In the introduction, I have shown, through the examples of Live and Helikopter-Streichquartett, how the spaces of the performer and audience both seem to contribute to the experience of the performance, as a sort of entangled performance space. However, the experience of these spaces is not shaped by the actions of the performer or audience alone: it is shaped as much by the qualities and possible elements of the places in which these actions are happening. For example, if Live would not take place in the city center of Amsterdam but in a shady industrial area, or if it would rain heavily during the performance of Live, the exit of the ballerina would have a completely different impact or meaning. If the audience in Helikopter-Streichquartett would not be sitting in an auditorium but in an open field, right under the sky where the helicopters are circling, the connection of the audience with the performers would be experienced differently.
In this part, I will examine this triangle relation between performer, audience, and surroundings. First, I will raise questions about the nature of performer-audience relations. By understanding that these relations are never fixed but open to shift constantly, I will show how intended and unintended actions can shape the awareness of being a performer or audience. Through this process, I will define performer and audience as co-players. In many performances, however, the performer’s body limits the agency of the audience as co-player in creating the performance. As I will examine through ALDA and CUMULUS, two performances I witnessed in Iceland, and through the ideas of director and composer Heiner Goebbels, playing with the presence and absence of a performer could be an escape of this domination, thereby creating more time and agency for everyone to engage with the surroundings.
Second, I will examine this engagement with the surroundings more closely. By becoming aware that places are full of spatial layers that can be activated by the performer, audience and by surrounding elements (intentionally or not), I will show that this engagement is always in a way site-specific, wherever the performance takes place. I will also explore how all these spatial layers have their own boundaries, therefore creating an overlap. By defining surrounding elements as co-players in drawing these boundaries, the surroundings get equal agency in relation to the performer and audience.
To reinforce the understanding of the performer-audience-surroundings triangle as co-players, to raise awareness of multiple spatial layers to be activated, and thereby reinforcing the idea of ‘space’ being constructed by interactions and overlaps (as defined in the introduction), I will conclude this part by coining ‘multi-space’ as redefinition of performance space.
With my definition of ‘performance’ as intended framework to look to actions in relation to something else (see introduction), someone obviously needs to perceive these actions to intentionally call them a performance.1 A performer could declare their own actions as performance without anybody else around, thereby not only being the performer but also being the receiver of their own performance – but in many performances, an external audience is witnessing the actions. I am choosing for the word ‘audience’ for any person that perceives the action of a performer (with any sense). The word ‘audience’ is however derived from the Latin audire (‘to hear’), which implies a mainly auditive perception (e.g. in a traditional classical concert).2 I could have chosen other words, like ‘spectators’ (derived from the Latin spectare, ‘to see’ – which implies a mainly visual perception) or ‘attenders’ (derived from the Latin attendere, literally ‘to stretch toward’, which underscores a movement of the attenders).3 However, since these words constantly need to be distinguished either in singular or plural form, I find the word ‘audience’ more useful in a general way, with the addition that I don’t relate ‘audience’ only to the auditive perception.
If a performance is seen as intended framework to label certain actions, we should ask ourselves the question: intended by whom? There are always two intentions in negotiation: first, a conscious intention from a performer to deliver a performance, even if people around them are not aware of that act being a performance. As we have seen in the example of Live, when the ballerina exited the auditorium into public space, many passersby might not have known they were crossing a performer doing a performance, especially since her coat made her look dressed casually like anybody else. Still, she could declare the people she encountered to be her new ‘audience’, even if those people were unconscious of that role put upon them. The second intention works the other way around: someone could declare themselves being an audience to an action not intended as performance, thereby turning the action into a performance and turning someone into a performer, even without their consent or own intentions. If the camera crew wouldn’t follow the ballerina in Live or the string quartet musicians in Helikopter-Streichquartett but instead film other people in the street, the audience in the auditorium would turn these people into new ‘performers’, even if those people are unconscious of that role put upon them.
With both intentions in negotiation, a performance can be declared by both performers and receivers: the two parts don’t have to be aware of their role for a performance to occur. This creates many possible performer-audience relationships. In many performances, the role divisions are clear from the beginning: if the performance is announced and advertised before, people choose to attend as official audience – with paid tickets or for free. Knowing an official audience paid for her performance, made the ballerina in Live decide to come back to the auditorium hall to get an applause. Her new ‘unofficial’ audiences, that were added to the performance in the form of passersby encountered by the ballerina as she walked into the public space, might have or have not been aware of their role as audience. This blurry line, between people that have intention of being ‘audience’ and the ones that are not, always arises if an announced performance has open doors for people to walk in, and especially when a performance is happening in public space. In these cases, people might hear or see the performance by chance and can consciously decide to be or not to be an audience.
However, even with an ‘official’ performer-audience role division, the relations between performer and audience are never fixed but are always open to change. In Live, for example, the official audience transformed throughout the performance: the use of real-time visual projection in the auditorium, of the ballerina’s actions outside of the hall, turned the audience into conscious voyeurs – especially since the official audience knew that the ballerina would encounter random people that were unaware of the performance. Moreover, the moment the ballerina left the stage, joining the space of the audience, some audience members were almost transformed into performers when the camera was suddenly filming them on the way. These examples already show that relations between performer and audience can change throughout any performance, but it can go further. People always have the possibility to interfere, even in a context of many conventions: ‘even if some participants considered such an unpredictable use inappropriate and infuriating’.4 And even without intention, an audience is interfering a performance with their own sounds, movements, and smell – with the possibility of changing performer-audience relations. I will examine this deeper in part 1.2, when putting the performer and audience in relation to their surroundings.
By understanding that a performance is constructed by the interplay of different intentions and that performer-audience relations are never fixed but open to change, it should be acknowledged that an audience has as much agency as a performer, even in contexts of many behavioral conventions. According to philosopher Jacques Rancière, a viewer is never passive: ‘the act of visual interpretation is in itself already a dynamic and conscious action.’5 Hans-Thies Lehmann and Erika Fischer-Lichte, both Professor of Theatre Studies, point out to a high degree of involvement and activity from the audience, transforming everyone in 'co-actors' or 'co-subjects'.6 Seeing audience and performer as co-players underscores that both are constructing the performance in a specific time and place of the performance instead of seeing a performance as an independent work of art: you could go as far as to say that the relation between performer and audience as co-subjects creates the performance, rather than the actions alone.7
The literal disappearance of the performer from the center of attention was a clear technique in ALDA, a three-month installation and performance which I visited for half an hour in August 2022.8 Choreographer Katrín Gunnarsdóttir and her team reshaped a room in a museum with colorful veils deviding the room in multiple smaller spaces to freely walk through as audience. Eight dancers were inhabiting the space for three months, in shifts of seven hours per day, gradually building up from solo to full group shifts. The dancers were sometimes retreating invisibly behind the layers of veils, leaving the audience alone. The result of the performers literally disappearing from the center of attention was clear: the audience had the freedom to engage with the room and colorful veils themselves, for as long as they wanted without a performer’s body attracting their focus. As mentioned by Gunnarsdóttir, the room in this way ‘[became] many spaces’ where the audience had more agency to construct their own experience of the space.9
But by seeing performer and audience as (intended or unintended) co-players, both with the agency of constructing the performance, a question arises: do the audience and performer have to be present in the same room or same area? According to theorists like Fischer-Lichte and Thies-Lehmann, ‘bodily co-presence’ is indeed required to constitute a performance: both performer and audience need to feel each other’s presence.10 In fact, presence and present are related etymologically — someone’s awareness of their presence is the making of the present. This co-presence doesn’t have to be bodily throughout the whole performance: an awareness of each other’s presence can arise even without seeing or hearing each other. For example, in many traditional theatre and dance performances, actors and dancers leave the visible stage to go behind the wings. The presence of the performer is still felt in the minds of the audience, since the performer is expected to return at some point again. In Live and Helikopter-Streichquartett, even though the performers left the physical space of the audience, the presence of the performer was projected in real time.
However, the body of a performer can easily become the center of attention, limiting the agency of the audience to control what to engage with and dominating the narrative for an audience how to engage with the surroundings.11 From the perspective of the performer, being present as body in front of an audience can also become a dominating force, creating a degree of tension, anxiety, kick or rush. For these reasons, director and composer Heiner Goebbels disputed the idea of bodily co-presence and encouraged theatre makers to play more with ‘absence’ as a tool to leave an audience more alone with their imagination, thereby giving them more agency in constructing their own narrative, and to question and subvert the normative ideas of theatrical performance.12 Goebbels listed a few ways of dealing with absence, of which I found the following particularly interesting in relation to my own practice as violinist: ‘the disappearance of the actor / performer from the center of attention’, ‘a division of presence among all elements involved — you could also call it a polyphony of elements’, ‘a separation of the actor’s voices from their bodies and of the musician’s sounds from their instrument’, and ‘a de-synchronization of listening and seeing [and other senses]’. 13
These examples of absence not only influence the agency of the audience to engage with other things than the body of the performer, but influence the experience of the performer as well. In ALDA, the audience was free to come in and leave the room, leaving the dancers many times perform for nobody. Gunnarsdóttir had asked the dancers to keep performing, no matter what: as result, the performance was less directed to a possible audience but more directed to the personal experience of each performer, as if they were performing in a ritual only for themselves.14 Through this, the dancers clearly got more agency to engage with their surroundings themselves, since one of the dancers described it as follows: ‘The performance is never the same and because of the long time frame, I feel like I become a part of a living organism. An organism that is constantly changing and developing, affected by its environment and other beings around.’15 In Live and Helikopter-Streichquartett, the agency of the performers to engage with their surroundings (in these cases the streets of Amsterdam and the sky above) probably happened to a lesser degree: even though the performers were in their own spaces, a camera was reminding them of staying constantly present to the audience through the real-time projection.
Encouraged by the examples above, I wanted to test out these different ways of dealing with absence myself, to experience how a degree of absence would influence the agency of both me as performer and the audience to engage more with the surroundings. While inspired by the examples of Live, Helikopter-Streichquartett, ALDA and CUMULUS, I wanted to include more prominently the other two ways of dealing with absence that were advocated by Goebbels: ‘a separation of the actor’s voices from their bodies and of the musician’s sounds from their instrument’, and ‘a de-synchronization of listening and seeing [and other senses]’. In PART 2, I will show my own artistic projects, and in PART 3, I will analyze the results of dealing with these strategies of absence.
The examples above showed how different ways of absence could challenge the domination of a performer’s body. This doesn’t mean the co-presence of performer and audience will be limited, the result is exactly the opposite of that: by taking the domination of a performer’s body down, the agency of an audience will grow. Therefore, the shared agency of performer and audience as co-players in constructing the performance will be even more pronounced. Every participant will have more time, space, and agency to engage with the surroundings as well. In the next part, I will therefore examine how this engagement with the surrounding takes shape.
The disappearance of a performer from the center of attention can also be achieved while the performer stays visibly present, through Goebbels’ second example of dealing with absence: creating a division of presence with other elements. This was a clear technique in CUMULUS - Figures of the elusive, Politics of the sky, an audio-visual walk by Andrea Gunnlaugsdóttir and Claudia Lomoschitz in which I was participating as audience in November 2022.16 The audience was invited to watch the movements and choreographies of the clouds above, at some point given individual mirrors to ‘turn the world upside down’ and imaginatively walk on the clouds.17 As result, all audience members were in their own bubble, playing with the changing perspectives in their mirrors. Even when Gunnlaugsdóttir and Lomoschitz were performing choreographed movements, a big part of the audience didn’t see them – people were too busy with their own relation with the clouds, forgetting about the bodily performers.
Not only did both the performers and the audience in ALDA and CUMULUS have more agency to establish relations with their surroundings, the surroundings themselves had a big role in shaping the performance. In ALDA, Gunnarsdóttir called the space a ‘fragile space’: the natural light changed through the windows, while sounds from the café downstairs entered the space through open doors, all changing the atmosphere of the performance.18 In CUMULUS, unpredictable clouds were the main performers themselves: if the sky would be completely clear that day, there could even be no performance. As I already pointed out at the beginning of PART 1, the surroundings in both Live and Helikopter-Streichquartett also had a decisive role in shaping the performance: if Live didn’t take place in the cozy city center of Amsterdam, or if it would be rainy day, the performance would be interpreted differently. If the audience in Helikopter-Streichquartett would not be sitting in an auditorium but in an open field, right under the sky where the helicopters are circling, the connection of the audience with the performers would be experienced differently. In all these examples, the surroundings become a third ‘co-player’, alongside the performer and audience.19
When exploring surroundings in their potential as co-players of a given performance, the process of making art quickly becomes site-specific. In opposition to creating artworks without considering surroundings, as if the artwork is transcending surroundings, site-specific practices give the surroundings more influence as co-players in the process of making an artwork or performance, whether in the preparation of the performance (using materials or information from specific surroundings) or during the performance itself (like the clouds in CUMULUS).20 ‘Site’ seems to be closest to ‘place’: deriving from the Latin situs (place, position, even inactivity), it implies a fixed location. In other words, the word ‘site’ seems to embed the distinctive features that are shaping a particular fixed place.21 Moreover, the use of ‘site’ seems to put a stronger focus on the assumed ‘realness’ and context-specificity of a non-traditional performance location than the word ‘place’.22 As performance arts curator Florian Malzacher puts it: ‘The hype around site specific works […] put a special focus on space, by leaving the theatres and occupying supposedly non-artistic spaces, searching for something authentic or wanting to contradict the seemingly authentic. This move into the city […] is closely linked to the desire for the real.’23
By using the label ‘site-specific’, a contrast is created with more traditional processes or venues. But in my opinion, the label ‘site-specific’ should only be used to describe a process, not to describe performance venues. When using the word for venues, there is danger of creating a false binary opposite between traditional, indoor concert venues (like black box theatres) and non-traditional, ‘site-specific’ venues (like the park in CUMULUS). Of course, a black box theatre controls the surroundings more than a park, in which the clouds, weather and sounds are beyond control – in that sense, a black box theatre could limit the potential of the surroundings to be co-players, whereas the park embraces the surroundings as co-players. However, that depends on the person who uses these spaces, and thus only relates to the different process of dealing with space. For example, whereas ALDA and CUMULUS were clearly inviting audiences to explore these surroundings themselves, making direct use of the surroundings as co-players in shaping the performance, Live and Helikopter-Streichquartett used the surroundings more as a setting for their performances – only if it would rain, these surroundings would claim attention as co-players.
There might be more or less things in control, but there is nothing inherent in a venue that has more ‘real’ or ‘constructed’ qualities than other venues. When examining this idea closer, we will discover that all surroundings – whether they be a black box theatre, a park or a museum – contain multiple ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ layers which all have their own boundaries. These layers can be activated, intentionally or not, by the triangle of performer, audience and surrounding elements. Therefore, dealing with different layers of space will always signify a site-specific engagement with the surroundings.
When examining ‘real’ qualities of space, the multiplicity of different layers becomes evident – the physical space, visual space and acoustical space being the most prominent. When a performance is taking place in a contained physical space, spatial layers blend more easily together as if they are one: this is what makes a black box theatre easier to control. Walls are very dominant in creating a feeling of space. Even if a performance includes a walk between more rooms, the walls of a new room immediately seem to limit the understanding of performance space as the physical and visual space of the audience on the moment: ‘It has been shown that in cognitive terms doorways create “event boundaries”; when people pass through doorways their experience of location is updated: as they enter a new location, they forget more information than if there had been no such shift.’24 However, if a performance takes place outside, the boundaries of a physical and visual space are more difficult to draw. A few thought experiments show the difficulties: was the whole park creating the feeling of space in CUMULUS, or just smaller areas the audience was walking in? If the clouds were co-players, was the sky also part of the physical space?25
But even within a room, problems show up to draw boundaries of space. Of course, with walls around, a performance takes place within these walls. But what if the performance takes place in the corner of an enormous room (e.g. a station): is it possible to physically sense the whole room, or is the rest of the room becoming a sort of ‘dead’ space? If there is a window, the visual space is extended outside, crossing the boundaries of the physical space – literally crossing the physical material of the window itself. If audience members are facing a wall, while a performer is performing behind their backs, the visual space is different from the physical space.
The acoustical space is definitely not the same as the physical and visual space. Sounds travel, thus influencing the experience of performance space based on the sound’s proximity and distance, and the moveability of the participants.26 If a performance takes place outside, sounds might be heard from far and close (depending on the loudness and register of the sound), from visible and invisible places, outside the intentions of a performer and audience alone – which forms one of the clearest examples how the surroundings literally can become a co-player in the performance. When a performance takes place inside, sounds still can travel through open doors, windows, or thin walls. Classical composers have been instructing musicians to play from behind a door (e.g. Gustav Mahler) to let the audience perceive the sounds ‘as from far away’, while invisible and physically imperceptible to the audience.
Other ‘real’ perceptive spatial layers are connected to the other senses, again with a different range and different boundaries. Odor works similar as sounds, because it travels through space, although it reaches less far and fast than sound. Touching a space would reinforce the physical sense of space, but you can’t always touch a whole room (e.g. ceilings) or touch all surroundings – due to proximity or distance, material, or social norms. A less literal way of ‘touching’ the space would be to describe the process in which all senses work together to create a feeling (rather than a cognitive understanding) of space as ‘haptic’, or as Schechner has put it: ‘the properties of the space seem to ‘touch’ the spectator and actors.’27
In black box theatres, the spatial layers are more in control, limiting the agency of the audience in exploring the space. There often exists an invisible extra ‘wall’ between performer and audience, as was clear when the ballerina in Live suddenly left the stage into the audience, as if crossing a boundary.28 Physically, they belonged to the same room – energies between audience and performer are even physically perceptible – but apparently, there was a boundary based on expectations and cultural norms.29 These boundaries are, however, constantly crossed: movements, sounds and odors from the audience that are not ‘part’ of the performance create distraction and irritation to others, as if these factors had to be erased from the space. In fact, these ‘disattendance’ factors created by audience members shape the total experience of performance space, thereby transforming the audience members even more into co-players.30
This extra ‘wall’ between performer and audience, based on cultural norms, expectations and traditions, show that many other layers of space exist on top of the ‘real’ layers of space. All surroundings, whether they be a black box theatre, park, the views out a helicopter or the city streets of Amsterdam, always bear associations, memories, expectations and socio-politically constructs of the past, present and future.31 In this sense, it is impossible to distinguish traditional theatre venues from all other possible venues, as theatrologist Marvin Carlson has pointed out: ‘both conventional theatre buildings and other places of public performance […] are marked by the traces of their other purposes and haunted by the ghosts of those who have used them in the past.’32 Theorists have given all these extra layers many names: fictive or imaginative spaces, represented spaces, metaphorical spaces, to name a few.33 Due to the scope of this research, I will not elaborate in detail on all these different spatial layers. For now, it is most important to acknowledge that ‘constructed’ spatial layers of these kind are present in every performance.34
Due to all these different spatial layers happening at the same time, it is not possible to talk about a ‘shared experience of space’: we should rather speak of a multiple feeling of space, or even of space existing in multiple levels, experienced differently by everyone. Moreover, this feeling is not a fixed situation, but rather a moving and constantly changing process through different layers. All co-players have their own agency in activating spatial layers and changing the boundaries and overlap of these layers, intentionally or unintentionally, by every movement, sound or smell they make. As such, the spatiality of performance space is constantly activated, renewed, and highlighted by the triangle of performer, audience and surroundings. Fischer-Lichte states it as follows: ‘Spatiality is transitory and fleeting. It does not exist before, beyond, or after the performance but emerges in and through it.’35
Summarizing all thoughts above, I would say that a triangle of performer, audience and surroundings – all co-players in many spatial layers – together create the performance space in a fluid, unstable interplay. Performance theorist Fiona Wilkie has also advocated that site-specificity is negotiated through a triangle between performer, audience and ‘space(s)’, but that definition obscures the idea that space is created as interaction.36 I prefer to use the word surroundings in my triangle, to highlight the multiple elements around us that construct their own spatial layers and boundaries.37
In the introduction, I defined space as ‘result of the interactions and overlap of mobile elements around a certain place’. In order to enhance more awareness of the performance-audience-surroundings triangle creating multiple spatial layers as co-players, and thereby establishing these interactions, overlaps and mobile elements, I feel the need to coin a new term: 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. The unstable prefix ‘multi’ not only implies the coexisting of many spaces within a larger space, all with different boundaries and relationships through distance and proximity, but also underlines the necessarily present movement, instability and unfixity of any performance.
You can’t ‘pin down’ where a performance is taking place in space: it rather consists of overlapping circles, an overlapping ‘taking place’ instigated by the performer, audience and surroundings. When looking to performance space with this new concept of multi-space, artists will be invited to play with the triangle between performer, audience, and surroundings, with (invisible) boundaries and layers, and with leaving room for more agency in all co-players.
In this process, multi-space can be understood in different ways:
- Overlapping ‘real’ or ‘sensorial’ layers of space
- The experience of ‘real’ spatial layers vs. the imagination of ‘real’ layers somewhere else
- ‘Real’ spatial layers vs. ‘constructed’ spatial layers (based on norms, traditions, expectations, values, socio-political contexts)
- Intended space vs. unintended space (in which not all parameters are in control and both surroundings and audience claim more presence as co-players)
- A space contains uncountable possible performance spaces by zooming in to details and transforming them as center of attention
- A space is part of uncountable performance spaces by zooming out to surrounding spatial contexts