On the 24th of May 2022 a work-in-progress version of Audience Body was performed as part of the spring programme of the Moving in November festival and the main programme of the Reality Research Center. It took place in Valssaamo, which is next to the Zodiak Stage, where the premiere would happen in November of the same year. Both spaces are located at Kaapelitehdas, an industrial space that currently functions as a cultural center. Kaapelitehdas was built during 1940s-50s for the manufacture of cables, hence its name which translates as the Cable Factory. Valssaamo and Zodiak Stage are situated on two sides of the same foyer; while Zodiak is a black box stage (or dark grey to be exact), Valssaamo has white walls and is often used as a gallery. Thus the choice of spaces reflected that of A Reading of Audience, which also took place in a light grey space whose colour code fell in between a black box theatre and a white cube gallery—a “white box”. Also, both Valssaamo and Zodiak Stage have large windows, which was an important feature of the work. The second edition of Audience Body continued these aesthetics as it took place in a white space with plenty of natural light in the House of Art in Turku. Also the for the third edition in Cologne a theatre space with windows was used.
Photos by Rosaliina Elgland unless mentioned.
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Edit of the transcript of a post-performance discussion, 24th May 2022
Discussing:
Maria Oiva (MO)
Hanna Helavuori (HH)
Kaino Wennerstrand (KW) (currently known as Mia Wennerstrand)
Saara Moisio (SM)
Tuomas Laitinen (TL)
Nanni Vapaavuori (NV)
***
[microphone cracking, rustling]
MO: I was just talking about this space, I connected it to when I saw that other work, I don’t remember what its relation is to this, but in Teak, this other work by Tuomas... [Referring to A Reading of Audience]
TL: Yeah. So you were there as well ....
HH: Yes the first one. Yes. Yes, that’s right.
MO: Something like, “Oh, yeah, yeah” and then it came that...
TL: ... everyone was there.
MO: ... that this idea of the body was activated right away. Then we were like: “here”. That this space is disgusting. That I feel cold, smell of dust, dreary. That this is where our bodies are, in this disgusting space with this text. That this is somehow like “stripped” and like—ahhhh! Well the previous one was warm, the floor was made of wood. For me this activated the idea of the space.
HH: Interesting how different. Because I remember, in the first one, I felt a certain kind of pressure to perform the reading and now this roll was something so wonderful. So I thought that I could be here and then emptiness appears. When the emptiness is there and really the idea of the time in the roll. And I-I-I have no idea how long I spent with the roll...
MO: mmm
TL: mmm
HH: ... but then I felt like “help, what else will I...
[Kaino comes out of the bathroom]
TL: We already started.
HH: ... have time to do here”, I was just enjoying it...
MO: mm-m
HH: ... so much and I was really moved. And this, really, this language body, which is conveyed, as it were, by the sender of the letter and the thinking behind it, is something that is so touching. It’s... it’s strange how intimate the act of this kind can be.
MO: mmm
TL: mmm
HH: And really, I mean, it’s, it’s really beautiful that when you have your hands there oh [laughs and points towards Immersion, the water containers with underwater books] I could have held my hands there for a long time... really. In a way...
[a pencil falls on the concrete floor]
HH: ... because I couldn’t control it, it was so enjoyable. When the water does it for you....
MO: yes
HH: ...and when the page really turns this way and then I see that it floats and so on and so on...
MO: mmm
HH: ... and with the roll you could do it yourself, and it’s delivered in such a way that the flow is never broken by a page turn. Yeah, I was really entranced by this.
MO: ... for me, the body, the heat, that became terribly significant, and how different papers, the quality of them, what was thick and what was smooth, what was sticky, the kinaesthetic things in relation to the... the texture...
HH: yes
TL: [explaining to Kaino] We just started talking—Kaino came in late so—there was no initial question or anything.
MO: When the baby cried a little bit, it was really funny. That on some other kind of level of sensing, this part of the collective body flutters like this. The baby’s body reacting as a part of the collective body. I was checking out how this large body of mine moves, who is fast and who is affected.
KW: There was so much thinking about the stage. So is it good to think so much about the stage? [laughter] Is it good for anybody? [laughter continues] It seems to me that quite many of us make art because—or I guess that’s the central problem of artistic research—quite many make art so that they don’t have to think about making it, but just do it. I found myself longing for the alternative: maybe it doesn’t matter what the stage is. There is this theory and then this theory and then this and this—this is how the stage works, this is how the audience is formed.
So then, I thought that, does it matter? It just happens. When referred to the theatre of the antique, to the origins of the audience-stage-relationship, well “that's nice”, a bit like the interval fifth in music—it sounds nice. I felt a sense of control, I thought that this was an attempt to control what the stage is or could be, and not so much as... maybe I would have just wanted to leave the stage as it was. Maybe due to the fact that the stage is so dear to me personally, it felt a bit like someone had talked about my parents in public on a megaphone. These are family secrets, we shouldn’t talk about them.
MO: ... analysed correctly...
KW: [laughs] Is it proper to bring everything into daylight? There’s something, like, obscene about talking about the stage so much at once. But this is not a bad thing, this is not a criticism like “the work is a failure because...”. But the experience was such that I started to feel anxious. Suddenly I realised that I also tend to talk a lot on stage and maybe I should go there and just be quiet. That moment when the performance starts, it’s so wonderful when you don’t have to think anymore, because it’s so obvious what it is. That clarity is so wonderful to me.
HH: I was thinking ... when you said something about being obscene or that it was too much... that it was a degree of intimacy, because the text was so extraordinarily close, revealing and beautifully intimate. I mean, it had poetic force, it passed through me in such a way that I could have floated mentally in that kind of a world for as long as I wanted. As if a flowing body of words, like internal blood circulation, where words or patterns flow, a liquidity, the flow of time, in these [lifts up a long strip of paper] and then all over there. But for you there was somehow too much of it.
KW: I guess it depends a lot on how you feel about text, how you feel about reading. If you had read the letter aloud, for example, it would have been a very different experience, because the tone of your voice would come through, I’d hear whether you are ill, in what kind of mood you are. You can’t hide anything when talking, whereas in a text you can hide everything. You can go through any kind of pain, as everyone knows, and produce a text in quite unimaginable circumstances. I've answered work emails in very bad shape [laughs]. The thing about text is that it’s always a cloak, it’s always a blanket. It’s never really—or that’s why I think performances are so fascinating because—well yeah.
At least for me words are the most important thing. If something is precise, it’s words. So maybe I got jammed because of the amount of text. I can’t read slowly, I don’t read poetry since it requires slowness, I can’t do it and then my head is just like that, I read all these texts, like what is this, what is this, what is this. I mean, I did enjoy it, there were some wonderful texts, but that's why I can’t get that kind of experience of gliding. This has to do with the duration of an hour—I’ve noticed before that at 80 minutes a magical moment appears and I finally relax in a performance—that the first hour is always spent in the intellect and then you slowly start to turn into an animal, the drool starts to drip, you don’t care anymore and I don’t wonder if I’m hungry and if I hate everything and if I hate myself. I let go of analysis. So then an hour is—for me it’s not enough, I was involved too much through intelligence.
SM: I experienced something similar to what I’ve had in these immersive performances, where you go into a space and have to choose for yourself where to go. And at the beginning I had a kind of anxiety about what I was going to choose so that I would definitely find the good thing and only when I got to the water it calmed me down. When I read this letter I felt that I could not internalize most of it and then the water slowed me down and only then did I somehow get a grip of it. And then I was annoyed when I started this [shows a roll of paper] a bit too late and I didn’t have time to finish reading it but then I thought that maybe I should let go of it because maybe that was the point of this story that the viewer can’t see everything, an individual in the audience cannot get everything from the performance anyway.
HH: Of course, it would be interesting to know how different it will be depending on which choice you make first. Because I chose this [shows a roll of paper] and I thought that I was happy that I could experience the flow of time in this way and then I have no idea how long it took—but then I thought that in fact I have lived during this time, and it is wonderful to be able to stretch time, slow it down, like that.
SM: But maybe it's the same as in the immersion part, your hands are in it and you’re hanging them there and...
HH: Exactly like this
SM: ...it kind of calms you down
HH: Yes
SM: when I was reading those cards on the floor, I couldn’t concentrate
HH: It’s that pattern of getting cold again, I am a couch potato: I can’t squat there...
MO: Those cards made me—I mean, first of all, there was an awful lot of them—I mean, for me, almost every “scene” or thing I experienced was like a performance. It started to open up so far that I couldn’t take it. And in those cards especially: I look up and the performance opens up in front of me. The other people become the performance and I start crying and I’m like “fuck, what a perfect idea and what a dramaturgy and I love these performers”. And then I pick the next card and then again I’m like “what a light, what a situation, what!”—and so on. And then I’m like “please stop I'm gonna throw up”. It’s too much. And I’m really really fast, I've just learnt to be pseudo-calm, this is completely fake, I'm actually still like a total Duracell rabbit, I’ve just practised being calm in adulthood. Am I pretending now, performing an audience that is like “yes, it's a part of this that I don't have time for everything”. Because I didn’t have time to do this [pointing to a roll of paper] and of course it really pisses me off. So the thing is that there was an awful lot, each one of them was an awful lot.
KW: It’s true that regarding neuroatypicality, that with my brain, I have no choice but to read through everything quickly. I didn’t go through any process of “okay, I'll just look through this really fucking quickly”. I can't change my brain, there’s no such thing, except with medication. Somewhere in there it was mentioned how we experience things differently. I read the letter first, and then when it talked about the fact that when talking about audiences you have to take absence into account, how was that?
TL: When the art form fetishizes presence, absence is important.
KW: Yes exactly, and I thought that it’s very well said and I was missing something lethargic and non-articulate or not-defined. There are definitions everywhere, there are categories everywhere, there are terms everywhere, there are references everywhere and so on, there are lists of sources and all things are defined. I’ll go back to what I said at the beginning: for me, the central idea of the stage is that, like, there’s no idea. I ended up doing performance art when I was young because it seemed like the most stupid art form... Not maybe stupid, but unintelligent, it’s completely unintelligent stuff. I love art when you don’t have to think about anything, that it’s just wonderful to have a pause.
HH: Well, it could be related to the fact that this is, to some extent, quite non-normative. I was expressing my anxiety, and someone said something like, “Yes, yes, but it says you don’t have to read everything.” And I thought, “Right. That doesn’t really help”. So these kinds of statements, like “you don’t have to read everything” do not address the way you’re actually feeling. Even though we know this is a porous form and all that, in the end, it's still about some personal desire as an observer or experiencer.
KW: I just noticed at some point that I had probably read everything. I defend that way of reading, that kind of manic reading; I think it’s just as valuable as the slow, indulgent kind. They’re just different modes. Even though I started with a negative tone, I also don't think it's a bad thing to feel difficult emotions after a performance. I love that—it’s wonderful to have a hard time after a performance because so many of them aim to make you feel good, and that’s so boring. I’m not that interested in well-being [laughs]. So it was lovely because, in a positive way, I didn’t feel bad, but I was constantly like, “Wow, this is tough”. Which you also felt when you felt like vomiting? It reflected the sense that the demand on the viewer’s body or the audience’s body was so total. It really got under my skin. I found it funny that there was so much tenderness, you’re so gentle, and there’s so much love like, “with love from Tuomas.” There’s a lot of gentleness everywhere, but then the experience of being in this space together feels like we’re in some sort of prison experiment. Who’s going to fuck up first?
[laughter]
MO: That’s interesting, and I think the context matters here. It would be different if this would happen somewhere on a beach in the countryside, made by a random Tuomas. But I know that Tuomas is working on a doctoral thesis, and it’s kind of like a pseudo-statement that “you don’t have to read everything” [in a gentle voice]. And I’m thinking, “Well, you don’t really have to finish writing the dissertation either!” But you do! It’s structured, precise, and it’s contextualized in my mind. I can’t help associating it with academia. If this would happen on a beach in Hanko, with you [points to Tuomas] sunburnt, hair sticking up, in a bikini, and you were like, “I’ve made this for you,” and we were all like, “Yes, yes,” that would be totally different. So the context really affects it. This isn’t just random shit. There’s no looseness, and I can see that from what I’ve read—there are no loose bits. This is well-thought-out; these are considered thoughts.
KW: That’s exactly what I meant.
MO: And then it’s like, “You don’t have to take all of MY WELL-CONSIDERED THOUGHTS.” Okay... and then kind of...
TL: So should there be some shitty stuff in there too?
MO: Maybe something sloppy. And it’s also like, you’re not writing in a sloppy way either—it’s tight stuff. But the context changes things, like if this tight content were happening on a beach, it would be different. But why the nausea? It starts to form this huge constellation—vhum vhum vhum vhum—this penetrates me fundamentally. It’s so profound. It penetrates my authorship as well. Like, I’m also a creator. So it doesn’t just penetrate my audience body. It keeps operating on that level of authorship, the artist speaking to me, and then it pierces through my audienceness and my humanity at the same time, and then it’s like [makes gagging sounds]—this is a lot. And I don’t want to say it’s a bad thing. It’s just a lot. For me.
HH: That’s really what it is, isn’t it—who we are, the audience body?
KW: Of course.
HH: Like how does it work with people who aren’t operating in the context of performing arts? There could be someone who behaves much more undisciplined, someone who... Do you ever compare this, like having an audience that doesn’t—
[a bang is heard when a camera, attached with a suction cup to the wall of the room to document the event, drops and hits the floor. Laughter and comments about the agency of the object taking part in the conversation.]
MO: The power and ingenuity of this, in my opinion—and now I realize I sound really critical—is that there is an immense amount of information here, well-considered theory, your own and from others as well. At the same time, it’s incredibly poetic and physical. That’s why I say it’s nauseating. Because it [makes an explosion sound] hits me on every level. That’s why I think it’s ingenious.
HH: Actually, when you think about it, this is strange because this is a textual world we’re encountering as viewers. The performing arts don’t usually operate in such a textual way. And here’s my question: does this operate mainly with textuality and the act of reading? Because the act of reading is not at the core of the subject. It’s not central to our genre of performing arts that we individually sit down and read. That’s a very individual practice. Why does this formation of the viewer’s body depend so heavily on reading acts? We could have other acts. We are reflecting on the act of reading, and, in doing so, the fundamental philosophical questions of our art form. But surely it could be something entirely different, where you’d be observing how this viewer’s body, this audience, forms.
KW: I don’t disagree, but I look at it from a different angle. I think it’s not because the theatrical experience wouldn’t be textual, but because text belongs to the world of ideas. I don’t think the stage is a place for ideas, or that it operates in the world of ideas. I’m just now realizing, as we’re talking about this, that maybe this work convinced me that the stage is not a place for ideas. I don’t know what place it is, but it’s not for ideas. There are no ideas on stage—there are no arguments. I’ve never believed that theatre makes any claims. That’s why I really like Peter Handke’s play from the 60s, Offending the Audience, which is like a list—of course, it’s also related to the Cold War and the Holocaust, and many other things—but still, there are no ideas there. Maybe that’s why I felt like, in this, we were constantly trying to go deeper, trying to drill down into what the stage is, what the audience is, who you are, what the viewer is, what the audience is—so I kind of hoped that the answer would be, “Well, it’s just lukewarm mud, that’s all it is.” There’s no theory at the bottom; there’s just mud and junk, or fluff, or belly button lint or something. I think I believe that—at least on stage—ideas aren’t at the bottom. Ideas are always on the surface, and there’s something else at the bottom. This also ties into the “inside and outside” discussion. On the outside are ideas, and inside is something completely different. Ideas are never inside. Maybe I’m an anti-idea person. [laughter]
TL: What you just said ties in nicely with how I approached this problem when I entered the academic world. You have these libraries full of texts, which form the context in which research is done, and then you have the vast number of stages, and different ways of stepping on stage. So what do you do with that if you’re doing artistic research that exists at this intersection? How do you get hands on both sides?
SM: I have to leave soon, but this makes me think that I really liked those little stage directions, like, “the audience looks around” or “close your eyes and take a deep breath.” That’s made it, for me, like you’ve scripted our actions as the audience, and that has made the performance for me. I’ve been reading it as some kind of a script... or something like that...
MO: mmm
TL: mmm
SM: ... and I’ve liked what you’ve written into these moments—it has guided what I’m supposed to do at a certain moment, and I’ve enjoyed seeing when the others are doing the same. Are they at the same part, or do they even have the same text?
MO: Yeah, and there’s also a power dynamic in making the audience read. Usually, performers and artists do the reading, representing it in whatever way they do—it’s not usually the audience’s...
SM: See you.
MO: Thanks for sharing.
[Saara leaves.]
MO: ...and when you’re reading the text, in the context of performing arts, it’s not your job as the audience to read. Well, sometimes it might be, but generally speaking, it’s not. There’s a tension there—are you willing to participate? It’s noticeable who’s like, “Okay” and who’s like, “Hmm.” And that’s part of it, I think. And then there’s the gentleness and inevitability of it: “You don’t have to, you don’t have to read anything if you don’t want to.” You can do whatever you want; this is just the proposal. But at the same time, the proposal is quite audacious: you are now the audience, and this performance happens by you reading this. There’s a kind of audacity there, adding another layer of tension, a kind of friction.
HH: And this is meta. This is so meta. And that, of course, is exactly what makes this interesting, because it’s so meta. What would happen if, in some scenario, you left out all this meta stuff and did something completely different? Because I’m thinking—now I’m being provocative—I’m thinking that this reflects the control of research: the idea of churning out bloody written page after page. And it’s almost like an intrusion into the bodily realm of performing arts, almost like penetrating or violating my body. I could almost say that I feel like I am fucking raped here, don’t come at me like that. Text do not force yourself unto me. I’m here to experience something different from having text imposed on me.
KW: Yeah, yeah, that’s what I was talking about earlier—exactly that.
HH: Yes, exactly. I just suddenly understood what you were getting at. There’s this incredible paradox in your project, given that it’s being done in the context of esitystaide, which has specifically left all this damn textual stuff behind. And then suddenly we’re getting all this theo—hhhhh—this theory in this way. I think you’ll have to deal with this in some way. There’s definitely a paradox and a real contradiction here. That’s why it would be so interesting to have people with no prior knowledge, to see how they would react to this academic research being presented so obediently. I could have kept my hand in that bowl the whole time. And it was amazing that you had gotten rid of A4 papers. That’s why [shows the long unrolled strip of paper] I found this so fascinating. The format of the textuality here is something else. Are there other ways for text to become some other kind of material? But does there really have to be text? [laughs] Couldn’t you study the audience body without text? Think about where you come from. [laughter] I’m just playing around here, now that summer is coming [everyone laughs], in my sun-soaked mood.
TL: In the research context, you can’t escape the meta-level. It has to be there—you have to address the work from the outside and articulate it. When I started doing this, I didn’t like that distinction. I wanted to push the text into that fluff, and that’s how these have emerged. I started experimenting: I made one programme booklet with three lines, and then gradually, more and more text accumulated. At some point, I realized, yeah, maybe the A4 format has run its course, and I have to think about what comes next. I don’t know what will follow this, but this has been an emergent process. It comes from the question of how to avoid going on stage, so I don’t have to put actual bodies there. And secondly, how to integrate this conceptual research content with the situation where people come together in one place and experience something together.
KW: There are many aspects to this, but what you just said about the bodiless stage—it’s a bit like a war fought with drones. It’s still a war; people are still dying, but we pretend there are no armies on the ground. In the same way, the bodiless stage has that same element—a very different, differently felt element of violence—but still one in which the war is denied, yet still happening. And the absence of performers still affects me, even though this has been done for quite some time now, and I’ve followed it from the sidelines. It still gives me this feeling [makes sounds of resistance]: “Just get up on the stage already. Come on, this is a performance, there are people here. Come on, I’m a person, I’m here. I’m not going to do your job [others laugh]. I’ve left my home to come and watch, I want to be passive [more laughter]. I’m not your backup drone buzzing around here.” It’s... it’s like, when you talked about Foucault and control, a few years ago, there was this book called Foucault in Warsaw, written by a Polish scholar. Foucault was, in the late 1950s, the French cultural attaché in Warsaw for a few years, it was a really confusing time. Homosexuality was legal, but in reality the police always found excuses to beat up homosexuals and others. Foucault was living a double life: by day, he was the head of a conservative cultural institute, earning a fortune compared to Warsaw’s cost of living—living like a king. During the day, he interacted with cultural attaches and high-end people, and then, of course, at night, a completely different crowd—soldiers, anyone who came off the street into the same places. I often think about what kind of cultural politics were shaped in Europe by people who could smell both saffron and urine on the same day, which doesn’t happen much today. Few people make such large class jumps. I’m not interested in the class aspect; I’m interested in how—and this is just a different way of saying what you said—how... if theory is like the intellect’s revenge on performance, how can you take revenge back? Or how can you continue living wildly? I don’t know if you see the connection I’m trying to make, but—I’m saying this for the first time, so it’s a bit messy—the most wonderful thing is knowing that the boundary exists and living with it. And at the same time, choosing not to live by it. That simultaneity, where the theory is there, but in a way, it’s not. That’s the hardest and most interesting part, I think—that’s what you’re also getting at. The theory is there, but it’s also not. It matters, but in a way, it doesn’t matter. And it becomes a game of ping-pong between the two until it feels amusing and playful. Maybe play and sexuality are the real tools that take it in that direction. And both are so deeply connected to bodies. So then—YES—THAT’S IT [laughs]: I felt like that was the job I was given. To do the work of play and sexuality, to do the work of freedom with my body. To be the freedom that the text can never achieve. I had to take revenge on theory on behalf of the performance. That was the feeling I had. I had the task of avenging: “You live because I can’t anymore, I’ve already written this. I’m already dead.”
HH: And now we come to the body and pleasure. Really, I got to tinker with the text in that wonderful liquid. It was just regular water, but it clearly gave me this haptic experience—because text is, of course, haptic, it always is, as it’s usually on white paper—and this is interesting, considering the idea of revenge and what pleasure is. Because I agree that in our art form, the focus is on something deeply physical, whether it’s pleasure, pain, or something else that truly touches the skin and penetrates inside, and so on. Words—yes, words, of course – but it’s not quite the same. Now you, Tuomas, have to think about this... [laughter]... really—how will you overcome this dominance of textuality? This is one way Foucault’s idea of control works, this kind of biopower. I understand that it’s like this, research and all [laughter], but what would be the kind of gesture in which we, as viewers, could also participate in ripping something away from this system that has forced you into this? I don’t mean it literally, but still, there are certain rules of the game you must follow. I think it’s great that this kind of discussion is happening. We’ve come far in understanding what these structural conditions are, and ultimately, what is this about? What are we watching as audience—what are we really watching? And how do we experience the audience body?
KW: And exactly like you said, and Tuomas, you mentioned it in your letter—you quote someone, Maria , I think, I don’t remember her full name [means writer and actress María Alejandro Rojas]—that art can forgive our sins. So, our task as the audience is to forgive you or somehow release you from the task you’ve been given. There’s something almost Christian about it, like we are absolving you of the sin of theory.
HH: Exactly! And in that way, grace is coming from the audience. Grace, and so on, in this way.
MO: You [addresses Hanna] talk about the physical assault, like, “leave my body alone.” It comes in this form, it sort of overwhelms you. And you [addresses Kaino] talk about having to take revenge. And my feeling is that I want to vomit. And I know why I have this vomiting feeling—because I’m surrendering to this. It’s tied to our personal history. I come here like this [opens arms as if surrendering]. I don’t have this attitude of “I’ve read all this and I won’t take revenge on your behalf.” Or that I’m intellectualizing... I came here like a sacrificial lamb. I’m Tuomas’ sacrificial lamb. [laughter and swearing, shouting over each other] LIISA KOSKINEN SPEAKS HERE [talks towards the audio recorder, exaggerating the pronunciation, imitating an attempt to assume a false identity when saying something embarrassing]
KW: I will not sign anything, I must have been drugged!
MO: Yes, yes, and Liisa Koskinen, my alter ego... Exactly, I fully trust this. I trust Tuomas, I trust where I am. And this is so extreme—I give my body, and I interpret the work through haptic sensations, I’m tuned into it, not even realizing it, but now that I think about it, that’s exactly what it is. That’s why it becomes... it’s just too much. I’m not supposed to do this, and then all of it comes rushing in. This is sort of my orientation, and then comes the text. I’m not in a position to resist it. If my mother came here, without any context, what would she do? What would she do? She wouldn’t understand these texts; she would probably pick one up and be like, “There's so much of this and it’s all scattered here on the floor – it’s just trash.” I was thinking about that baby when it was playing with this [takes a long slip of paper], and it’s a completely different thing for the baby—it doesn’t matter what’s written on it. It’s all just some kind of mess, and not particularly entertaining either, if you noticed [gives a meaningful look to Tuomas], that this wasn’t so interesting as a texture for the baby.
[they talk over each other and shuffle the pile of paper strips, imagining a baby crawling in it]
...the demand for physicality creates this kind of dialogue.
KW: Regarding trust – if you feel like “I trust you, I surrender,” I feel “come on, you know that I can’t trust you, and you can’t trust me in this context”—though I would trust you otherwise. My experience is that, of course, I can’t trust the artist whose voice is coming through this, or this working group, or anyone. Nor should you trust me, I’m the spectator. That gesture of trust is a stillborn one. I latched onto the issue of failure, and I looked for failure everywhere. Is there a voice here somewhere that says this will fail, that this stage will fail, or that the audience will fail? I was looking for the opposite, in a way.
[laughter and overlapping voices]
HH: The quality of the text here is so beautiful, so inviting—it has these tactile poetics. It’s really... I mean, truly, here we have this kind of intellectual framework—it’s exactly what I read in books. But this is your the tactile text of your body. You’re sort of giving me your body. I’m so happy I stumbled upon this [shows the unwound paper rolls], here is the body of text, the body of language, your body is somehow present in this. Existing. For a moment, I am really here. Completely as an individual. I’ve completely immersed myself in this.
MO: Mmmm.
HH: I didn’t care at all about what was happening around me.
MO: I was reading the audience body here from the perspective that there are different levels of awareness. It wasn’t essential to me whether you were aware of me in any way while you were reading, or anyone else who was here, gazing out the window lost in their thoughts. And someone sighing all the time was part of it too. Normally, that kind of sighing would be difficult for me, but here it wasn’t at all. I thought: “this body of mine breathes in this way”.
HH: The question ultimately boils down to what kind of feeling we have—I'm thinking that there’s a certain gentleness, a great sense of freedom, where I’m not forced into anything—these are incredibly important things.
MO: The history of making suggestions is visible here. There’s a 15-year...
HH: Yes.
MO: ...background behind it.
HH: And in such a way that it doesn’t feel like someone is wielding brutal power over me. Otherwise, I’d be resisting. You can be proud of that—of your own ethical approach as a creator. That’s definitely the result of a long practice. In this sense, this freedom—it’s ridiculous for me to say, “Will I manage to do everything?” That’s my internal norm, not part of the work, nor you. So how does the person who is creating this allow the spectator body to form here? Do they actually let it develop, or do they control it? Not everyone can handle this.
MO: This needs to be articulated, it’s giving context now, and it should somehow be articulated...
HH: Yes!
MO: ...how it affects things...
HH: Yes!
MO: Given the context, it’s incredibly important, because this is a complex matter—what makes the difference? The fact that it’s not coercive, how the whole infrastructure is built from small elements that you don’t notice until you know what’s happening. Somehow, this needs to be articulated in relation to your research.
HH: And it’s important for you to acknowledge just how much you already know about this subject. The wealth of experiential knowledge you have in this kind of practice is really significant. With the wrong framing, you could do anything here, and we’d all end up with this backward stance. Maybe we should rethink the term “sacrificial lamb”—we come as ourselves, as free individuals. These are the kinds of things, and you continue what you’ve always done [refers to performances they have experienced from Reality Research Center over the years]. There’s great joy in coming to this kingdom of freedom. Then I think about what's purely personal... you have the experience, but ultimately, what about you as a person—what role do you fill here? You bring that out very beautifully in the texts as well. But even if someone didn’t know that, I believe there’s a gentleness here that respects me as a spectator. We aren’t objectified test subjects. That feeling didn’t come up, not at all. If we were treated like laboratory rats, but we weren’t. That never happens. And as you conduct your research, these are the boundary conditions of art based on this act of gathering together: if the spectator feels like crap, they won’t enjoy it. If they feel like they’re being forced, they sure as hell won’t come back.
MO: And they won’t submit...
HH: They won’t submit, exactly. And then they sit back, and those kinds of affects rise, and they can still obediently go along with it. And your comparison to the “sacrificial lamb” isn’t quite accurate, because we want to expose ourselves, we want to surrender. It’s like [Jean-Luc] Nancy’s idea of the body—when you do it in such a way that we sense your openness, then we, too...
MO: It’s actually written somewhere here, something about surrendering, but I think you would sense it if it was somehow untrue or...
HH: Exactly, exactly. [looks through the pile of paper strips and picks one at random]: “But what about those who don’t read this language / or that other one / but what about the words our mothers say, don’t they come from another time / or what about the languages that don’t even have words for time?” Even if you read just a small bit from here, it works... your text works incredibly well as this kind of textual tuning. If we talk about the idea of an actor’s dramaturgy and how we tune things, you’re an incredibly good tuner. Is this about constructing some kind of spectator’s dramaturgy, or audience dramaturgy? What elements does it actually consist of? And obviously, this tuning comes from the actor’s dramaturgy and that whole project about the contemporary actor [refers to The Art of the Contemporary Actor research project, Hulkko et al 2011]—so how much of it is actually the same as what’s being done to us? How are we brought into the framework? You’ve been doing this in your work all along. Esa probably brought that tuning element, and then I thought about the Logomimesis [Kirkkopelto 2025] framework—how your text needs to contain some sort of a bodily gesture, a poetics that is bodily and affective language.
MO: There are many performances here, in a way—each of these is one, and probably in every section there are several. It’s not an understatement to say that this is an overwhelming amount of information, and it’s not just theoretical, but rather this holistic, intellectual-bodily information.
HH: Exactly, this holism—how much... You could say this is a mission impossible, the way you’re tuning us. So what is it actually, and how can text be bodily and affective? For example, the flow of duration and time—you give it this material form. These are fascinating experiments, where the body is present in its absence. Like in pedagogy, we talk about different kinds of learners—are they visual, are they haptic, are they kinaesthetic, and what medium do you work with?
This is really something! HUHHUIJAA! What’s going on here? I came here with enthusiasm, but also pretty tired. And now, what the hell, here we are...! [laughter in the background]
MO: How long have we been at this?
TL: An hour and a half.
MO: AHHAHA good luck unpacking all this!
[...]
MO: I think about what was said earlier about your personality—what’s really at stake when you suggest something to the audience? I say this in a general sense, but in the context of participation. It raises thoughts about how much the artist’s worldview is reflected in this. I’d argue that it’s visible in performances to varying degrees. How much of it is a matter of practice, fundamentally, but also how much of it is a worldview issue? It’s a pretty daunting question in this context.
NV: It’s a skill question—being able to get people to surrender. After that, it’s incredibly easy to violate or exploit that. On the one hand, it’s lack of skill, and on the other, it’s disregard.
HH: These kinds of forms are very much about setting aside the self and, in that sense, being exposed. I’m thinking of the ethics of Levinas and Buber, where you’re genuinely, in some way—though it’s interesting, this form where you’re not physically present—but you’re still here because you’ve set this up.
TL: I’ve always liked Levinas.
HH: Write about that. There’s so much clutter around this question, especially in the context of contemporary art and theater.
MO: As if it were a matter of taste. I don’t think that applies here. “One person likes one thing, another likes something else.” In this context, that doesn’t work. From the perspective of ego, you could examine it. Of course, when it comes to speaking about oneself: “In this dissertation, I would like to talk about myself and how I have no ego, and in fact, I’m a damn good person, and here we are, with two hours of Helavuori & Oiva analyzing it, and feel free to oppose it from home, because I mean...” [laughter]
HH: Right now, this is a big question—ethical practices in relation to...
NV: The exploitation of skill—I feel like you’re talking about that boundary.
HH: And about something where, nevertheless, I’m being programmed. Returning to RRC [Reality Research Center], it’s been so wonderful how that freedom has been maintained. As a spectator, when we were together, what we experienced collectively—you’ve tuned it so carefully.
