How Audience Bodies Form

Tuomas H Laitinen

This artistic doctoral research approaches art, not as a variety of artworks or performances, but as a variety of collective bodies that are summoned. It addresses the subordinate and complicit way collective audience bodies form in relation to artistic performances. The commentary introduces the concept of an “audience body”, emerging when individual bodies gather to become an audience. Audience bodies are described through preconditions that are needed for one to appear, conditions that contribute to its subsistence and variables that determine the primary qualities and the degree of actuality of that audience body. More specifically, the commentary addresses the local genre of “esitystaide”, developed especially in the Helsinki-area during the last 30 years. Neologism “beforemance art” is introduced due to a lack of an English equivalent. Esitystaide/beforemance art is the artistic context of this study and is presented as a genre of art, in which the complicity of audience bodies is a fundamental material of artistic creation. The Finnish word “esitys”, being the medium of the genre of esitystaide, is defined as the sum of a performance and an audience body. The theoretical approach towards audience bodies is presented as impartial with regard to different genres of art, but the practice of research favours esitystaide/beforemance art. This leads to political conclusions that defend the exposed complicity of and the experimental relation to audience bodies which are characteristic for this specific genre. This theoretical argumentation has been developed through an iterative series of 30 drafts and two examined artistic parts, made by the author, as well as through a parapractice of audience membership. The drafts and examined parts are works of esitystaide/beforemance art, in which printed or digital texts are staged in different ways for audiences to read. The works and the thinking developed in them have been significantly affected by dialogues with audience members and their feedback. The commentary discloses how the process of thinking, resulting in the main arguments of the work, has evolved through this artistic research practice and how temporal, spatial, textual and material design of the events has been developed to address more adequately the phenomenon of an audience body. The parapractice of audience membership is introduced as a term describing the attendance of artworks made by others—a way of accumulating knowledge parallel to and yet different from practicing art. The arguments made in the commentary aim to provide conceptual tools for artists, scholars and pedagogues who attend the phenomenon of audience in their work. They can also serve as a basis for further research on the political significance of esitystaide/beforemance art and related art forms. Methodologically, the research offers an example of an iterative and dialogical artistic research practice and its presentation; the relationship between art and theory unfolds as both fruitful and troubled. Through the introduction of the parapractice of audience membership, it argues for using art, equally to the use of bibliographical materials, as reference material of artistic research. Through the use of a Finnish term and its local context as part of concept-creation in English, the work defends the importance of local thinking, which links artistic research to the land upon which it takes form.

Draft 19

1.4.2020, Center of Joint Studies, Theatre Academy, remote

Pedagogical perspectives 2: Performance during a pandemic

In late January 2020 the first case of COVID-19 was found in Finland and in March the virus started spreading fast. On the 16th of March the government declared a state of emergency, resulting in closing schools and other public facilities like universities, theatres and libraries. The premises of the University of the Arts were closed the following day. Organizations and companies reacted fast by developing alternative ways to realize their functions in conditions where human bodies no longer left their domestic spaces to gather. Conference calls enabled by software like Zoom and Microsoft Teams started to be widely used and meetings, events and classes were re-situated into remote formats.

Already two days after the state of emergency had been declared, I was contacted by Aune Kallinen, who worked as a lecturer at the Center of Joint Studies of the Theatre Academy. Kallinen asked if I could plan a course that students could carry out on their own while staying at home. The course Performance During a Pandemic was ready on the 1st of April.

M o t i f s

S p a t i a l s c a t t e r i n g

The idea behind the course was that while the lockdown disabled performing art by forbidding gatherings, there were already artistic strategies suitable for solitary or domestic conditions. I gathered some online materials that presented such strategies developed within the local scene of esitystaide/beforemance art. The materials were organised under three subtitles: performance without humans, home as a stage and letters as performance. There was an assignment to make three performance drafts, one for each of the three categories, and to document the process in a working journal. In addition the students were invited to develop the field of performance under lockdown further: they were asked to create their own category.

I conceived the categories by thinking about the performances (that I had either made or attended as an audience member), which could be realized when people could not gather to the same place. The first category expanded the concept of audience beyond the human sphere. These works were related to the posthumanist discourse and resulted in performances which were designed primarily for non-human audiences (as materials I used Kokkonen 2017, Roumagnac 2019, Hannula 2018, Kausalainen 2014).

If the first category expanded the phenomenon of the audience, the second one diminished it. It involved works that did not require a public sphere but could be realized in a domestic environment alone or with people who were already there: Pilvi Porkola’s Christmas with Family (Porkola 2008-, accessed in 24.1.2025), Anniina Väisänen’s Tosi Esitys (Väisänen 2013, accessed in 24.1.2025), Reality Research Center’s Utopia Consulting (Eerola & Santavuori 2018) and In the Living Room (Kotiteatteri 2018, accessed in 24.1.2025) by Kotiteatteri (a group of “folk-esitystaide” performing only in private homes around Finland. I am a member of the group).

The third category of epistolary performance proposed the creation of an audience body fragmented in time and space, by reaching out to other people from your domestic space via post. I offered the students four pieces by the Reality Research Center as examples: Mail Order Experimance (Vuori & Santavuori 2011), Postdigital (2018-), The Wanderer (2019) and the Second Etude on Everlasting Life (2010).

The effects of the pandemic and the subsequent regulations imposed on citizens were extremely negative for the performing arts scene. Simultaneously, they resulted in artistic survival strategies that sprouted new performance formats and unprecedented thinking. With regard to my research, the circumstances made me think about the formation of audience bodies. Before this draft my work had been strictly traditional performing arts in terms of spatiality: taking place onsite. When these kinds of events became impossible, it was appropriate to expand the notion of gathering. But what did we actually miss when we could not gather onsite? Was there some topical value in the traditions of performing arts or were they actually obsolete? With time, I came to the conclusion that what was missing in pandemic conditions, or at least rendered typically too thin to be sensed, was the (experience of an) audience body.

The collective and global situation that was disastrous in so many respects, offered my research very fruitful impulses. In time they would be developed into the main arguments of this commentary.

The motif of space continues here —>

M E T H O D S

Internet-based digital reading interfaces

Before this draft, I had used paper as the material reading interface. I had been conservative in terms of media: I did not use social media and instead had even realized a project which functioned categorically outside so-called digital capitalism. Someone called my practice technophobic, even if I did not identify with that.

The pandemic changed everything. In addition to restructuring the content of my work, these altered conditions encouraged me to utilize new tools and methods: conference calls, screensharing, shared online notebooks and such. These kinds of electronic tools were present in Drafts 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26 and 27 plus in some iterations of A Reading of Audience.

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Tuomas H Laitinen - How Audience Bodies Form - 2025