Could you tell us about the background and starting point of this project?
This year I am happy to collaborate with Moving in November through an art mediation format called Audience Club. Audience Club is a participatory format that invites festival’s visitors to get deeper understanding of dance art in relation to pressing issues of our contemporary world. It allows participants to learn more about the language of dance and performance, gain confidence in articulating their questions and opinions, find a community for discussions and immerse deeper into this year’s festival’s program.
Most importantly, it’s open for both art lovers and professionals and even wishes to have them in the same space of discussion, since artists and cultural workers don’t often meet with the viewers who don’t belong to their professional community in an open and safe conversation.
Audience Club is one of the mediation formats I am exploring as part of my longer artistic research project (Re)inventing the audiences: love, irritation, misunderstanding and joy. Having lived and studied in Finland for four years and worked as an independent dance researcher, artist, dramaturg, critic and educator, I have repeatedly found myself in a weird place in between the professional communities and so-called “wider audiences”. As an artist, I’ve always liked to challenge the limits of professional art-bubbles, placing my works outside the secured theatre stages in the spaces where normalised social segregation can collapse. As a dramaturg, I have helped choreographers craft their works so that they could speak to multiple individuals as well as social groups in a layered manner. But as a professional writer and educator, as well as a person seeking connections with others, I have always sensed a large gap between the professional lingo we are thinking in, and the ways we create spaces for spectators of dance to come in touch with our pieces and give feedback or even influence the ways we do our job.
Does the audience even matter? This question is not as simple as it sounds, when we try to marry our desire to connect with others with our wish for artistic freedom, with institutional practical and financial needs, with the desire of theoretical research to stay away from simplification, with the effects of social media on the quality of our connections. And if it does matter, what kind of impact can “audiences” have on performance making beyond the power of figures — the so-called “audience love” measured in the amount of sold tickets?
(Re)inventing the audiences is an artistic and research experiment (supported by Kone Foundation) which inspires artists and festival curators to get curious about the role and the agency of the audiences in dance and performance production. It is concerned with a possibility of art mediation that wouldn’t take root in a didactic, explanatory-driven project originating in the enlightenment, but would instead research the potential of artist—artwork—audience—place—institution relationships as nodes of layered and curious encounters of different intention and desires.
The idea of the project stems from my 7-year long experience of combining different mediating roles in contemporary dance production: being an artist as a mediator of new possible worlds and meanings; a dramaturg as a mediator of someone else’s artistic vision; a writer juggling theoretical concepts with the needs of broader audiences; an educator talking about dance and theatre with people of various backgrounds.
How do you situate your artistic work within the Finish performing arts landscape
That’s a very interesting question that has been stimulating this project from the very beginning, as I am a foreigner in Finland, with a career of a freelancer working in different European countries with various venues and choreographers. Audience Club is a mediation project that grows from a desperate need for discussion, communication, translation in the professional communities (in Finland as well as other Nordic countries) as well as from a desire to understand the bigger impact our work can have on the wider audiences that don’t necessarily belong to “art bubbles.” For an expat, trying to grow roots in a foreign professional context means to always deal with various procedures of translation: not only literally between languages, but also between different systems of values and meanings that always intertwine, collapse but also just stay opaque and unclear when it comes to an “international dimension.” The same happens with the translation between the language of peers and funders and that the broader audiences can potentially speak. And here I am not interested in the didactic approach of “explaining the art to the audiences.” But rather I wonder what particular points of connection, questions, painful misunderstandings are in place when performance meets its audiences.
So the attempt of this project is not to take a particular place or niche in the local context but rather to create spaces and practices that could host boiling conversations around the art we are making. I feel that in the Nordics discussions around the meaning and quality of the produced art is either not very well developed or just stay very private and way too “polite.” Although such social protocol keeps artists safe and free in their creative self-expression, it also has its drastic downsides: we can’t be honest and constructively critical and can’t have a grasp of the wider needs of professional communities as well as people we are working for. Maybe the Club is just an attempt to make things a bit more fiery, honest, disputive and open as well as invite the recipients of the art in the picture, with their feelings and opinions on what and why is happening on stages. I’ve heard from many colleagues that people secretly crave it, as it can enhance mutual understanding and the feeling of care and belonging.