Drafts 28 and 29 together formed a diptych, titled Time to Audience, acts 1 & 2. The main element in both was a set of 40 rolls of paper, each containing a text dealing primarily with the phenomenon of time in relation to audience membership. This was a point in my research process, at which my focus turned more towards the material properties of the surfaces from which my audiences read and in effect the qualities of the embodied reading experience. Through this focus on materials, the process of making started to resonate more with visual arts and design.
After A Reading of Audience, I had started to be dissatisfied with the format of the pages, even if it had proved to be useful in creating autopoietic dynamics within an audience. I questioned the compatibility of the experience of a work of performing arts and the experience of turning pages. I had the experience that time “flowed” in a performance—things followed from other things more or less seamlessly, creating an experience of continuity. Pages were instead a serial medium, as each of them was composed of two sides and using them demanded the repetitive act of turning them from the recipient.
So I started to think about a way to enable a reading experience that would flow. Hence, the idea of a roll of paper surfaced: a roll is a paper with no pages. The previous two drafts had already prototyped this with a digital interface. Interestingly enough, the roll is a reading format that predated the codex, in which a set of pages is attached to each other. After having had the idea, I started to search for a way to manufacture rolls to be read by my audiences.1
Through a lengthy phase of handicraft, writing and experimentation the work started to take form. The main idea was that the audience of act 1 (i.e. Draft 28), which was in the programme of Moving in November contemporary dance festival, would experience the work at the same time, but in different places. The audience of act 2 (i.e. Draft 29), by contrast, would experience it at different times, but in the same place.
Finally all the 40 rolls were printed, combined with a reading device planned in collaboration with Alexander Furunes Eriksson and wrapped in an info note with instructions on how to use the roll.
These rolls were then distributed on the 13th of November at three venues of the festival: at Zodiak Center for New Dance, at Cultural Center Caisa and at the Cultural Center Stoa. The instruction in the wrapper requested that the audience member would open it at 7pm the same evening, in the place of their choice. The photos below are from Zodiak, were I personally was at the time of the performance.
G a t h e r i n g a c c o r d i n g t o v o n H a n t e l m a n n
Riikka Thitz, who curated the second act of Time to Audience in the exhibition Ebb and Flow, gave me a text by Dorothea von Hantelmann during the process. In it, von Hantelmann proposes that art galleries and theatres have different ways of creating ritualized gatherings: theatres convene “collective gatherings”, galleries by contrast “individualized gatherings” (von Hantelmann 2019). The concept of gathering is stretched in a way that was useful for my research. Time to Audience was inspired by the article: the acts convened two kinds of “individualized” gatherings, in this loose interpretation of the word. In the first one time, in the second place was the connective tissue.
T i m e , s p a c e a n d t h e l i m i n o i d
Through the spatial and temporal dramaturgy of the two parts the diptych was presenting the trajectories of time and space in a highlighted way as dimensions that determine the formation of audience bodies. It evidenced how my artistic thinking had evolved towards theoretical levels, where the basic structures of a work expressed, exemplified or experimented on a hypotheses or an argument. The way this kind of practice-theory-fusion developed can be seen in the draft series at large; A Reading of Audience and Purity and Danger were already clear examples of this tendency.
In the traditional spatial and temporal composition within the performing arts, the audience would gather in the venue at the right hour. They would thus be contemporaneous with each other when attending the work as well as in a spatially dense formation, inhabiting the same room. Time to Audience dissected this structure into two complementary parts, one of which preserved spatial density but dispersed the audience body into time, while the other preserved temporal contemporaneity but dispersed the audience body in space. This kind of conceptual clarity anticipated the more systematic theoretical composition available in this commentary.
Furthermore, I stated in the text that ‘this paper is time’, paraphrasing the interview of Shawn Chua (Chua 10.2.2020), a fellow performance artist based in Singapore. The phrase connected the aspect of time to materiality, exposing the fundamentally temporal nature of performing arts, as well as the effects of time on a living body. An audience body is intimately linked with the presentness of the moment of experience and also bound to its own temporality as a collective that will breath together for a while and then disperse. Although I did not mention liminality, I strongly suggested in the text that reading this roll would change the nature of time, magically fusing time and the substance of paper and rendering the reader with the superpower of slowing down, accelerating or reversing time itself. I also stated that the readers themselves would transform and would be different after. It specifically and explicitly followed the course of a liminoid dramaturgy and tried to suggestively induce a liminoid experience in the reader.
Applying this to my argument about esitystaide/beforemance art, it is an art of contact, an art of complicity, but also along with other forms of performing arts, an art of time, since one of its basic ingredients is the totality of an end, rendering a revisit into the work virtually impossible.2
1 Later I discovered a couple of publications from a year before Time to Audience, utilizing the roll format. Free Runoff is a 1020 mm long print inserted in a cardboard tube, published by Bokeh and authored by photographer Martti Jämsä and poet Kaija Rantakari (Jämsä & Rantakari 2021). Performing silence: process-based artefact#3 is a publication by Petros Konnaris and Evagoras Vanezis, based on performances in Nicosia in 2021. The publication contains a book and a paper roll, containing a list of questions (Konnaris & Vanezis 2021).
2 There are exceptions and experiments that do not abide to these kinds of definitions; the claims are not meant to be conclusive. In my reading art can and will break any rule, but we can still make differentiations allowing a conceptual model to appear. There are performances and works of esitystaide/beforemance art with no end, for example by artist-researcher Tuija Kokkonen (Kokkonen 2017).