In Multi-Space, the glass walls functioned again as physical boundaries, while the visual space was extended to the outside. Acoustically, the boundary was less thick than expected. Because that day there was a big snowstorm in Reykjavík, the sounds of the strong wind entered the room. And because the installation area was connected to other parts of Harpa (there were no walls fully enclosing the room), faint sounds from visitors in these other parts were travelling in as well, mixing with the sounds and steps of the audience. When I finally – blindfolded and after having stood still for five minutes – moved and lifted my violin to play, I ‘vacuumed’ the space: I vacuumed all sounds from the audience, they suddenly became completely silent. They froze in a circle around me and turned all focus to the center, as if narrowing the performance space to what was happening within that circle. But since there was a snowstorm outside, the result was unexpectedly interesting: while I started air playing in silence, the sounds of the strong wind outside suddenly claimed attention, invading the vacuumed space from the outside.
The harsh contrast between the stormy world outside and the comfortable installation room inside became even more apparent when I walked outside myself. I was inspired by Live and Helikopter-Streichquartett by applying real-time filming to allow myself to go into public space, but I took it further: not only was I carrying the GoPro camera alone (without an extra crew, making the action more personal), but I also used the glass wall. When I exited the room and walked back to the glass wall on the outside, the boundary of the glass wall was clearly tested. The audience could see me standing outside, and at the same time saw themselves on the projection wall – since I was looking back inside. One person in the audience told me this was quite an emotional experience, especially knowing that I was standing in the cold snowstorm while they were warm inside, being able to both see me and my projected camera-view.1
As explored in PART 1, 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 black box theatre easier to control. Walls are very dominant in creating a feeling of space. This might reinforce the usual binary opposition between traditional inside venues and site-specific outdoor venues. I would argue, however, that the idea of multi-space is transcending this opposition. In all the projects shown in PART 2, I have sought to extend spatial layers usually considered for themselves to spaces outside of their surrounding walls, making visible the multiplicity of spatial layers that already existed within these walls (as is underscored by my concept of multi-space). In this part, I will show how I ‘crossed’ walls in all my projects and how that turned both the audience and the surroundings in more active participants as co-players.
In OVERLAPS, I elaborated on the technique already suggested by classical composers such as Mahler and consisting in placing some musicians outside the physical and visual room of the audience. I decided to use two duos, together forming a live improvising quartet in order to create a cross-spatial communication, an unstable interplay between rooms. The performers described that they sometimes clearly connected or at least tried to connect to the other duo, while they were at other times more focused on connecting with their duo partner alone.2 Acoustically, the sounds from both duos sometimes blended so much together (due to my intended instrumentation of two voices and two wind instruments), that it became difficult for the audience to distinguish which duo played what. This triggered the audience to find out who was playing what, to imagine how far the invisible duo was standing and what it was doing.3 In other words, while the acoustical spatial layers extended through the wall to glue both rooms together, the audience was trying to oscillate between the rooms by attentive listening and with their imagination.
In Out There, I literally took spatial layers apart one by one, by slowly connecting the restaurant where the audience sat to the surrounding nature outside. The glass windows functioned as walls that could be crossed out. On one hand, the windows drew a boundary physically, acoustically, in temperature and comfort between the audience and the world outside. On the other hand, the visual spatial layer was extended outside from the beginning: I invited the audience to watch the fields, mountains and fog, thereby drawing intentional visual lines from the room to the outside. However, this visual spatial layer was also limited: when I went outside as a performer, I slowly became invisible by moving away into the field. Someone in the audience told me that he only imagined me walking all the way to the mountains, because he couldn’t find out where I was going.4 Only with the binoculars, the visual boundary was crossed, connecting the room with my spot in the field.
At one point in the performance, Bergþóra Ægisdóttir invites the audience to open the windows, thereby also extending the acoustical space to encompass the sounds outside of the room where the audience was sitting. Sounds made themselves present to the audience’s awareness: the wind, cars driving by, and faint sounds of my violin – mostly, only the higher registers, which are easier to play loud on a violin.5 When Bergþóra was singing, she couldn’t hear me anymore: her own sounds created a stronger acoustical layer. Because she was singing as soft as possible, leaving a lot of silences, the audience was however still able to hear me from time to time: the rest of the acoustical duet became imagination.6 For me, imagination was key as well, since I couldn’t hear the soft sounds of Bergþóra. For Bergþóra herself, the binoculars became a tool to make a duet from afar possible: using my movements within the fog, field and mountains as graphical score, she was visually connected with me, as if pulling the spaces together.
By inviting the audience finally to go out and explore ‘what’s out there’, I took the last boundary of the glass windows and walls away: they were able to challenge their comfort, temperature and feeling of space, to find out what I had been seeing (by standing further away, looking back to the room, against its own background) and to experience the cold, humid air that I had been feeling the whole time.
In Multi-Space, it became quite clear that I didn’t have all parameters in control. The snowstorm invaded the installation acoustically. The contrast between the outside and inside world seemed bigger due to the storm, and made it physically and mentally more difficult to step outside. In this way, the snowstorm turned into an important co-player in the performance, just like the passers-by in the street shaped the performance as well. In Out There, the surroundings became important co-players as well: the fog appearing just right before the performance represented a risk for the violin, but the moment in which I started performing, the fog went away. Due to the moving fog, the mountain and field outlines started ‘moving’ as well, to which I invited the audience to watch in the beginning of the performance – while creating a graphical score for Bergþóra. And when a car drove by unexpectedly, all the focus of the audience turned to the car.7
Although I played in all my projects with going outside, using glass walls or windows as physical boundaries to be crossed by performer and audience both visually and acoustically, going outside is not the only way to challenge the domination of walls. Even when having no outside influences, like in a more controllable black box or concert hall environment, artists could play with crossing invisible borders (as happened in Live), with distance and proximity, with having different audience set-ups to let them experience physical, visual and acoustical layers differently. I will come back to this in PART 4.
For me as a performer, it was also an unexpected emotional experience. This was partly because I touched the glass window with my hands, to physically feel the glass wall boundary separating me from them. Because it was the first moment I was touching something else than my violin, making me feel more connected to the actual physical room and bringing me closer to the audience while also reinforcing a separation, I felt in power over the situation but vulnerable and alone at the same time. Most of all, I got emotional feelings in the third performance, in which I ended my performance exactly behind the glass wall (whereas in the other performances, I continued walking away into public space). The audience members understood the performance had ended while I stood blindfolded behind the glass wall, so they all turned towards me, seeing themselves in the reflection of the window, with me in the middle but outside. When I took off my blindfold, I became very grateful seeing the audience inside (in both other performances, the performance ended in the shop window far away from my main audience). Something curious happened though: I couldn’t hear the applause they were giving me – the glass wall still functioned as boundary while I stood alone in the cold wind.
My walk through public space, from Harpa to the 66° North shop, was all the time connected with the main installation room through the live projection. Especially in the second performance, this created funny moments when I was greeting passers-by in the street, and when I was being photographed in the shop as mannequin by people in the street. The audience in the installation room could follow everything, watching the street passers-by, shop visitors and workers without them knowing. This turned the audience in the installation room into voyeurs, and turned the street passers-by into important but unintended co-players.8 In the third performance, I stopped walking to consciously film the hotel facing the installation area. This turned my audience even more into voyeurs, because they were looking into private rooms, but made my audience also aware of the fact that the opposite could happen as well: the hotel room guests could watch into the installation room because of all the windows and glass walls.9
The glass walls in Multi-Space extended and reflected visual spaces: the room literally blended with the harbor outside – © Angela Rawlings
As I argued in PART 1, a triangle of performer, audience and surroundings – all co-players in many spatial layers – together create a multi-space. In all my projects, I tried to find a way of reinforcing this equal triangle relation in constructing and exploring spatial layers and boundaries. In order to give the audience and surroundings more agency as co-players, the domination of walls and the domination of a performer’s body needed to be challenged. As examined in PART 1, the domination of walls (due to which many spatial layers seem to blend together as if they are one) and the domination of a performer’s body (becoming the center of attention, limiting the agency of the audience) might create a feeling that space is experienced by everyone in the same way, but the many spatial layers provide playground for artists to create an opposite experience. By challenging the domination of walls and domination of a performer’s body, I got interesting and unexpected results in the behavior of the audience and in my own experience as performer.
Transforming myself as object within the installation, with no particular attention – © Neus Fuster Corral
However, after I took the blindfold off and started walking around, an extraordinary thing happened: my actual body transformed into an installation object again, not claiming much attention! The projection wall, on which the GoPro camera showed my violin going through the room, became more important than me as performer. Even when I was clearly standing very close to audience members, filming mirrors, my own reflection, but also filming these individual audience members themselves, most of the people in the room kept watching the projection wall more than watching me. In the moments that they didn’t look to the projection wall, most people still didn’t pay much attention to me and kept exploring the sea of mirrors. It surprised me, and encouraged me to test this behavior even further: in the second and third performance, I deliberately came closer and closer to people. Especially when I went outside and came back to the glass wall, I discovered that many people were still fixated at the projection – as if they didn’t want to acknowledge that what they saw was happening live behind them. That’s why I started to touch the glass wall: it was not intended in the first performance but became a conscious act in every other performance. It made the spatial contrast even bigger – me standing alone outside trying to connect with the people inside, while many turned their backs toward me.
In my projects, challenging the domination of walls went hand in hand with challenging the domination of a performer’s body. As explored in PART 1, the body of a performer can easily become the center of attention, limiting the audience and surroundings to become real co-players. As Goebbels has advocated, a certain degree of ‘absence’ can help to subvert the domination of walls and of a performer’s body: ‘A theatre of Absence [...] disperses the center, displaces the subject, destabilizes meaning’.10 Goebbels listed a few ways of understanding absence, as already presented in PART 1: ‘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].’11 By applying these strategies, I got interesting results in the behavior of the audience and the experience for the performer.
In this part, I will examine the results of the different types of absence. After briefly showing how presence and absence influenced the performers in OVERLAPS, I will show how I disappeared in Multi-Space and Eye Power while being visually present, because other elements were getting more attention. Then, I will show the opposite: how my violin became a body on its own, claiming its presence as body in risk even when being visually absent. Finally, I will discuss how people felt uncomfortable and confused by these middle grounds of presence and absence, not knowing what to hold on to.
In OVERLAPS, one duo was performing in a separate room, without any audience. For the performers, this contrast clearly gave a tension between presence (for the first duo) and absence (for the second duo), the presence and absence being defined objectively as the fact of being seen or not seen by the audience. The first duo felt more observed and therefore more tense.12 This had an impact on their volume: because OVERLAPS was the opening piece of the concert, the first duo was exploring the graphical score in a calm way to feel comfortable performing their first notes in front of an audience. The other duo felt freer without any audience around them, and was almost not concerned with the audience or with what the first duo was doing – they were simply having fun exploring the graphical score, almost as a game.13 On top of that, the feeling of time was clearly influenced by the presence of the audience: whereas both duos were asked to spend 2-3 subjectively calculated minutes on both sides of the score, the first duo finished the piece earlier than the second duo, both in the performance and in an earlier try-out with audience. One performer of the first duo said that her perception of time was ‘moving faster’ due to tension caused by the presence of the audience.14
Of course, in Multi-Space, Out There, and Eye Power, I went outside as performer, creating a degree of absence in which the audience became freer to engage with the surroundings, and transforming these surroundings into important co-players – as described in PART 3.1. But in Multi-Space, I discovered through the behavior of the audience that I was disappearing as performer while being visually present at the same time. I was inspired by the examples of ALDA and CUMULUS, in which the performers also disappeared from the center of attention (as shown in PART 1), but approached it with different techniques.
The result was a middle ground between installation and live performance: the performer became part of the installation as object, while the projection wall and mirrors claimed more attention. At the same time, it was also a middle ground for the violin as extra body being present: being an instrument in the beginning, it transformed more into an object as camera. But the body of the violin claimed its presence back in the third performance, when I left it unprotected in the public entrance hallway. Many audience members were shocked by this event and kept thinking about the vulnerable violin: their minds were not only present in the installation room and in my outside space behind the glass window, but kept a strong imaginative connection with the public hallway as well.15 Their minds started to be aware of the many spatial layers and their contexts or risk around – an ultimate multi-space experiment.
Giving the violin a stronger presence as an extra body was also a strong feature in Out There and Eye Power. In Out There, people were shocked (again) that I took my violin out in the freezing and humid fog: even though they couldn’t see me with bare eyes, they could hear the faint sounds of the violin coming from the field. This made people very aware of the body of the violin being exposed to risks – together with my body as performer.16 Even though our bodies were absent from the visual, physical and at times acoustical space of the audience, our bodies at risk were having a strong presence in their minds. In Eye Power, the violin transformed into a main performer, without sounding. When I put the violin on the ground and sat down next to an audience member to watch the violin for a minute – as if it was going to perform – the violin became a body of its own, disconnected from the player. When I started moving the violin’s body on different mirrors, the same friend who dared to wave his hands close to me started moving the bow around as well: the material body of the violin and bow clearly became more present than they probably would be as instrument.
Why the projection claimed more attention than me although I was the protagonist of the performance, could have to do with, firstly, the angle of the GoPro attached on the violin chinrest. The violin stayed fixed in the middle of the screen while the surroundings changed by moving around, and therefore resembled a protagonist in a videogame exploring a 3D world, slightly curved as fisheye.17 Having a violin (as action hero) walking around a videogame was a new experience that people hadn’t seen before, so they didn’t want to miss a single bit. The experience as videogame might also show how our generation is conditioned with media like videogames, in which moving images, screens and a constant thrive for ‘new’ things as separate from ‘real’ life proof to be addictive. The second reason could be that I was not doing many new actions but continued things the audience already knew – walking around, filming the room and surroundings, and playing a single note with all its harmonics in it. Moreover, the real-time projection was an extension or result of my actions, and therefore more important to the audience than my body as the source of the projection.
Because I was being blindfolded in the beginning of the performance, I had intentionally transformed myself into an object that was part of the mirror installation. As expected, since I was standing motionless for five minutes, I didn’t get any particular attention: people understood they had the freedom to give their attention to the mirrors instead. Only when the tape recording started, people immediately thought I was going to do something and turned their attention to my presence – but when they saw I was still not moving, they turned their attention back to the mirrors and their own exploration of space. In Eye Power, I applied the same strategy, only without the tape recording. In this performance, standing motionless was reinforcing the silence, so people moved around more slowly, being more aware of my presence. One friend dared to come very close and waved his hands in front of my eyes, testing the possibilities of his own agency – while I became very aware of his presence at the same time.
As explored in PART 3.1, when I took up the violin to play (both in Multi-Space and Eye Power), I vacuumed the space acoustically – everybody turned their focus to the center, stopped moving in silence. In Multi-Space, the acoustical invasion of the wind outside as co-player didn’t lower the audience’s focus on my presence, because people were drawn to me with expectations and confusion due to the fact that I didn’t make any sound. When I started playing with sound and voice, their connection with me stayed strong, because I finally fulfilled their suspended expectation.
Finding this middle ground between installation and performance, between bodies and objects, between present and absent performer, transformed Multi-Space and Eye Power into a gray zone that not everybody felt comfortable with. It created an unstable feeling of not knowing what to expect, what to hold on to, being ‘neither here, nor there’.18 It related mostly to what Fischer-Lichte has described as a feeling of constantly standing on a ‘threshold’: ‘While the border seeks to prevent one from crossing, the threshold seems to invite such a crossover. Since the space beyond is uncertain, its crossing requires certain provisions and precautionary measures.’19 This uncertainty made people confused: by the lack of guidance from me as performer, what to pay attention to, how to behave, and when the performance would be over. In Eye Power, where all audience members told me that they were puzzled, left in the ‘dark’ or the ‘unknown’, the confusion even transformed into frustration: ‘At some point, maybe that was where my frustration came from, it didn’t deliver. […] it wasn’t developing, not bringing me to an experience. And then my attention went away, and then I tried to create my own experience, by seeing what the mirrors could do, doubling the space.’20
In Multi-Space, my goal was not to leave the audience with frustration, but some people still felt very confused and probably a bit frustrated. One example of this was an audience reaction about the moment I started air playing in silence, not fulfilling the expectation that I was finally going to start playing: ‘You didn’t give the candy that you were presenting, so I thought: am I deaf? Why can’t I hear it?’21 The same person told me afterwards that she was expecting a concert, with its own set of traditions as anchor to hold on to, but didn’t understand how to behave or what to do in the situation that occurred. She described clearly how everyone was in their own bubble experiencing the situation: ‘Everybody was on their own, Stijn was on his own, everybody was doing something for themselves, in the same room but all managing differently.’22
The most difficult moment for a lot of audience members was the moment I left the room. By comparing the audiences’ energy flow and attention span in the three different performances, it becomes clear that their attention and energy strongly depended on the quantity of senses stimulated at the same time. In the first performance, the live sound of the GoPro couldn’t be heard in the installation room. The moment I left the room, and especially after I left the glass window and headed towards the 66° North store, a lot of people lost attention. These people didn’t come on purpose to Harpa to see my performance, but just found out about it when already being in the building. Clearly, they didn’t feel connected enough with me and the performance once they saw me leave without hearing sound: not knowing how long I would keep walking in public space, they decided for themselves that they had seen enough. In Eye Power, this happened in extreme form: after I left the room, not knowing if I would return and with some frustrations already built up, the audience decided after two minutes that the performance had ended. They waited for me there, to participate in a group discussion to evaluate the performance, but otherwise probably would have left the room.
In the second performance of Multi-Space, however, many more people (who also didn’t come on purpose and happened to be in the building) stayed until the projection stopped. In that performance, the live sound of the GoPro was heard over the loudspeakers. In that way, my acoustical space was connected with the installation room – so the wind, my steps through the snow and greeting the passers-by were heard. The combination of acoustical and visual stimuli made many more people stay. In the third performance, the attention span was challenged less. Leaving my violin unprotected in the hall made people stay, and I ended the performance visibly behind the glass wall.
In Out There, the end of the performance was also unclear: since I was not returning from the field, and Bergþóra also had left the room, the audience had nothing to hold on to. When Bergþóra returned, someone asked her jokingly if the performance was really over, or if there was still more to come.23 However, some audience members decided to stay very long, to keep exploring the surroundings with the binoculars, to stay in the quiet, slow atmosphere that was created in the performance, or to go outside on Bergþóra’s invitation to explore these surroundings for themselves. This poetic dissolving was a central part of my concept of Out There, to make the performance more centered about each own’s connection with the surroundings as equal co-players, each one having the ability to end the performance whenever they wanted.
By challenging the domination of walls and the domination of a performer’s body, both the real sense and imagination, desire and explorative agency was stimulated – for the performer as well as the audience. By crossing walls and taking physical, visual and acoustical layers apart, the audience was invited to listen and watch more carefully, while giving a bigger performative role to the surroundings as co-players. By finding a middle ground between bodies and objects, between present and absent performer, and without a clear performance end, the attention and energy flow of the audience was tested, resulting in either frustration or poetic calmness – both a strong sign of giving the audience more agency as co-players.