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.