In August 2021 I took part in a project by the Reality Research Center, the Performance Wagon. Like Treasury in Draft 24, the Performance Wagon was a reaction to the regulations of the pandemic era, which radically limited the possibilities of performing artists to continue their work. When theatres and other public art spaces where closed, we prepared a format which enabled performing outdoors.
The Performance Wagon was a performance artists’ version of an ice-cream stand: while strolling along Esplanade boulevard in Helsinki one could stop to the wagon, scroll the menu of performances available and purchase one. The performances took place in several sites in the vicinity of the wagon and could be experienced by individual audience members or small groups.
As a part of the programme available at the wagon, I prepared a letter performance titled Purity and Danger (available also in Finnish as Puhtaus ja vaara). The work was inspired by the perils that were linked with the genre of performance due to the Covid-19 epidemic. I borrowed the title of the performance from a similarly titled seminal book by anthropologist Mary Douglas (Douglas 2000). In the work I claimed that performance is the impurest of all art forms.
The performance was given to an audience group with the minimum of three members and it was realized by them, independent of the staff of the wagon (i.e. performers). The staff would ask the audience to choose one from among them to receive the letter and be responsible for opening the envelope and for starting to read it aloud. Then the task of reading would be circulated in the group. It was the second time I experimented with reading aloud—this time it was inspired by the content: reading aloud would mean spreading (potentially infectious) particles in the air. It emphasized the effect that the attendees had to each other. The letter suggested that they would do some tasks, through which they would at least partly destroy the letter1. So it functioned partly as a score of sorts. When the performance was over, the audience was asked to return the remnants of the letter to the wagon, where the staff archived them in plastic bags.
It was a playful score, suggesting things that were socially inappropriate, like spitting and farting. It explicated the contents of the rectums of the attendees and proposed chanting a creed of filth together. It was playing with the authority of the author: would the group consent to the playful proposals given in the letter or would they rebel against them. I would not know, since I did not feel like I could be present at the readings or document them. The feedback came in the form of ripped, crumbled, smudged and spit-on remnants of the letters.
T h e a u d i e n c e b o d y a n d e p i d e m i c c o m p l i c i t y
The draft used the condition of the Covid-19-epidemic to describe esitystaide/beforemance art (at the time I had not yet come up with the term so I used performance in the English version) as an art form which exposes us to each other through the proximity of our bodies in space. The existence of a collective audience body, which became a central argument in my research, was the thematic substructure of the work: a collective body has by definition members who are in inter(or intra-)action2 with each other. This intra-action of an audience was mostly implicit or tacit, much like the level of contaminant airborne particles, of which we had become painfully aware through the pandemic. Masks, handwashing, distance and other preventative actions showed how intimately linked we were with everyone who just happened to inhabit the same space with us. The fact that we breath the same air—that the same air literally extends inside all of us—was suddenly rendered perceptible. The global interdependency of the human species as well as the divisions between species were plain to see. The pandemic was a colossal argument against the figure of the independent modern subject (or consumer). We are all linked on the most fundamental levels of our being and we affect each other constantly, the virus seemed to say.
At the same time, the restrictions made in Finland to stop the spreading of the virus closed down all those spaces in which audience bodies of performing arts gathered. Performances, which created contemporaneous and dense collective bodies, were the most dangerous of art forms, or the most impure, to use the phrasing of this draft. A concert held at the Music House in Helsinki on the 8th of March 2020 (in early stages of the epidemic) to celebrate the International Women's Day became infamous since over 100 audience members were infected there.
I interpreted this as evidence of collective embodiment and of problematics of gathering and locality. Our (= the representatives of human species’) relationships to the bodies of others and to the land that carried those bodies was damaged or to say the least, troubled. Douglas argued that the division into categories of pure and dirty were cultural. I could deduce that since esitystaide/beforemance art was an environment, where the embodied complicity of attendees was experimented upon, often in very respectful and sensitive ways, it was also an environment that could help us move towards a society where relations between and within bodies could be healthier.
S u b o r d i n a t i o n
Continuing from the experience in Draft 22, also this one left the audience without the presence of the makers guiding the experience or witnessing that it really took place. The audience was left among themselves with the task of realizing the esitys/beforemance. However, in this draft the audience had explicit instructions, the temporal guidance provided by the letter, and they were asked to return the remains of the letter to the wagon after the event. The fact that these audiences nearly always returned the remains and these remains always consisted of different crumbled, smudged and ripped pages, made it clear that a liminal process had been realized and completed. The remains functioned as material evidence of the event, in which the audience had used the liberties provided by the authority of the performance, thus rendering themselves subordinate to it. They realized an esitys/beforemance, in which they took turns performing and then rejoining the membership of the audience body, re-iterating the dramaturgy of reading aloud used in Draft 11. The material evidence could at least in theory be used to trace the way the performance had progressed (although I never attempted such investigation).
T h e e n d o f g a t h e r i n g s
The Performance Wagon and Purity and Danger as part of it were one of the many artistic reactions to the restrictions deployed during the pandemic. In 2020-21 different instructions were given by the state and municipal authorities, sometimes forbidding gatherings of more than 6 individuals, sometimes those of more than fifty people. There was a group of artists called Kuusiplus (= 6+), who organized “illegal” art events with always more people attending than was allowed by general regulations.
The regulations were of course eating off the livelihood of performing artists, but they also interrupted the existence of whole genres of art as well as all the dense and contemporaneous formations of audience bodies for months, even years. I had several discussions with colleagues about the future of performing arts: would they just vanish from the face of the earth? Should we all start thinking of other ways of using our lives? What will humanity be, if we cannot come close to each other and gather any longer?
1 The self-destructive message is familiar from many stories and films, but I was also inspired by Keri Smith’s interactive book Wreck This Journal (Smith 2016), which I had purchased a couple of times for my kids.
2 Following Karen Barad’s definition, phenomena “are the ontological inseparability of objects and apparatuses”. In Barad’s iteration of quantum physics, measured objects and measuring apparatuses do not exist as separate entities, which interact. Instead they emerge from intra-action that takes place within the phenomena. (Barad 2007, 128) See also Draft 16.
Is the audience a different phenomenon since its members seem to exist as separate prior to its emergence? This could be alleged, but I would defend a suspension of this temporal point and the everyday experience of separation from others. Although I do not develop this aspect of the audience body further here, I think it is an interesting metaphoric play that may support the audience body as a concept.