Between 14th-18th of September 2022 the Audience Body working group (architect Alexander Furunes Eriksson, sound designer Carolina Jinde, lighting designer Nanni Vapaavuori and graphic designer Visa Knuuttila) gathered at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki to plan and test the realization of the work.
We had a dance studio with a high ceiling and a lighting grid for our use and the size of the studio was approximately similar to the Zodiak stage. After the Valssaamo experiment and its audience feedback we had decided to use carpets to make the space softer and more welcoming for sitting and lying around. So I had borrowed carpets that had been used in the performance Over Your Fucking Body (by choreographer-dancers Janina Rajakangas and Neil Callaghan) at the Zodiak Stage and in the programme of the Moving in November Festival in 2019. I had also a 200x80x20 cm water container for reading the underwater books collectively.
The whole thing started to be fairly close to the final outcome.
A u d i e n c e a s a b o d y
I had chosen the title of the second artistic part fairly intuitively in early 2021—I can’t remember or find the reasons for it in my notes. It was probably inspired by my desire to use the full potential of the instruments of esitystaide/beforemance art, move my work further from the analytical and intellectual qualities of academia and closer to the fleshy, sensuous and felt qualities of art. The title would direct the focus of the last parts of my research and when composing this commentary it evolved into the central term of the whole work. At this point, when composing the work titled Audience Body, it started to replace audience in my articulations, even though I did not really consider it’s implications as a theoretical concept. I imagined the audience as an organism for which I would enable an access to a variety of resonant potentialities.
I started to think that the phenomenon of audience bodies, which I had now named, might have special relevance in the genre of esitystaide/beforemance art, which was my main artistic habitat. The concept might also tell something crucial about my own path as an artist, especially the impact of Julius Elo and other colleagues at the Reality Research Center during the previous 17 years. We had focused on bodies of spectators: examining how to help them attain altered experiences, how to encounter them as performers, how to enable encounters between spectators. We had attempted to step back from the spotlight and condition audiences to function as organisms. During the same years, I had participated in numerous audience bodies in experiments by other artists, submitting to take the position of a lover, a reindeer, a sexual partner, a car, a prisoner, a gender transitioner and many other positions more difficult to put in words.
While the conceptual work, making it possible to formulate motifs and arguments made in this commentary, came later (and before), at this point I was concerned with the actual audience bodies that would inhabit this work in the not-so-distant future. I wanted to make audience members breathe, feel and resonate as a collective body, with the ability to exceed their own individuality without compromising its integrity.
P r o l o g u e & E p i l o g u e
At this point the prologue was still in process. I had decided how the event would start. There would be an auditorium at the other end of the black box. The audience would enter at the same time and when entering, they would receive a short prologue on paper and would be guided to take a seat in the auditorium. I had also started to plan incorporating the act of eating paper in the prologue.
After the September session I developed the concept further. As the format I chose the one I had used in the very first draft: the folded A4 programme. On the cover I wrote the same instruction the script of A Reading of Audience had: [open at the same time with others]. When handing the prologue to the audience members, I stopped for a moment with each of them before letting go of the paper, making sure that they really read the sentence—to avoid the repetition of what took place in Draft 7. In this way I linked the beginning of the event to some of the most significant points and gestures of my research process. Thirdly, I added a small piece of edible paper inside each prologue, with the word audience (or in Finnish yleisö) printed on it. The prologue text asked them to eat it and when everyone was ready, to enter the space.
While the audience body was after this free to wander in the space and read or not read anything in any order, the beginning made explicit the subordinate relation between them and my performative gestures. Eating and digesting the word audience attempted to make the institution of this relation grandiose, ritualistic and self-ironic, through the reference to the Christian ceremony of communion that would be familiar to most audience members. Instead of the body of Jesus, or its symbol, they digested their own bodies, which further underlined the self-reflective or cannibalistic nature of the format in which, to quote the informant Kaino Wennerstrand, they had to “revenge the sin of theory” on my behalf (see Audience Body—work-in-progress 2).
Sitting in the auditorium together marked the creation of a collective body. Eating their own body was an even clearer mark of a transition to a liminoid state, during which their digestive system would process it. During the liminoid state the audience body would live its own life, governed by its own needs. When time was up, I went through audience members and handed each of them an epilogue, which was a repetition of the prologue in form, a folded A4 with [open at the same time with others] on the cover. The audience gathered back into one dense group, and re-turned the page together, re-entering the everyday through this transition.
T i m e a n d P l a c e
I had rewritten the text used in Time to Audience and renamed it Time and Place. Nanni in turn remodelled the circular light used in the center of the room in A Reading of Audience. She hung a trash can lid below the lamp and created a black hole in the middle, a kind of solar eclipse. The rolls were placed along the strip of light that circled the dark center, forming an approximation of a circle. It would invite different variations of a circular audience body formation during the public iterations.
How time was addressed as a theme was for most part inherited from the previous iterations of the roll in Time to Audience. The flowing format itself was paramount, but I crafted also both the rhythm and the content of the text to induce free-flowing and atypical temporal modalities in the collective body. Also infancy, death and the time after death were addressed as temporal qualities curbing live bodies.
I m m e r s i o n
When my imagination opened towards the development of different bodily reading experiences via the use of materials, I also came up with the idea of an underwater book. It was induced by the realization of the strong effect of putting one’s hands into water and due to the excessive handwashing done during the pandemic. I felt there was something hypnotic about it, or that it functioned as a relaxant. With my colleagues Maria Oiva and Jani-Petteri Olkkonen we had prepared a water-resistant book for the second act of Plato’s Republic, in which the audience entered a sauna together and read a similar book there.
I took the book of Plato’s Republic as a blueprint and rewrote the text to fit my research themes. In the book, I addressed the theme of immersion, which was central both in the genre of immersive theatre and of experiential performance in general. In addition it was relevant for me in the context of artistic research, since research arrangements seemed (possibly without exception) to contain a metalevel of attention, disabling attempts to whole-heartedly immerse oneself in an artwork or enter other-worldly realms of experience.
The pool could accomodate 8-10 audience members at a time to lower their hands for this paradoxically immersive reading.
The act of gathering was present in the basic theatrical format of the work: the audience convened onsite, at the same hour and the motif could be perceived in several elements present. The large book titled What if audience is a charge between in and out was especially thematized around this issue as it traced through a flood of historical and theoretical anecdotes concerning the way audiences position themselves in performing arts had developed and had been conceptualized.
The script was adopted and re-iterated from A Reading of Audience, where it was situated as the second act, Out and In. Taking it as the starting point I collaborated with graphic designer and my cousin Visa Knuuttila on the visuality and materiality of the content. One of the interviewed audience members of A Reading of Audience had questioned the typewriterly courier font I had used and suggested that I would develop the graphic design with a professional. As I now did.
We decided to use a large format, eventually the A2-size. The idea of a queen-sized book had come in a post-performance discussion from one of the audience members of Draft 7. The size gave proper attention to the visuality since it was our focus. One of the audience members of Audience Body told me later that the way images and diagrams were used in the book made it more accessible for people on the neurodivergent spectrum. Another one questioned the number of male sources quoted in the book, the weight of which was amplified by the size of the book. Before that I had not come to think of that the book would have more weight than the other parts.
The size of the book also enabled an unusual reading composition where two or three adults would sit together and read a book together. These kind of dynamics were the more sophisticated level of the motif of gathering taking place in Audience Body. The big book would invite a group of people to sit and stand around it, following the same story. The water container would enable up to ten pairs of hands in the same liquid affecting each other through vibrations that their movements triggered. The paper rolls gathered people into a circle-like free formation. The set of cards suggested they would bend over it like over a puzzle solved together. And so on. During the event the audience body would realize multiple different compositions of gathering.
On the floor we placed test prints of the set of cards with short scores and aphorisms. They were a development of the programme print, with which I had started the draft series. In some of them I paraphrased or appropriated something I had read, like I had done for example in Draft 4. In addition, I used the interviews I had done with my informants at different points of the process, similarly paraphrasing a score of an exersice or just a thought based on something someone had said. In the September session I still titled the series How to Audience, but before the November premiere I removed the title.
One of my research interests had been the use of performances as reference material and the related parapractice of audience membership. During my Saari residency in March-April 2022 I had composed a list of performances I had attended during the research process. I used my roll printer to manufacture a long strip of paper with the reference list of live performances. I had also added my comments of each performance, when possible. The list was expanding as I attended more performances, at the time of the September sessions it was 45 pages (= approximately 15 meters) long. I was working on how to install it.
T h e l o v e l e t t e r
Following its title, the love letter was probably the most personal and intimate of the elements of Audience Body. Contrasting this intimacy, I also included the most substantial theoretical argument in it. Taped on one of the pages was a piece of cardboard, which could be folded into a three-dimensional cube. I called it a love poem, through which I express my erotic relationship to theory.
It spells out how audience bodies form.
The love letter also contained the most corporeally versatile and deep materials of the work. The words love letter were typed to the envelopes with the typewriter my late grandfather had used. The text portrayed my kids as mythical figures. In the end, it invited the reader to add something if they wanted and destroy the letter and leave the remains so that I would find them. I said that I would burn them and add the ashes to my garden where I would grow food. In this way, I could also eat some of the audience input during the coming years. More about this process can be found in Chapter 6, Retribution.