In 1979, Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen created Live, the first video-ballet in the Netherlands.1 In this work, a ballerina is filmed on stage, live projected on a big screen behind her. The camera zooms in and out, filming only her wrists, fingers, face, or her whole appearance within the space around her. At some point, she leaves the stage, walks through the audience, and exits the hall. The audience is left alone, only with the presence of a pianist who continues playing pieces by Franz Liszt. In the meanwhile, the camera follows the ballerina, and the audience can witness her on screen with a partner performing a powerful pas-de-deux in the hallway. At some point, the pas-de-deux stops: the ballerina puts on her coat and leaves the building, walking away into the city of Amsterdam. This time, the camera does not follow as she distances herself until the screen goes black. Ten minutes later, the ballerina reappears in person in the hall to receive applause from the audience.
Both performances play with live and mediatized spatiality, expanding the possibilities of space with the use of real-time projection techniques with a live performer. The differences between the performances are however striking. The live relationship between audience and performer seems prominent in Live: the focus on her solo appearance, both by the camera and the co-presence of the audience, creates an intimate relationship and at the same time makes her vulnerable as an object to watch. The moment she leaves the stage, joining the space of the audience and even leaving the room comes therefore as a sudden break, as if she crossed a border that was enclosing the stage. Even though the camera continues to film, her acoustical space becomes imagination to the audience, who is left behind in the acoustical space of the auditorium. In Helikopter-Streichquartett, however, the audience is prepared for the exit of the musicians from the start: the panel discussion is in fact the only element of the performance before the musicians leave the hall. Furthermore, the acoustical space of the ballerina remains silent once she leaves the hall, whereas the acoustical space of the quartet musicians in their helicopters is projected into the acoustical space of the audience. And, while the ballerina in Live steps into public space, the string quartet members stay separated in contained spaces without any possible public encounters.
Both performances left me with the same question: where did the performance take place? A first answer seems obvious: the performance happened in the spaces where the performers (dancer and musicians) were doing their actions – in these cases the auditorium, the hallway, the city of Amsterdam or the helicopters in the air.2 But this provisional definition doesn’t last long: the space of the audience played a big part in constructing the performances as well. Both audiences stayed behind in the hall watching the performers perform in a different space, with an element of unsureness that was central to the performance: the audiences did not know if the performers would come back or if they were still watching a live projection instead of a pre-recorded video. In both performances, the acoustical experience – in these cases the live piano or the overlapping streamed sounds of the string players – was clearly designed for the space of the audience alone. With the performers and audiences literally in different places, it becomes clear that both places together constructed the performance space. With the ballerina being outside, it becomes however quite blurry to label one space as the audience space, since the people that encounter the ballerina in the street can also be considered as audience. Even inside the same room, labelling spaces might become a difficult exercise as well, for instance when the ballerina steps in the auditorium after being on stage for a long time. In addition to the physical closeness or distance between the ballerina and the audience, the camera’s zooming in and out on her wrists contributed to blur perspectives, narrowing and widening the focus of the performance space, and almost pulling audiences closer or pushing them further away from the body of the dancer.
The questions arising from Live and Helikopter-Streichquartett made me want to get a deeper conceptual understanding of ‘performance space’. What are the boundaries of any performance space? Thinking about these boundaries made me wonder how physical, visual, acoustical, and other sensory experiences all influence the limits or possibilities of performance space. In the search for these boundaries, the agency of drawing these boundaries during performances becomes a question by itself: to what extent and how does the performer, the audience, the surroundings themselves, or all of them define the boundaries of performance space?
As a violinist, I have played in many different surroundings, including concert halls, prisons, hospitals, refugee centers, schools, other social institutions, and many outside locations. In every place, and especially in social institutions, I always felt being a guest in someone else’s environment: even though in many places like prisons, hospitals and refugee centers, people mostly inhabit these places temporarily, I’m stepping into their temporary world. On the other hand, I always felt being the host of my performance ‘bubble’, in which those people are my guest. This curious mix of being both guest and host simultaneously, became one of the strongest foundations through which I’m behaving in the world, engaging with the surroundings and people reciprocatively. When I moved to Iceland in August 2022, I found even more time to establish a personal, direct connection with the surroundings. With these feelings of being host and guest, and engaging with the surroundings and inhabiting beings, performances like Live and Helikopter-Streichquartettmade a deep impression on me. It made me interested in the relations between the performer, audience, and the surroundings to understand ‘performance space’ and to explore new ways of applying that understanding in my own practice of making interdisciplinary performances.
In 1995-1997, Karlheinz Stockhausen used a similar form of live projection in his Helikopter-Streichquartett.3 After a panel discussion with the four string quartet musicians, the musicians leave the hall, and the audience follows on four large screens how they drive separately to each their helicopter and prepare for take-off. The moment the helicopters start lifting off, the musicians start playing. Not only their image but also their sound is projected in real time in the main hall, along with the helicopter sounds. After landing, the quartet members come back to the main hall to share their experience with the audience.
In order to conceptually grasp ‘performance space’ it is necessary to first define the concepts of ‘performance’ and ‘space’. Defining a performance depends on contexts, conventions, and use as much as intrinsic properties. Richard Schechner, founder of The Performance Group in New York in 1967, described performances as follows: ‘To treat any object, work, or product “as” performance – a painting, a novel, a shoe, or anything at all – means to investigate what the object does, how it interacts with other objects or beings, and how it relates to other objects or beings.’4 This approach is very useful, because it brings the live moment and the physicality of a performance into focus: at a different time, on a different place, with a different audience or energy, a performance would be different. The focus on real time and physicality is strongly related to the idea of ‘performativity’: the idea that objects or individuals perform actions that have a transformative effect on a given situation and thereby constituting a new reality.5 Performative acts change the status quo of the moment, and therefore underscoring the real time and physicality of the world. I could define performativity as the making of the present – and in that sense, a performance is the locus of performative acts, a space of interaction and real-time transformation. For the sake of this research, I don’t want to distinguish performance art from any other performing arts, because I think all performing arts share that same real-time situated interaction. I therefore define ‘performance’ for now as ‘an intended framework to look to actions in relation to something else’ – to literally speak of an ‘interaction’ happening in time and space.
Defining ‘space’ implies distinguishing it from related terms such as ‘place’, ‘location’ and ‘area’. Interestingly, the examples of Live and Helikopter-Streichquartett brought up the question of ‘where did the performance take place’? This expression uses the word place rather than space. ‘Taking place’, as synonym for ‘to happen’ or ‘to occur’, literally states the act of becoming and therefore underscores an action happening in time. Cultural philosopher Michel de Certeau advocated to make ‘place’ and ‘space’ distinct from each other: ‘A place is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. […] It implies an indication of stability. […] Space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it.’6 In this view, place is understood the same as ‘location’ and ‘area’, or a defined, static and fixed geographical point with arranged regulations. Space, on the other hand, is constructed by interactions over time within a certain place (or multiple places). In this sense, I could argue that space is ‘taking place’: the temporal element transforms a place into a space with a ‘fluid identity’ constructed by interactions.7 I would like to adopt the ideas of De Certeau in defining ‘space’ as ‘result of the interaction and overlap of mobile elements around a certain place’, in order to be more sensitive to time and to the co-agency of these mobile elements in constructing performance space.
There exists already a vast field of literature on the concept of performance space. In the first part of my research, I will examine this literature in relation to my own thought experiments and to the examples of Live, Helikopter-Streichquartett, and two performances I witnessed in Iceland. In this literature, I encounter three problems. First, I feel that borders are being drawn where they don’t necessarily have to be. For example, Peter Meineck, Professor of Classics in the Modern World, keeps separating the ‘performance space’ of Greek theatres from surrounding landscapes even when acknowledging that the Greek theaters were in open connection to these surroundings – and thus influencing the experience of the performance acoustically, visually and sensory.8 I find the focus on architectural structures in drawing boundaries limiting in exploring other possibilities to engage with the concept of performance space.
Emma Govan, Helen Nicholson and Katie Normington, all Professors of Drama and Theatre, question these borders indeed, and point out to a more diverse way of using space in site-specific performances outside the traditional theatre venues. As I will examine in PART 1, this site-specific approach is supposed is understood to be using the ‘real’ qualities of a place more consciously. However, a second problem arises here: it seems to suppose a binary opposition in perception of spatial boundaries between the traditional and ‘site-specific’ venues. Through examining qualities of space and spatial boundaries in PART 1, I think this binary opposition overshadows the many similarities that exist between all kinds of venues.9
I draw extensively on the works of performance theorists Erika Fischer-Lichte and Fiona Wilkie, who acknowledge both the problem of drawing boundaries between a supposed performance space and its surroundings and the problem of labelling venues as ‘site-specific’ while many similarities between venues exist. Fischer-Lichte and Wilkie try to establish a different view on performance space as ‘fluid’, ‘blurry’, ‘unstable’ and ‘fluctuating’.10 All these words in my understanding mean that performance space never is a fixed status-quo: in Live, the status-quo was challenged when the ballerina left the stage into the audience, or when she left the audience alone by exiting the hall and extending the performance space into the city of Amsterdam. Seeing performance space as ‘fluid’ or ‘fluctating’, underscores my definition of space as the interaction of mobile elements around a certain place. Moreover, Fischer-Lichte and Wilkie both highlight the possibility of multiple spaces to be embedded in any performance, as the existence of multiple spaces of performer and audience became clear in Live and Helikopter-Streichquartett. Wilkie points out that these spaces could be ‘interconnected’ and interacting as a ‘network of spaces’, in which all spaces have their role in constructing the experience of a performance.11 However, I find a third problem in the way of their writing, which strongly influences our way of thinking about performance space: the possibility of multiple spaces is not presented as a possibility of spaces coexisting within a space itself. As I will explore in PART 1, I would rather advocate that we perceive performance space as overlapping multiple spaces all embedded in the same moment.
With this research, I want to coin a new term to create a new way of grasping performance space: multi-space. This term indicates for me that every space is the product of multiple spaces overlapping at the same time: every space therefore contains multiple spatial layers within itself, and is at the same time part of multiple spatial layers. In my view, this term could provide a way out of the dominance of walls that draw boundaries; a way out of the dilemma between perceptions of spatial boundaries in traditional and ‘site-specific’ venues; a way forward to include simultaneous perceptions of time that reveal the overlapping of spaces at any given moment. The unstable prefix ‘multi’ not only implies the existing of spaces within themselves, but also implies the importance of movement, instability, unfixity. To describe the process of dealing with the concept of multi-space in performances, I want to advocate the use of the verbs ‘navigate’ and ‘zoom in/out’. These words allow for possible creative approaches of multi-space, since they strongly carry the meaning of exploration and point out to the triangle of performer-audience-surroundings as co-players in creating performance space.
The introduction of ‘multi-space’ as analytical and creative tool expands the existing discourse (of the exiting theories from Fischer-Lichte, Wilkie, Govan, Nicholson and Normington, amongst others) and allows for a deeper analysis of existing performances beside my own. This will not only be useful for my own future practice as performer-researcher, but also for other artists and for those that analyze the creations of artists. With the introduction of multi-space and the notion of zooming and navigating, spatial boundaries either disappear of become excessively visible, stimulating both the senses and the imagination, desire and explorative agency of performer and audience. This invites to listen and watch more carefully, while giving a bigger performative role to the surroundings as co-players.
The methods that led me to the understanding of performance space as multi-space can be seen as an intertwined process of theoretical analyzation (of the existing discourse in the literature and of existing performances) and creating my own artistic performances to test out ideas. By reading theoretical frameworks, reflecting on these frameworks in thought experiments, attending performances with these frameworks as cognitive viewpoint, discussing certain ideas with the artists of these performances themselves, my conceptual understanding of the notion of performance space deepened. By testing out ideas of these frameworks myself in newly created own artistical performances, documenting these performances on camera, opening discussions around these performances, and collecting audience feedback after the performances, I came to understand the artistic potential of multi-space in practice.
In PART 1, I will examine the triangle relation between performer, audience, and surroundings, defining this triangle as co-players in creating a performance space. I will show how places are full of spatial layers that can be activated by the performer, audience and by surrounding elements (intentionally or not), and will therefore advocate that a performance space should be understood as multi-space. In PART 2, I will exhibit four artistic projects that I created to try out my theoretical understandings of multi-space in practice: Multi-Space, Eye Power, Out There and OVERLAPS. In PART 3, I will analyze what happened to the experience of both performer and audience in my performances by challenging the domination of walls (due to which many spatial layers usually seem to blend together as if they are one) and the domination of a performer’s body (which usually becomes the center of attention, limiting the agency of the audience). In PART 4, I will analyze how different types of movement were at work in my performances, and will therefore advocate the use of zooming and navigating to enhance exploration, imagination and agency of the performer, the audience and surrounding elements.