a cognition that included bodies that were mobilized and choreographed by a combination of textual and spatial design.
T e r r i t o r i e s o f e m a n c i p a t i o n
When a subordinate relation between the makers and the audience has been established, some of the agency can be and inevitably is distributed also to the audience. This was evident implicitly already several times in the Draft series, when the motif of subordination was experimented on: for example when the audience members of Draft 2, 4 and 5 were left with 30 or 45 minutes of unstructured time or when they took turns in reading aloud in Draft 11. Explicit it started to become when I offered them practices in the etudes of Draft 14.
I exemplified this distribution of agency with the page below, emphasizing the fact that the audience has been, and by default is, guided through an art experience by the makers (in this case, by me). There was also an added hypotheses: the guidance, provided by the makers, contains gaps, pauses and invitations, most of them implicit, opening experiential zones and territories, in which the audience can roam freely. The makers provide their audiences with limited doses of emancipation. These doses might be illusory, actually providing just an experience of emancipation and not emancipation per se, but they might also be elements that carry a risk of compromising subordination and the arc of liminal dramaturgy. Such risks may result in disappointments or conversely in an enhancement of the beforemative charge—the tensions related to the relationship between the performance and its audience body.
C o m p l i c i t y t h r o u g h s i n g u l a r i t y
This is a curriculum. It is presented and received in a specific way: specific in time, place, materials and attendees. No-one else, nowhere else and at no other point in time could present or receive this curriculum. So, our time is precious.
This perspective on the motif of complicity has been there since the beginning of the Draft series, but it was articulated for the first time in this one. All of my research experiments had been context-specific, composed to be received at a specific moment in a specific location. They were not available for mass production and copying, instead they were unique and singular. Even if the paper would last, the work itself was forever gone after its event. The singularity of each letter further underlined this motif. I was situating my practice in the context of performing arts.
As an example of context-specificity, I borrowed the title of the work from a lecture held at CARPA6 just in the days preceding my work. I am not sure anymore if it was Erin Manning (Manning 2019) or Vida Midgelow (Midgelow 2019) who quoted the White Queen from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland—I have lost my notes about it. As many of the attendees had also attended CARPA6, I thought that someone might pick up this reference and it would then highlight the singularity and contemporaneity of the draft. Carroll writes:
“I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.”
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
The singularity of the event, which is present in the performing arts in general, highlights the complicity of the audience. If an audience in its contemporaneity is the only audience body ever to experience a work, their appearance is necessary for the work to exist in the first place. Performing arts are audience-dependent. When this audience body has appeared, their way of taking part is fundamental to the quality of the existence of the work. Thus this body is highly complicit by default.
Expanded referencing
An the end of each letter I included three lists contextualizing the event. The first one listed the 21 different chapters, marked which one of them the reader was holding and informed the reader of the themes the other audience members had been engaged with. The second was a list of sources that I had used when writing the work. The third listed all those members of the audience by name, who had registered to attend, which was close to the actual composition of the audience.
This gesture was expanding the norm in different ways. The list of chapters was common from the context of literature, but the structure I used here, in which each audience member could only read one chapter and was made aware of the other 20, emphasized an aspect of the phenomenon of audience in which each member has a different and singular experience and together these perspectives compose a collective event. The listing of sources was something I had done before; it was also familiar from the academic context. In the context of live performance it was very uncommon—this I have addressed already elsewhere. The list of attendees was the most unconventional gesture of the three and disturbed the expectation of an anonymous audience, whose impact on the work is typically left implicit and uncredited.