On the 14th of October, 2024, while writing the last parts of this commentary, I attended Sonja Jokiniemi’s choreography Armo. It took place in Pannuhalli, which is the smaller stage of Dance House Helsinki. The 235-seat auditorium was set frontally opposite to the stage, where four dancers moved in repetitive patterns that seemed to vary fragments of traditional folk dances. Close to the end of the performance, Jokiniemi sat on the right side of the stage, ten meters from the first row of the auditorium, facing sideways and sang a lamentation song about or to her father who had passed away recently. Then the dancers and the choreographer danced in a circle close to the back wall of the stage, under a spotlight.
I felt overwhelming sadness. Not over Jokiniemi’s personal sorrow, but over the way we as an audience were sitting silently, disconnected from the shreds of tradition splintered across the hard industrial space. Sadness over the way the lamentation bounced towards us from the concrete wall. Sadness over the soles of our feet that were protected from the soil and the seabed by layers and layers of different monochromatic materials that composed the foundations of the building. Sadness over the circle that was closed from us and enjoyed in the distance by the practitioners of art. Sadness over the orphaned claps that could not even pretend to compensate the massive and masterful effort put in the work by the makers. Sadness over the violence that we had committed to our land, violence that haunted almost every moment of my experience of the show. When the dancers swayed back and forth at the end, once in a while snapping their fingers into the echoing space, I wanted to snap mine as well. I wanted to be in the circle, even on its fringe. But I could not, since the scent of separation that oozed from the stage and surrounded me wouldn’t allow it.
I found that this type of audience membership was a product of modernity and carried that unsustainable weight on its shoulders. I understood why artists needed to express this sorrow, this infinite grief. My participation in the event as a customer made me complicit in the misappropriation of life inflicted on the ecosystem by fossil-fuelled capitalism. I did not want to take this role, I did not want this complicity. I felt that the era of this haunted audience condition was, or should be, over.
I did not blaim artists for their participation in this system to be able to practice their passion and fight for their livelihood. Well, I was one of them. I understood them but I really sympathized with those theatre artists who turned towards ritual art. I sympathized with those performance artists, who travelled across the earth on minimal budgets to perform for free for their peers and random passers-by. I sympathized with those immersed so far in posthumanist practices that they performed rather to moss and maggots than to their fellow humans. I sympathized with the small artist circles of local beforemance art, attending each other’s work and forming a loose community in a system where a community could hardly survive.
But was the retribution from the violence we had committed present in my research works? Was I able to absolve myself of the sin of theory or let audiences surrender their body to the art itself? I had the feeling that something like this had happened, but there was no evidence to publish, there were no testimonies to justify such claim. Beforemances escape documentation like I claimed already at the beginning of my research when agonizing with the inappropriateness of research writing with regard to the performing arts. I had had some feedback that could corroborate this feeling of succeeding in something. Someone had approached me and said that they are usually touched only by texts written in Persian but my writings in English made them cry.
But good feedback does not change our relationship to the planet. I performed a terrestrial ritual process to atone my relationship with the audience and to liberate my work from the forces that sever our connection to the earth. You could say that I moved from beforemance art to performance art, in its traditional sense. It was the afterlife of the Love Letter, which was (for me) the most intimate and theoretical component of Audience Body.
I had started to write the letter on spring equinox 2022 at the Saari Residency. On the winter solstice in 2022, after the Zodiak beforemances, I gathered the letters that had been ripped, folded and eloquently destroyed by my audiences. I took a metal bowl, which had a history. It had been used in 2016 in the performance Griefbook (created and performed by actors Heidi Syrjäkari and Yuko Takeda and myself) to gather and burn the sorrows of our audience. I placed the remnants of the letters in the bowl and burned them.
Respectively, one year later, on the winter solstice of 2023, after the beforemances in Turku and Cologne, I repeated the ritual. This time I used an oil barrel, which had been used earlier in Venus, a performance choreographed by my partner Janina Rajakangas. Venus dealt with the erotization of teenage girls and the sexual harassment they were subjected to, with my dear bonusdaughter Volta as one of the performers. At the end of the show Volta and the three other teenage dancers burned a Bruce Springsteen puppet made of straw in the barrel while his paedophilic song I’m on fire was playing.
Both years I lit the letters up and followed their transformation into ashes. My son Ilari took care of the documentation. I sprinkled some of the ashes onto our garden, by the apple trees and berry bushes and saved some for the set of potential future performances.
Already in 2017 I had encountered the concept of Place-Thought by the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe scholar Vanessa Watts as well as the idea of local thinking by philosopher Tere Vadén. Culling from her ancestral traditions, Watts proposed a theoretical understanding of the world via a physical embodiment, namely Place-Thought. It is “based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts”. (Watts 2013, 21) Vadén wrote that language cannot be separated from ways of life. Unique, untranslatable language, as well as unique language-related thought, can exist when unique ways of life exist. Translation may be possible if lots of time and work is put into it: “if one is willing to experience and live in a new way”. (Vadén 2006, 220-21)
Beformances are typically localized, ephemeralized and embodied. This tendency is challenged by fossil-capitalist structures: uniform and hermetic theatre spaces, fast-paced touring schedules, overabundance of visual documentation and its insemination via social media and so on. The fruit of my research practice, a theoretical model depicting the formation of audience bodies, is meant to be impartial. For it, no way of gathering is better than others. However, my own practice is biased towards those art forms that invite and expose the complicity of audience bodies and through them the inevitable fragility of life and the land as its condition. Embracing beformativity contains a resistance to non-local practices that enable a distancing from and a nondisclosure of the material dependence of art on bodies and planetary resources.
Fire—with its inherent irreversibility, mutability and threat—is an appropriate metaphor for the beformativity I am describing. In Jokiniemi’s Armo, a stack of matches is scattered on the floor twice, as if falling from a sleeve or a pocket of a dancer by accident. The dancer Marlon Moilanen lights up one a couple of times, in the midst of some seemingly uncontrollable tics. The fire in my backyard is devoid of an immediate audience body, much like the open studio in Pori seven years earlier, in the story I opened this commentary with in Chapter 1.1. The lack of immediacy of an audience does not compromise the performativity of the work. But its human audience body is distributed elsewhere in time and place and I no longer am able to trace its qualities in terms of beforemance. That paper is time and our time is withering away as smoke.
The research environment as I have encountered it, in comparison to the current institution of art, supports porous temporalities and economies. It can take nine years to form a thought as has been the case with my thesis—if one counts from the residency in Pori in June 2016. This kind of duration, in my experience, can better foster the thoughts emitted by the land than the much shorter timespans of most artistic projects within the economies of the current freelance art scene. While there is tension between the conceptuality of theoretical arguments and the material realities of living human bodies attending beforemances, I hope that this durational and practical process of artistic iteration can keep them at least to some extent in contact.
Philosopher Antti Salminen has theorized artistic experimentation in the postfossil era, determining modernity as the era of fossil energy. In his definition, postfossil (and thus postmodern) era is only starting as the production of fossil fuels has started declining and cheap oil is no more available (Salminen 2015, 8). Salminen advocates for a radical change of the arts as we enter the times of economic decline. One of his proposals for the art of the postfossil age is asubjectivity (op. sit. 53-60). For postfossil art, the subject-object relation is no longer in focus, rather the production of subjectivity is a redundant structure that no longer serves us in the postfossil condition. With the decline of subjectivity, affordances of the parapractice of audience membership as well as those related to the modalities of audience bodies may prove to be useful. Maybe naming is then not so important anymore. Maybe it leads to a liquidization and erosion of the separation between the makers and the audience. Maybe practices of audiencing might give some answers to the need for a new kind of sensitivity, challenging passive spectation with resonant complicity, in which the mode of one's membership in an audience body would not be given.
Art can be perceived as different ways to summon collective bodies. These bodies are complicit in the emergence of art through resonance. Resonant complicity is, in addition to being an attribute of audiences, a way masses take part in different political processes. The choice of media that is used in artistic performances has effects on the possibilities of audiences’ complicity and their awareness of it. This has led me to think that there are dangers in using media that keeps us unaware of our resonant complicity and its effects.
Through esitystaide/beforemance art and the parapractice of audience membership we can experiment on and educate ourselves on how to think through resonance and how to accept and bear the weight of our complicity. I believe this has happened via the production of self-aware audiences realized in this doctoral research. The crisis of the modern subject is tied to the end of the era of fossil energy as well as to distancing audiences from the effects of their complicity. Audience-sensitivity, complicity-awareness and availability to resonate can be configured as (para)artistic (para)practices for the post-fossil era.
When discussing audience participation with people, they almost without exception say that they do not really like it—regardless of whether they are professionals of participatory performance or totally inexperienced with such aesthetics. On an emotional level, it is very hard to let your protective bubble be controlled and compromised by others. The current global environmental (and increasingly humanitarian) crisis will not however grant us such luxury. This makes me think that beforemance art could prepare us, re-educate us, inure us, the privileged Europeans, for an era of dependence, for the times when we will need to rely on mutual exposure and support1.
1 See the dissertation by Alexander Eriksson Furunes for practices of mutual support in architecture (Eriksson Furunes 2022).