Draft 12 was realized in collaboration with the artist and student of Live Art and Performance Studies MA programme at Theatre Academy, Olga Spyropoulou. I was invited to work as her mentor. However, due to Olga’s wishes, it was more a collaboration than a hierarchical pedagogical relationship. One important feature of Olga’s work was making a contract between the two of us and then following it—as a form of participatory performance. We had shared a trip to Palestine and started our work with remembering a performance I realized there (see Draft 5). We drafted a contract, which dealt with realizing an experiment regarding the phenomenon of the audience. We aimed at searching for a limit of audiencing: realizing a performance where there would be no audience function at all. Below is a short version of the contract.
First we attended choreographer Mette Ingvartsen’s performance at the Sidestep contemporary dance festival (69 positions 6.2.2019). The work was kind of a lecture performance taking place at the Stoa cultural centre in Helsinki. The audience entered an installation situated onstage. The installation was composed of historical documents of “sexual performance art”, especially works from 1960's with an aspect of utopian sexuality. Ingvartsen’s lecture travelled through the installation, telling stories and re-staging parts of those performances (which was in an interesting parallel with the practice Olga and myself engaged with, telling each other stories of Ingvartsen’s performance).
The performance took place on Wednesday. Next Monday, when the festival was over, Olga and I re-entered the performance space at Stoa. Then we experimented on a technique of remembering: one of us narrated memories aloud from the performance while the other one typed everything that was said. Occasionally we swapped roles. The idea was that we would revisit the performance but both of us would stay active throughout the practice. Halting these activities to listen and resonate with the story should not take place at all.
Due to the inclusive quality of Olga's work, the contract also spelled out our personal foci.
An excerpt from Olga’s narration, transcribed by me (typos and misspellings are from the original transcription):
I remember looking a lot off her hair, the fringe and how it is cut. I don’t remember being significantly bored during the performance. I think perhaps because i was looking at the people. I was bored of her performance but not of the whole performance. Peoples reactions and in remember going really close to a person when i was trying to see what she was doing and the person freaked out
I also remember writing to someone who asked how was the performance. I answered, ”as a researcher i enjoyed but otherwise not”. I remember thinking that all the other people in the theatre were not so aware of dionysus and the theatre history and i also thought that you always find something greek anywhere. I also remember that i said that her performance lacked flesh and the only flesh was present in the choir when the people took over. I remember also thinking how a person that would have sex with her would see the performance. And perhaps all this research has ruined her sexual life. I also felt that it was not letting go or it was not giving the audience as much agency there was potential in a lot of scenes for the audience have more agency. Perhaps it is because dancers like to count and if you give agency to the audience you can’t exactly count. I remember thing that everything in this space much be used. And at some point were very anxious that there was still things that was not used and we would have to stay still but she didn’t use everything after all.
An excerpt from my narration, transcribed by Olga (typos and misspellings are from the original transcription):
something of this was disturbing me somewhere below then I remembered when she was describing this orgy that I remembered these instances that it was somekind odf an orgy like the wanderlust festival that I was writing for anf people fucking around anfdhanging around and really unconventional social space and then when I was looking at her using people like people who would be in the orgy the memory of the realy orgy was disturbing me because there was something more eye opening there but this thi was somehow too familiar I would understand everything here but that is of course also because of being part of so many participatory performancs in the audience what she did was sort of within that genre so recognizable that I had this this some sort of dissatisfaction there was this sort of tension wha ti f I come on the stage if I become part of the installation but that tension somehow has become not so interesting eanymore for me – – – I remember thinking about the haircut and the pubic hair but the hair in the head was cut in a straight line and this combination. And also thinking about athletics and that every body seems like an athlete’s body, the body structure the muscles the shape and also the (didn’t hear) and I also remember this thought that carolee sneeman wrote don’t do meatjoy and then she started to and I remembered when she said this sort of quote that she said of somewhere where abramovic was doing the serues and askes chris burden to do one of his performances and I don t remember which one it was and chris burden said no and then at some point I was thinking of the politics it was because of this Dionysus 69 I remember in the end Dionysus starts a presidential campaign which wwhen they did the performance was the elections of Nixon and I was trying to think how this performance was in relation to the political system and got nowhere and also what she said about yeah maybe that was also what she said that in these 60’s performances having these revoluntionary aims in the beginning when she was staring with the email of carolee sneeman I was thinking in both these places what about the rest why just the end of 60’s it kind of felt like a good reference point but I was thinking what about all the other exciting or transgressive experiments that have been done or perhaps I was wanting more information for something that I did not know about and then I remember this moving like situating myself in the mixed of the others making choices of whether I am in the front row or the back row or where the rest are or not or far from her or close to her or looking at what she is performing or not looking at what she s performaing and being aware of these choices and also the fact that by staying somewhere the performance would move around you and come closer sometimes and move further sometimes
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
Olga's response to my research on the topic of the audience was to attempt a performance devoid of an audience position. This was to be achieved by keeping everyone active all the time. In this case, everyone meant just the two of us1: we would perform tasks together that would keep us active and disable a resonant position (of an audience). We would try to either speak or type all the time. This experiment is relevant because it points to the distinction, which I make between performance and esitys/beforemance—that performance can take place without an audience and when you add an audience body, a beformance appears.
Performance artist and researcher Karolina Kucia has also pointed out that my research may not have relevance in the genre of performance art and the fact that there are works of performance art, which are not made for an audience. Kucia's critique has been directed especially to those experiments, in which I have traced histories of audience, namely to A Reading of Audience and in What if audience is a charge between in and out?-part of Audience Body. According to Kucia, my research may be flawed when claiming something about the genre of performance art as a whole.
I agree with Kucia and have developed my argument to include the proposal that a performance does not require an audience. A beforemance instead does not exist without an audience body, which in turn can take multiple forms, as is proposed in this study. This draft therefore marked one limit of esitystaide/beformance art.
G a t h e r i n g
By focusing intensely on our personal memories of the performance, our practice spotlighted the experience of a single audience member. Proceeding with the motif of gathering and the subsequent plurality, this act of remembering and articulating those memories showed how our personal histories, associations, prejudices, small talk in the foyer and observation of details—things that were not deliberate parts of the performance itself—strongly affected our experience. The parallel existence of the implied (present in the work of the maker during the time before the esitys takes place) and the actual (present when the work is performed before an audience) audience member is one of the ways an audience appears as a charged condition2. It adds to the previous iterations of the motif in Drafts 2 and 4, where audience was produced through a plurality of approaches.
The singularity of each experience of each audience member as an attribute of the plural nature of an audience is highlighted by performances made for an audience of one. Performances truly just for one person are highly rare in the context of art (in the context of birthdays they are fairly common). I can’t remember ever attending one, although I have composed a practice for it (Laitinen 2017). When talking about performances for an audience of one, or one-on-one-performances, we mean performances for one person at a time, in which case the plurality of the audience is realized asynchronously. For example, the director Otso Kautto erected a tent in a public place in Pori, where one could meet him personally for a session, in which he would find specific words that would function as healing agents in my life (Healing Words 4.9.2018); Giorgio Convertito in turn invited audience members for 30-minute private one-on-one meetings in a hotel room (Hotel Room Encounters 29.1.2020).
Works of this genre of performing arts have been addressed more extensively for example by Eero-Tapio Vuori and Risto Santavuori (with respect to turning the everyday into an experiential performance through a suggestive dramaturgy, Vuori & Santavuori 2011), Louna-Tuuli Luukka (with respect to a wish for transformation, Luukka 2020) and Adam Alston (with respect to narcissism, Alston 2016, 35-73). Vuori has developed a neologist concept of experimance to indicate specifically experiential performances for an audience of one. In his thinking, the absence of other audience members prevents the sole spectator from finding support from their reactions, and as a result the performance can merge with the rest of their experiential field.
S p a c e a n d p l a c e
By Draft 12 I had done plenty of experimentation regarding time, but spatial development had been minor. I did include the floorplan of the space in which the audience body was situated in the booklet for Draft 7 (but no audience member to my knowledge noticed this). Similarly, there was the figure of a square in the letter of Draft 11, which could be with some imagination interpreted as the floorplan of a room separating the audience condition from the everyday.
With Olga we decided to use the space where the performance had taken place as a tool for remembering. This brought in the themes of locality and place related to space and its density. A dense audience body would always gather somewhere, in one place. The place itself would then become significant for the esitys/beforemance. The works with a dense audience body would to some extent be site-specific. The performance by Mette Ingvartsen was a fine example of international European performing arts works, which are constructed in a way that they can tour and be re-staged in any black box or theatre space. It is not created through site-specific practices and the makers would not label it site-specific—quite the opposite, it can easily adapt to any similar space without any concern about the specificities of the site.
But it still mattered where we gathered. The cultural center of Stoa and its stage, similar in many respects to hundreds and thousands of other stages in Europe, are also unique. Stoa is situated in the neighbourhood of Itäkeskus, the East Center of Helsinki, with its multicultural population. Numerous local and visiting performances have been staged there and many audience members have specific memories related to the square outside of the building, the lounge tables in the foyer or the floorboards in the theatre. The building is from 1984, like the first part of the large shopping center Itis nextdoor. The older shopping center Puhos, on the other side of the cultural center, is inhabited by numerous immigrant shops and restaurants. Until the 1970s the area was mostly used as pasture for cattle, with fields and meadows. In early the 1900s it had not yet been merged with the city of Helsinki. The first known inhabitation is from the 1200s. (Nylander 2024) These layers in this or other places are not typically taken into consideration in performing artworks that take place in black boxes and other urban art spaces. That was also the case with 69 positions, which is thus not by its nature site-specific, but since it was anyhow performed on a site, that site became part of the resonance taking place in those audience bodies, who attended it.
Phenomenological practice
The method we used for extracting our own knowledge about the event we had attended could be seen as a collaborative phenomenological practice. We documented the way the performance appeared in our memory. It was kind of a loop: we were both informants as well as documentarists of each other’s attempt to remember.
1 Olga pointed out to me that I also had a parallel contract with Helsinki Uniarts, since I was hired by the institution as a mentor. Someone from the staff has monitored that the mentoring (and thus our performance) took place and this monitoring may be included in an inclusive definition of audience membership. This is an example of how any definition or concept is porous and open to contradictory interpretations.
2 The pair of concepts is adopted and re-iterated from Wolfgang Iser’s reception theory, see Iser 1972.