Author: Tuuli Vahtola

Now that the Audience Club enters the second year, I am curious what has shifted in your perspective since the project first began?

Since the beginning of the project, Audience Club has been held five times, with the current edition at Moving in November being the sixth. Much has changed in how I understand the project.

First of all, I have come to recognise its limitations, and at the same time the opportunities that arise within them. At the very beginning, the formats of interventions into festivals and ways of working with their audiences were still unclear to me. But the deeper I dug into the infrastructures, production realities, and working styles of different festivals, the more precise the role of my project became. I have decided to concentrate on the Audience Club as its central format, developing it across Nordic festivals in a sustainable way rather than relying on one-off “pop-up” versions as I initially imagined. So far, the project has taken place at STHLM DANS in Sweden, Moving in November in Finland, and CODA in Norway – with the intention to extend towards Denmark and Iceland in the future. Within this format, my aim is to make the Club resonate with each festival’s long-term audience development goals, while preserving its value as an “outside eye” – sometimes a critical one.

The Audience Club has become a space for discussion, learning, and mediation. We see shows together, reflect through the lens of art and dance theories, create our own dramaturgies, and, most importantly, search for ways to articulate emotions and ideas around the curatorial proposal as a whole. These then connect to broader, more “universal” topics such as our values, expectations and societal needs. Together with the festival curators, we share a conviction that theatre remains one of the rare social places where people can step out of their media bubbles and echo chambers, encountering other lifestyles and perspectives. Yet the existing social protocols around performances rarely allow true conversation to happen. Audience Club provides a safe but bold space where such conversations are possible.

At the same time, we have noticed that the Club tends to operate as “a festival within a festival,” with its group dynamics not always visible to those outside. This has led us to seek ways of connecting its activities more directly with the general public. At the latest edition of STHLM DANS in May, for example, we began posting collective reviews on social media, sharing how performances resonated in the group and what kinds of discussions they provoked, and we are developing this approach in this year’s Moving in November edition. Since one of the Club’s main intentions is to trace the processes, tensions, and even conflicts that performances spark in a collective dynamic, these reviews not only increase visibility but also leave behind a record of “productive disturbances.” They also provide an alternative to the single-expert review model, offering instead the voice of a group resonance.

So far, the groups have been culturally diverse, allowing the Club to work as a kind of social thermometer, revealing how performances resonate within a broader societal fabric. Looking forward, we are exploring ways for the Club to become more immersed in the social life of festivals – with participants engaging in artist talks, meeting festival teams, and connecting with other visitors, and this will be more present in the current Moving in November edition.

Another, more technical, comment would be that the format has proven itself to be recognisable (it has begun to shape its own identity and atmosphere), while remaining flexible enough to host various viewpoints. It has also become my personal laboratory for testing different mediation tools, prompts, conversational structures, games, and tasks—elements that I am confident will be of value to performing arts organisations interested in mediation, once published as a methodological brochure.

A year has passed, since I last asked you the same question: how do you currently situate your artistic work within the Finnish performing arts landscape? Has something changed?

I think the main incentive has stayed the same. As I told you last year, Audience Club is a mediation project that grows out of a desperate need for discussion, communication, and translation – both within professional communities (in Finland as well as in other Nordic countries) and between the art field and wider audiences who don’t necessarily belong to “art bubbles.” It also stems from the conviction that theatre remains a vital “third place,” where local social dynamics can be revealed through the audience’s reflection on what is on stage—provided that the venue’s or festival’s working style allows for a genuine meeting between the artistic work and its audience. Wherever I work, I am interested in this process!

But while the project was born in Finland and remains rooted here, its scope is expanding into a cross-Nordic dimension. With three countries – Finland, Sweden, and Norway – already involved, Audience Club is beginning to form a regional ecology of its own.

This expansion brings both questions and consequences:

• How can the Club preserve sensitivity to local contexts while expanding into a transnational format? And how can I, as a mediator entering new environments, refine the discussion tools that would allow both locals and local expats to engage authentically in our conversations?
• What does it mean for audience work when discussions begin to circulate across borders?
• Can a project that started as a local mediation tool grow into a network of collective reflection, contributing to how we understand audiences, communities, and values across the region?

I believe these questions will guide the next steps, as the project continues to negotiate its position between the local and the transnational, the intimate and the structural.

Photo: Vera Kavaleuskaya

Could you tell us about the background and starting point of your project?

I have always wondered what an event is. What happens? What do we see happening. What else happens? How does it happen? As a performance artist I have always doubted whether it actually is possibly to provoke or ‘create’ an event? An actual event, I think is not made. But perhaps art and performance art can be a place of collective processing of an event, or a preparation for it.

There are two themes and life forms, I am fascinated with and that are also a subject in this project: parasites and monsters, or more particularly: parasitic relations and monstrous narratives as that is what parasites and monsters engage with. By that I mean the ability to create and inhabit deep interdependencies and to negotiate terms that coexist regardless of considerable differences, in size and dimension, or even in a form of communication. Parasites and monsters share an imaginative form of survival, an ability to redefine, or even abandon a sense of self and an ability to shift power asymmetry in a complex and paradigmatic way. When I talk about monstrous I talk about embracing all what human is not, I mean those who are discarded from the human logic and yet on which humanity defines itself. The stories we tell to gain power over others.

It took me a while to arrive to these terms. I do not particularly like them, but I believe they carry an answer to certain particular intersections of economic, social and political questions that we cannot reach from a only human perspective. It is a layer of sub-, super- and non-humanity, which is casted away and which could possibly hold answers. For me they hide in actual strategies, protocols, and methods which are employed by those accused as parasitic or monstrous. When you have a closer look they become actually something quite different. This could provide a ground for conversations that aren’t easy, nor smooth, or clean, but I believe that these are the conversations to have right now. Hence I propose a training session or a ridicament . What is that? Ridicament is a made-up word, a mixture of ridiculousness and predicament, for a made-up situation that holds elements of a performance, a gathering and a training, and perhaps the potentiality for an event. In other words, with: “We’s and Us’s” I propose to form tactics and strategies for collective organization.

How do you situate your artistic work within the Finnish performing arts landscape? 

I am Polish. It is not a particularly attractive but tolerated form of foreign-hood in this country. I am born in 1978, which means being born in an economic structure that doesn’t exist anymore. This combined with everyone having some projection over what that life might have been, me included, and the return of the far right sentiments riding on the back of the old anti-communist sentiments not only in my home country, but also around the world, has shaped me without much of my choice. So, I embrace the foreign-hood, the communist past with its uneasiness, and that is how I situate myself. Then, being a performance artist with the background in visual arts, working in the intersections with live art, performance studies and artistic research, all that together in times of austerity politics spreading over the entire public sector, it is another level of uneasiness.

For over 10 years I have been active in groups advocating for art workers working conditions, pointing out the paradoxes of this profession: to make a living, looking for solutions to face the demands of labour and market. As artist I have worked against the myth of the ‘artist-genius’ but also against the stereotype of the ‘starving artist’, actively trying to understand the form of artistic production and logic of capital both historically and right now. I have been collaborating with economists and scholars, artists and art workers in many collective endeavours. Questioning together the immateriality of labour, digital capitalism and organisation. I have been working on the fringe of experimental art/activism/and ‘something from completely different’. I was part of Robin Hood Minor Asset Management (the counter-investment cooperative of precariat), Future Art Base, Economic Arts – the research department at Aalto University, Night Schoolers – a self-organised study curriculum on artist labour conditions and Arts Against Cuts, to mention just a few. And it has been too much, too demanding to work out the form of expression between discourses of art, political theory and economy, between issues of precarity and neo-liberalisation of art institutions, decolonial practice and new materialist feminism – collectively. I got lost in the collective dynamics, other people’s visions, and the extent of the question.

I have found for myself these concepts and methods of parasites and monsters as a two-headed strategy to tackle the multi-headed, the shapeshifting problematics I have been invested in and I partially withdrew from. For a few years, I have been working on a doctorate to work more systematically on the articulation and a method. We’s and Us’s is sharing some of the results of that work. It is also my love letter to all those I have been working with, to our grand plans and troubles we couldn’t solve… and to everyone else who ever failed working collectively . It is surely weird to formulate a love letter in parasitic and monstrous terms. But there is a life in it.

What inspired you to embark on this joyous journey alongside musician Joël Rabesolo and dancers Audrey Merlius and Stanley Ollivier?

What inspired me was the absence of stories and living conversations about how colonization has profoundly impacted the children of the diasporas: their connection to their countries of origin, their languages, their bodies, and their cultures. In Europe, colonization is often hidden away in discreet, embarrassing cupboards, as if hoping to be forgotten.

With Joël, Audrey, and Stanley, we each carry distinct stories, but we all come from islands intricately linked to France through colonization. Joël and I began by improvising together and discovered a strong artistic connection. He grew up in Madagascar, I didn’t, so our dialogue is layered and rich.

Audrey, who is from the Haitian diaspora, and Stanley, from Guadeloupe and Martinique (which are still French territories) bring other perspectives. We also connect through our shared experience of having academic, western-trained dance bodies, while also being rooted in another region, another history.

The question we ask together is: what to do with all of this?

Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna, three Malagasy words that mean comparison, transmission, and rivalry. Why did you choose this title for your performance?

While I was in Madagascar recording Red Crater, the first part of a diptych completed by the stage performance Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna, the historian Helihanta Rajaonarison helped me pronounce the word fampitaha correctly. I had been mispronouncing it as fampita, meaning “transmission.” The next day, she messaged me: “There’s also fampitàna, which means ‘rivalry.’” I laughed, fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna, the three words together sounded smooth, a perfect title.

Beyond the meaning comparison, fampitaha is also the name of a 19th-century dance tradition where dancers from across Madagascar competed before the royal family. There’s no monarch today, but these dance encounters continue.

The three words reflect not only a process of linguistic learning, but also the necessity of transmission in reclaiming a language, and the inevitability of rivalry between dominant cultures and cultures of the Third World.

As part of the Madagascan diaspora in Brussels, your piece serves as a dialogue between the children of diasporas and their places of origin. Could you speak more about this?

Yes, this piece is very much about how our places of origin continue to live in our bodies, consciously or not. As children of the diaspora, we often carry fragmented stories, partial languages, and silences. But those fragments move in us, in gestures, in rhythms, in cravings and contradictions.

In Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna, we’re also confronting how colonial legacies shaped those bodies, the tension between what was erased and what remains. This work is a way to reclaim space, not by returning to some imagined and fantasized origin, but by acknowledging and honouring the complex, ongoing dialogue between where we come from and where we are now. It’s about creating room to exist “in between,” fully and unapologetically.