There is a duality inhabiting theatres across Europe: the division between the audience and the makers of art. For art to appear, the artist has to enter the stage and do something. This doing attracts attention; thus an audience body is born. But how is this body formed and conditioned?

Audience Body is a performance without performers, like a book misplaced into the space and time of theatre. There is a codex. A scroll. A love letter. Place. Time. Immersion. Destruction. Order. Mess. Practice. Theory.

The work is an examined artistic part of Tuomas Laitinen‘s artistic doctorate at the Performing Arts Research Center Tutke, Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy. It has been developed in a long series of public experiments since 2018. The performance is available both in English and in Finnish.

Tuomas Laitinen

Tuomas Laitinen works as a director, performance artist, writer and curator. His artistic practice has revolved around experimenting with the audience position and questioning the nature of spectatorship. His works have taken the forms of retreats, family gathering, rituals of encounter, 7-day mystery plays, pole dances in living rooms, and practices of immortality.