The artistic research practice, which I conducted in my doctoral research, is predated by several works in which I have, with my collaborators, experimented on the formation of audience bodies and developed methods, which I have re-iterated in this study. Especially my work in the collective Reality Research Center (RRC) has been influential. I have added here small descriptions of some of them, to serve as the artistic background of the research at hand.
In 2008 I co-directed a research year at the RRC with Julius Elo on the Body of the Spectator in a Performance. As a part of it, we realized Renunciation, a “retreat performance”. The performance took place in an old villa, started before sunset and ended after sunrise. During this time both social and private everyday actions—eating, washing up, sleeping etc.—blended into the performance. In this work I used for the first time printed text and instructions as an essential performative gesture; almost all verbal communication with the audience took place through prints. The work consisted of four acts, each of which started with a printed programme leaflet. In the first act, Descending, the participants arrived to the villa individually, renounced their phones, wallets, keys and such and were guided into silence and a bodily sensitive way of being. In the second act, Being, they had the possibility to step into several different scenes/rooms, each of which was set for one person at a time. Each scene proposed renunciation of a specific thing, for example space, time, goals, power, the self or distance. In the third act, Dreams, the participants slept. In the fourth act, Ascending, they were guided towards returning to the world, via a reversed dramaturgy of the first act. Design of the prints were done in collaboration with Elo and artist Saara Hannula. The prints were ancestors of my doctoral research practice.
In 2010 I directed a research year at the RRC with the theme Can the Sacred Be Performed? One of the works, 12 Etudes on Everlasting Life prepared me for the iterative method of drafting used in the doctorate. I attempted to find 12 ways to practice not dying methodically: every month during 2010 I worked for three uninterrupted days in collaboration with a different artist. Each period resulted in an artwork and a practice, formulated into a textual score. The scores were the published as a book, Manual of Everlasting Life (Laitinen 2013). One of the etudes was a custom-made epistolary performance. In the Second Etude, I wrote in collaboration with the artist James Lórien MacDonald 66 unique letters about everlasting life to 66 specific individuals.
As a part of the same research year I made my first experiment of using explicit theoretical references in a performance. The work Comparative Religion consisted of five acts, each of which was performed for an audience of one and was dedicated to one theorist of the sacred: Emile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade, Rudolf Otto, Rene Girard and Georges Bataille. The work was based on an article by the scholar of comparative religion Elisa Heinämäki (Heinämäki 2010). It offered five interpretations of how sacred can be defined.
As an example below a photo of the fourth act, dedicated to Rene Girard. In Girard’s theory, violence is the heart of the sacred. He suggests that religions are borne from mimetic violence, as the actual violence dormant in the community is released through secondary violence taking place in a sacrificial ritual. I guided a sole audience member to a site with two bricks and a carton of eggs. We sat in front of the bricks. I placed one egg on top of the other brick and handed the other brick to the audience member. What then happened, was different with each audience member.
Circle was a participatory performance by RRC, directed by myself and Julius Elo and aimed to study instinctual ways of encountering others; especially within the areas of nurture, sexuality and power struggle. It consisted of a warm-up session done together with the audience members and the “circle ritual”. In the ritual the participants form a circle around a shared stage area. Any two people from the circle, including both the “performers” and the “audience” could move into the center to encounter each other while the rest witness their encounter from the perimeter. The encounters taking place in the center were usually focused on one of the three themes we had chosen to use for the study of instinctual encounters: fighting, feeding or mating. The ritual itself had a pre-defined duration: normally between 60-90 minutes.
Our use of the circle format did not carry nostalgia for lost communities or obsolete political structures but we did have an idealistic aim: we wanted to democratize the medium of performance—to dismantle the power position of the maker in order to distribute agency more or less equally among all participants, both performers and audience members. The circle was a symbol and a tool of a horizontal power structure. However, through our research during 2012-13 we realized that this was not going to happen. It did not matter if the format was non-hierarchical—the audience would never be equal to us. For example: we had tacit knowledge about the specific practices developed in the project, we had the ultimate control of the procedures of the event and we had the responsibility in case something went wrong. We were prepared; we had practiced.
Portals was a collaboration between myself, the vocal artist Samita Sinha and the visual artist Jesse Harold. We created a space for intimate encounters in February 2014 at Panoply Performance Laboratory, an independent venue and “laboratory site” in New York City, run by artists Esther Neff and Brian McCorkle. In Portals, I prototyped reading as a form of performance, which would become central to my research methodology.
When entering the venue, each audience member was given a book prepared by me. The books were black A6-sized Moleskine notebooks with 120 pages and read in “landscape” mode, the longer side of the page placed horizontally. The book had five handwritten chapters, separated by coloured Post-it notes, which marked intermissions. Each audience member could read the book in their own pace, but the number of pages correlated with the number of minutes in the duration of the event and intermissions suggested putting the book down for a while. Both features as well as direct instructions contained in the text, proposed taking time and traversing the book slowly. “Time is precious now”.
Simultaneously to reading the book, the audience members could experience a one-on-one collaborative act of creating an image together with Harold, with their fingers and ink on a surface. Also simultaneously, Sinha, an expert in classical Indian singing and experimental vocal practices, performed a long musical composition. The vocal performance included moving in the space and addressing each audience member personally.
In 2013 a mystery play titled Plato’s Symposium by RRC premiered in New York City at Theorems, Proofs, Rebuttals and Propositions: A Conference of Theoretical Theatre. Myself, director Maria Oiva, director Jani-Petteri Olkkonen and visual artist Visa Knuuttila staged a six-day experiential mystery play, whose audience members were rendered protagonists. It proved to be a transformative experience not only for us makers but also for many of the audience members. The aim of the play was absolute beauty. Plato’s Symposium was a part of a larger body of work we called Mysteries of Love, aiming at exploring philosophy as a life path in the footsteps of Plato, repositioned into the context of contemporary art. We embodied Greek archetypes: I became Apollon, Olkkonen Dionysus, Oiva Afrodite and Knuuttila Hermes. Mysteries of Love would later on contain the exhibition Trialogue (2015) two more mystery plays, Plato’s Cave (2016) and Plato’s Republic (2017).
In Trialogue, Plato’s Cave and Plato’s Republic I re-iterated the book format created in Portals. I, Olkkonen and Knuuttila realized the Trialogue exhibition at the Gallery Oksasenkatu 11 in Helsinki. The upper floor of the two-story gallery was inhabited by Apollon, the lower floor in the basement by Dionysus. Hermes, who delivers messages between gods and people, moved in between.
On the upper floor I realized an intermedial work composed of an installation, a book and a practice/performance. The installation was composed of an hourglass of sorts: each morning I set up a bag of sand in the ceiling, with a hole in the bottom. The sand would flow through the opening hours, accumulating on the floor. By the window, I attached a stuffed raven. Each day I performed twice a practice of moving slowly for two hours. There was a set of books available for visitors, who could read them while attending the room. The book offered audience members an orientation to the installation and the performance. I improvised the slow movement around the flowing sand and visitors could witness it accompanied by the reading of the book.
Plato’s Cave took place at the Dome of Visions in Copenhagen. It was a six-day mystery play and directed towards absolute truth. The play consisted of four acts. The first three of them were personal one-on-one encounters with gods: Act 1—Shadows of Afrodite, Act 2—Shadows of Dionysos, Act 3—Shadows of Apollon. The last act was a collective ritual titled The Cave.
I was responsible for the third act, in which I encountered the protagonists individually. The protagonist was guided to a balcony on the second floor of the dome, where a smart phone and a book awaited them. The book guided them to direct my actions via a microphone, which transmitted their voice to my ear. I functioned as their avatar, a borrowed body, which they could guide with verbal instructions. The idea was that they could practice being their true selves with me, before starting to really live it through their own bodies.
The mystery play Plato’s Republic by Reality Research Center premiered in Helsinki in August 2017, again created and performed by Maria Oiva, Jani-Petteri Olkkonen and myself. The goal of the ritual process in Plato’s Republic was absolute good and while in the previous mystery plays the process was partly an individual one, now the collective was explicitly the primary agent. The protagonists (i.e. the audience members) were to form a good republic through the play. In this way we proposed aspiration towards the good as the initial principle of politics.
So we devised a play consisting of five acts, each of which was performed through reading; in all of the acts each audience member received a book, which guided them into a synchronized reading experience and to actions suggested by the books. Each act took place in a different urban location in the neighbourhood of Kallio in Helsinki and represented a different function of a society. We estimated that the population of Kallio was similar to that of Ancient Athens in Plato's times. Act 1—Aletheia took place at the marketplace, Act 2—Physis in the swimming hall, Act 3—Pneuma in the church, Act 4—Logos in the library and Act 5—Politeia in the theatre. All acts followed the same structure. We welcomed the audience to each act dressed in black turtlenecks (we considered this was the archetypal dress of a 20th century philosopher), let them enter and left them among themselves. The books performed: the audience followed the dramaturgy given by them. The gods that had led the previous mystery plays only appeared now as detached figures following the events from above.
This literary dramaturgy anticipated my research to come. Even if I started the draft series from scratch and developed my research practice slowly and iteratively, experiment by experiment, many of the attributes that I discovered later were already present in Plato's Republic. This is an interesting observation. The body of work that contained the three mystery plays and the exhibition Trialogue (2015) was packed with information, knowledge and know-how to which we had arrived through artistic experimentation during a process of six years. Dissecting, developing, explicating and re-iterating it into academic artistic research would take another period of several years and another manifold experimental process.
