A Reading of Audience took place in Studio 2 at the Theatre Academy in November 2020. Below you can find an edited video documentation of the work, combined with excerpts from interviews conducted with 16 audience members, as well as close-ups of the script used in the performance, shot at a later stage.
The video shows the dialogical iterative practice exercised in this study, the emergent and collective nature of the artistic thinking following from that practice and the rich spectrum of experiences and insights the work initiated in its attendees. As a result, I propose that the video traces a thinking process that takes place in or around the entity I have named an audience body.
The full script used in the performance is available in the appendix of the commentary.
Some words about the process
I invited lighting designer, doctoral candidate Nanni Vapaavuori and scenographer, artistic researcher, Doctor of Arts Maiju Loukola to join me in the process of making the work. My proposal to them was that they would think with me through their field of expertise: in the case of Nanni, through light, in the case of Maiju, through space. The choice to invite a lighting designer and a scenographer was motivated by practical reasons: I considered that for reading together, I would need space and light, so I would have to think how to organize them.
I designed a practice of iteration that we followed through the process. Each time we met, I would bring a script. We would read the script and discuss it. As the text started to be organized into acts and intermissions, the discussions took place in the intermissions and after the last act. This format would continue into public performances: also they were paced by acts, during which people would read in silence, and intermissions, during which they would chat. I called these events readings.
There were altogether 19 readings:
August 10th/3 readers (the working group: Nanni, Maiju and myself)
August 12th/3 readers (the working group)
August 24th/3 readers (the working group)
August 26th/3 readers (the working group)
September 16th/2 readers (working group members and invited readers from outside the working group)
September 21st/6 readers (working group members and invited readers from outside the working group)
September 24th/27 readers (working group members and invited readers from outside the working group)
October 14th/3 readers (the working group)
November 3rd/2 readers (the working group)
November 5th/7 readers (working group members and invited readers from outside the working group)
November 9th/10 readers (working group members and invited readers from outside the working group, two of whom took part remotely)
November 11th/12 readers (public, the “premiere”)
November 12th/6 readers (public)
November 18th/5 readers (public)
November 19th/10 readers (public)
November 20th/4 readers (public)
November 21st/27 readers (public, with a streaming and 14 remote participants)
November 25th/16 readers (public)
November 26th/16 readers (public)
I would do all the writing in private and every time when I gathered people together—first just the working group, then audiences—we would read together what I had written. I took part in all the readings as one of the readers. In addition I was the main host: I was the one who had invited everyone and took care of the conditions. When people from outside the working group started to take part in the readings, also Nanni, and to some extent Maiju, would take part in hosting. Before each iteration, both before and during public performances, I would make changes to the script according to my own experience and that of others, who would share it with me. Thus I developed the script in dialogue with my colleagues and the audience members. If someone had a chat with me about the script, they might end up in it themselves.
The examination of the artistic part was done by artist-researcher, Doctor of Arts Annette Arlander and scholar, PhD Adam Alston in the seventeenth reading on the 21st of November. Since Alston was not able to travel to Helsinki due to Covid regulations, that iteration was organized as a hybrid event, in which one could also take part remotely. Remote participation was not advertised, but I sent an invitation to colleagues who I knew would not be able to attend on site. The remote members of the audience received the script from me via email and could follow a video stream from Studio 2 while reading it. They were not visible to each other since the stream was a one-way connection.
After the performances were over, I continued the dialogical practice in another way by interviewing 16 members of my audiences via conference calls. Excerpts of these conversations have been edited into the video available above.
A u d i e n c e , t h e a u d i e n c e b o d y a n d t h e i r t h e o r y
The examined artistic part was aimed at combining and refining motifs and ideas that I had introduced or developed during the draft series. The piece was framed by and built around both the term and the phenomenon of the audience. With the title I wanted to say that the event(s) as a whole were an interpretation of the phenomenon of the audience. This proposal implicated a faith in artistic research: to address the phenomenon of performance audiences, we would need to enter the environment where it appeared and not only analyse it in its absence—in what I called the outside. I also proposed the third version of a theoretical argument concerning the phenomenon via a re-iteration of the three-fold argument made in Draft 13: an audience appears as a charged condition and this charge is borne from three oppositions: out and in, one and many, familiar and alien.
The concept of an audience body was only suggested at this stage, but the presence and behaviour of a collective body was articulated by Satu Herrala, one of the interviewed audience members (Herrala 12.2.2020).
T h e r e s t o f t h e m o t i f s
The preconditions of an audience body, explicated in this commentary, were not yet articulated in A Reading of Audience, but they were implicitly present in the work. The subordination to a performance was addressed numerous times by thematising the relationship of the writer and the audience and through the use of parenthesis as a metalevel containing more or less open-ended instructions for the audience. The same features, along with the pointing out of intra-audience relations, were implicating the condition of resonance. The act of gathering and liminoid dramaturgy were performed via the structure of alternating acts and intermissions, as well as by pointing out the transitions between these two modes. Gathering was also present via a historical perspective and via etymological notions about the term audience.
Aspects of time and space were very much present and are emphasized in the video through the comments of those audience members who attended remotely. Two of them told me later in private discussions that they had attended at a different time than the others: one had started just as the rest of the audience was finishing, the other on the following day. Both emphasized the fact that they did not feel separate from the rest of the audience, but instead felt they were attending the work together with them. The audience body was deliberately choreographed by the text and lighting design, partly implicitly, partly explicitly. At the beginning of the third act there was a straightforward and clearly spelled-out request that the audience would take chairs, place them in rows and sit on them. And yet there was one audience that did not comply. The presence of and necessity for complicity, while I did not use the term yet, was highlighted already in the cover page of the script, which read “turn the first page at the same time as the other”.
Regarding the definition of esitystaide/beformance art, A Reading of Audience did not contribute any new innovations, but it was, more than the works in the draft series, instituted as a stand-alone work of art, for which the audience arrived specifically as for a proper theatre play.
I used basically all the methods developed during the previous series of experiments, excluding that of drafting, since I considered the difference between the examined parts and the rest of the works being specifically the difference in how finished they were. The drafts functioned as preparation for the finished artworks and the examined parts were the finalized results of the process of drafting. This followed from the structure given by the institution, in which there could be a maximum of three artistic works which would be examined as parts of the doctoral degree. However, I made A Reading of Audience purposefully to fit the genre of performance or live art and as such, it was not a “finished artwork” in the sense of a fixed, unchanging object. This liveness was present also on the level of the script, which I altered throughout the process by adding and editing pages between the iterations.
So apart from drafting, I made use of the tools I had come up with in my research process. The reading was an intermedial event, using the script as a variation of utilization of the medium of print superimposed with the medium of performance. The process was an iterative series of readings, in which I developed the script according to my own experiences and audience feedback. I used discursive and artistic references, metatext and appropriation of artworks for my purposes. I included sentences and thoughts articulated by informants in the script. The structure of the script was based on a three-fold theoretical model describing the phenomenon of audience and illustrated by a geometrical figure. Historical, etymological and phenomenological perspectives were included. The work was bilingual. Spatial and lighting design were integral parts of the work, as well as the design of the reading apparatus (designed by Maiju, built by stage manager Vesa Rämä): a tray on which the script and a reading lamp were installed. It was installed in a black box (or to be exact, a light grey box) space and while it was arguably a work of esitystaide/beforemance art, it could be also (in my opinion) situated genre-wise somewhere between performance art, theatre, literature and installation.