This text was published in the recently launched “Performance Art in Practice – Pedagogical Approaches” (2022, Worthwise) Aapo Korkeaoja (edit.). The book offers 9 approaches for teaching performance art by different authors. My text is built on experiences teaching at the Kankaanpää Art School. The publication offers insights to performance-teaching by Tuomas Laitinen, Aapo Korkeaoja, Annette Arlander, Pilvi Porkola, Pia Lindy, Jussi Matilainen, Leena Kela & Tero Nauha. I’m flattered to be included in this bunch and I particularly enjoy Pilvi’s writing! The book is illustrated by Katriina Sjöblom. I like that it includes both practical exercises and the philosophy behind the teaching. My submission was originally written in 2019 but it some acuteness to it. The intuitive teaching manner I present as a dream in the text is now fully employed as a praxis.
I have always had issues with authority. This family tradition was passed on to me by my mother. I get offended when people tell me what to do and for this reason studying has been and still is challenging. Luckily Finland is a welfare state, and in the nineties primary school teachers were idealistic. They believed that everyone is good at something and their trust convinced me that my dissident attitudes would find acceptance in the field of art.
I try to pass on similar hopefulness when I get the opportunity to teach. In the past I’ve attempted to assert control over creative processes and I’m learning to get more comfortable with uncertainty. I fear that open processes end up strengthening existing ideas and do not enforce change, which I think is mandatory for combating the hostility of present societies.
To identify subtle changes which manifest in creative sessions, I have called for the meticulous documentation of events and ideas which emerge during a course. I now fear that the detailed study journals we write with students, take on an authoritarian role and steer the course on their own. To counteract this, I have begun to rely on intuition. Can intuition serve as a benign, anti-authoritarian force?
I have been drawn to charismatic teachers whose habitus and art feels defiant. Teachers such as Jaan Toomik at the Estonian Academy of Arts, where I studied in 2007, who took pride in keeping students on their toes. We could be drafted into exercises at short notice, expected to work in public spaces around the city and prompted to develop performances on the go. Rehearsing in public spaces trained us to expose our ideas even before we had articulated them. We learned by doing and as references for our work we mimicked poses and acts described in art history books. I fantasized that we were simulating a resistance cell and hardening ourselves through collective training simulations. Perhaps this fantasy was shared as many of our exercises aimed to disturb the flow of city-life (and to shake us up as well).
Not knowing what would happen next, challenged us to adapt to unexpected situations and honed our preparedness to work spontaneously. I think the type of spontaneity we were groomed in is very useful for disruptive actions. Happenings that don’t show a pattern are difficult to suppress and impossible to sensor. As students, the prevailing uncertainty formed us into a tight group and developed our sensitivities in picking up weak signals and behavioural etiquettes from others. The capacity to read unarticulated signs is useful for absorbing subtle cues for navigating social events. Our artistic activities in shopping centres and tourist attractions around the city caused tensions. A simple experiment of moving slower than others could be met with aggression, and through repeated experimentations we developed awareness about how people are expected to conduct themselves in public.
This awareness is very successful in forming temporary alliances and assemblies that can set their own aims and work collectively to achieve them. The process sounds complicated, but it is a common craft we see performed in cities. As an example, Toomik presented us with documentation of the work of street performers, preachers and buskers he had spotted on his travels. Observing buskers reveals them to be great informants of performance art as a craft. In public spaces, simple expressions such as their tone of voice or the target of the performer’s focus are revealed to be techniques by which the artist distinguishes their work from the activity of other users of a site. We learned that, for example, the pacing of a walk is a cue for others to inadvertently alter their behaviour.
I believe buskers take these skills to their peak. They are sensitive to each other’s movements and situate themselves in space in relation to sunlight, the acoustics of nearby architecture, and the schedules the city infrastructure inscribes into the masses roaming the streets. They know where and when it is sensible to express their opinions, so that their ideas will be heard. Busking in itself could be investigated as a genre of performance which desperately attempts to make places public. The livelihood of these artists is dependent on a collective desire to keep streets accessible. To witness a street performer is effectively to attend a lecture on the craft of performing. Their tools can be deployed for other art. A simple example could be an inconspicuous performance during which a ballad is whistled at a tactical moment, like when walking through an echoey underpass at rush hour. At this place and time, the whistle reaches people who are moving as an assembly and the tune can serve as a perfectly vague reminder of the possibility of change. With the correct timing and articulation such a simple gesture can easily disrupt the regime of the everyday.
Here in Finland, there are not many public forums which allow citizens to address each other in a safe way. This is a challenge for the concept of the freedom of speech, when it is defined as a relationship in which parties have equal opportunity to voice their concerns and ideas. A strong dogma of modesty dictates how people behave in public. Watching a weird gesture complicitly makes you an accomplice, and acts that challenge rules get shunned. What function does this paraded freedom of speech serve if everyone pretends they are not hearing you? Teachers that I have had have emphasized art as a noble form of disruption. Their harsh public acts have been motivated by a desire to maintain public space as a spectrum that embraces differing opinions and bodies. They have approached modesty and courtesy as forms of exclusion: as forming an embodied city wall that is meant to steer the unwanted away. Their public actions have embraced bastards and arseholes, in order to include nonconformists in the public.
A particular goal has been to make internalized experiences of violence visible so that this violence may be addressed and reconciled. Feelings of inferiority caused by class, poverty and lack of security have been dealt with by turning the tables and confronting, at times terrorizing, people who own estates and properties (which make up what we understand to be ‘a city’). In these processes, the bitterness that artists manifest has become accepted as embodied class awareness. But as heterogeneous spaces are emerging in Nordic societies, disruption and didactic acts of revenge are no longer helpful strategies. Public, violent acts trigger fear and make space less accessible. The process of maintaining the public as a spectrum – or rather all attempts to cling onto the idea of the public as a spectrum, which it was meant to develop into under governments that emphasized solidarity and compassion as an underlying principle – which can process and come to terms with any array of emotions, tastes and activities, is still relevant. Luckily the same spontaneous toolkits can be applied to inclusive art and even constructive social efforts: caring and maintaining. Spontaneous public acts of compassion yield more radical effects than disruption, as caring affects everyone involved in an encounter.
WORKOUTS FOR COUNTERACTING CHARISMATIC FLOW
Losing agency in an exercise led by a charismatic teacher can be a very positive experience. Not a lot in the world makes sense yet suddenly, under the guidance of a teacher, every gesture feels important. This is only because the teacher sets the standards by which a performance is evaluated. Even if the relationship feels unfair, the process can lead to inspiration and the discovery of untapped potential. In my case, teachers have often emphasized the importance of spontaneity. To be pushed into learning by doing, to expose bodies to odd circumstances, yields noticeable results. Reflecting on these events, I think they develop students’ skills in mustering the resources to get through challenging situations, but they are not sustainable for developing a praxis. Spontaneity is reactionary, and a praxis benefits from fixed motifs which guide development.
Practising sets of repetitive exercises is a good way to document the effects that different inputs have on bodies. In my case, regular exercises include physical workouts and writing. By performing them regularly I can identify the impact on me of events I learn from the news or changes in the weather. I became involved with physical workouts by chance when attending contact improvisation classes. Not knowing better, I thought these classes were invented by the artists who organized them. Over time I learned that the most memorable classes I have participated in were rooted in methods popularized by contemporary dancers in the sixties. What I had mistaken for something specific to performance art, was standardized and taught routinely to first semester acting and dance students in art academies around the global-west. I don’t think my teachers intended to blur the context. Methods have passed between small groups of practitioners in a process of cohabitation, storytelling and mimicking illustrations in art history books. I think everyone knows someone who has been to dance classes abroad, which might be where my experiences with body-based practice stem from.
Teaching performance art using contact improvisation exercises works well. An actor may use an exercise to develop their skills in reading how their personal habits affect their orientation to others, a dancer might use the same exercise to expand their situational awareness, and a performance artist can use it to learn how their physical mass is affected by words. As I will soon explore further, a soldier might use contact improvisation exercises to spot vulnerabilities in border control facilities and to build up the courage to perform heinous acts in public spaces. In each case repetition is necessary to cultivate an exercise into a skill. However, as our environment is rapidly changing, learning to recognize subtle differences is more valuable than performing patterns in a serialized manner. I want to emphasize that repetition is a transformative technology for learning. By grounding learning into repetition, we create a space in which we can observe subtle changes in our bodies and surroundings. By identifying the presence of constant changes, we can demystify ceremonies and rituals in which we take part daily. To better enable this process, it is crucial that everything we do is approached as a mere exercise. This presents the work in making an ‘artwork’ as a process of continual learning.
Returning to the events and the ideas that emerge during a busy exercise is challenging. There might be a blurry photo and some traces felt in the body. But after the assembly disperses, repeating the effects of the exercise or even recalling the series of events that took place can be difficult. This could be taken as evidence of the ephemeral quality of live art, but I don’t think it is true. When there is no documentation of an event, it can be appropriated to serve as a myth. People who took part in the event can return to it to vali- date their thoughts and justify their current stance. This is not necessarily a bad thing because not all myths are bad; some help folk past hard times. But this is a challenge for critical art as practitioners cannot return to an event to deconstruct it.
This is why I advocate stopping, and I think it is the most radical skill I pass onwards when I teach. Stopping to take notes, to feel, stopping for the sake of stopping. As a reference I often cite a friend, Jussi Koitela, who praises stopping as a political activity. Following Koitela, activism becomes political when an activist stops, takes a look back, traces their steps, and starts to take decisions on what to do next. I also like to think of stopping as a miniature strike of sorts – a manoeuvre for sabotaging charismatic flow. When participants of an exercise start experimenting with stopping, they may stop while in the middle of a movement routine or while performing an intensive kettlebell session. This leads to interesting events.
Another interesting way of learning to document events as they happen is to focus on choreographies. I introduce participants to choreographic work through bodybuilding and particularly kettlebell training, which teaches participants to move collectively while following a strict form. I take the training sessions so seriously that participants think I’m making a parody of sports, which seems to work to my benefit. Perhaps this helps people to approach physical workouts from an ironic stance. Kettlebell training teaches participants to read choreographies and helps them to build muscle mass. Muscle gains work as proof that participants can affect their bodies and many find the process emancipating: we can develop ourselves, we can overcome our past. Students are often insecure in engaging in physical activities. Perhaps the disruptive physical performances we know from art history books spring from similar traumas: overdoing something is a cunning way of hiding personal limits. Learning to follow choreographies merges writing and reading in a holistic way and allows participants to approach reading through their bodies, as if it were a process of strolling through a forest.
Kettlebell training felt more comfortable than I thought before. Movement with heavy weight was actually smooth. Authoring my feelings in English feels pretty hard now. And I’m not used to write so much. Lecture was really interesting, a lot of thoughts in small time. Now I author myself to stop writing. – Viljami Nissi (Media and Performance study journal 2016)
I present writing as a method for reading the exercises we undertake during classes and I have taken on the habit of organizing course journal writing processes, meticulously. We write in a shared online study journal, which can be accessed anonymously by all group members using their mobile phones. The group is advised to scribble during exercises, lectures and after classes, while brushing their teeth at home. Participants share notes with the group on the go, and comment on each other’s writing non-stop. The collective writing pad is a great way to follow what happens during a class. It gives an overview of how inputs are processed and helps participants in building up the courage to expose sketchy ideas for debate. When people read each other’s texts, they inscribe the exercises the texts describe into their bodies. In a process where pieces of documentation are frequently made the relationships between planning, doing and reflecting get blurred, and this opens new ways of reading the spontaneous activities that group members engage in. Spontaneity is often revealed as a very sensible way of organizing. Planned and reactionary actions are not opposites.
I think learning to document performance art formally is a good practice because it helps to demystify it. We have grown accustomed to seeing arrays of cameras at performance events. Cameras compost performances by pinning them to their specific location and time; they also help to distribute the creative authorship of a happening. Every time the shutter strikes the performance is locked tighter to the past, so that the audience can move forward. An effort to condense events into text is also beneficial for starting a composting process. A written account grounds the experience to a point of view and invites others to assess the impact of an event as a relation between different bodies. However, recently I have begun to fear that my efforts to make everything into text, by blurring the boundaries of writing, reading and moving, have been an attempt to conjecture a totalitarian order of creative processes. I fear that instead of boosting participants’ confidence, the process advocates a fatalistic relationship to text: as if everything could be read and written, as if the future could be determined.
The simple gesture of planning and organizing a performance using a list can prove harmful. Lists (set-lists, shopping lists, riders, inventories) are used as barebones structure for art; they are tools for assessing how events and things flow during a presentation and serve as a lens for seeing how different ideas and materials align. I think that lists do more harm than good. They normalize hierarchical, deterministic and causal approaches to time. Performances that are executed by following lists for chores and materials feel like rituals which celebrate the passing of time and the seemingly inevitable progress the passing of time brings about.
Performances channel deterministic worldviews. This critique stems from having studied at sites and times at which local events have to be interpreted (or even deciphered) by situating events in relation to global political movements. The construction of the Iron Curtain and the tremors of its falling are historical processes, which are very difficult to understand from a viewpoint located at the fringe of both the west and the east. I think the absence of local written accounts of the devastating events in the recent history of the places I’ve studied at, equipped my past teachers with a trust in intuition as a route to knowledge. Linearity or cohesion are not required for stuff to make sense.
I have come to understand that the charismatic drive, the focus on spontaneity and public exposure my teachers deployed were rooted in intuition. Moreover, attempting to understand the reasons behind everything is boring. In the worst-case-scenario participants of an exercise will end up believing that there is an understandable reason for every action. This is why, in the future, I will also rely more on intuition. I hope that intuition can be an inclusive process, which invites people from mixed backgrounds to share their opinions. Instead of being a reactionary stance, like the spontaneity I mentioned earlier, intuition offers long seeding guidelines for activity and can even set trajectories for a praxis. I bet everyone would like it if art schools’ curricula could be built intuitively: crafted to respond to affective concerns the facility has. Relying on intuition would foster an organizational culture that could adapt to challenges swiftly, while maintaining a clear course of action.
KEEPING THE CRAFT PUBLIC
Exercises that approach movement and text as equal technologies for documentation have interesting applications. They pave the way for learning how built environments inform behaviour and how the ideological presumptions which are embedded in design affect us. As an example, during the ‘Performance and Solidarity’ class in 2019 we visited the Kankaanpää swimming hall construction site to interview engineers in an effort to learn how the construction of a building relates to text. We learned that the colours of paints, the dimensions and the regulations which specify materials are all determined with codes. This presented writing, construction and reading as indistinguishable acts. To further these investigations, I turned to the work of artist Alex Schweder, who uses the term ‘Performance Architecture’ to outline artistic work that explores the material agency of buildings and the behavioural patterns buildings inscribe occupants with. Borrowing from his toolkit I often present the city as a behaviour factory.
As an example we can investigate how doors enforce territories: a door underlines the difference between the inside and the outside. The gesture of caressing a handle, in a similar manner as shaking a hand, must be performed to gain access to the other domain. A door authors behaviour and to feel its effect, an exercise of opening a door with everything other than your hands may be performed.
Field trips are great for developing the confidence to work in public spaces. This is beneficial because people can rarely afford studios and practising in public places (such as gyms, dancehalls, libraries or shopping centres) offer great venues for gaining awareness on how audiences will affect the presentation of an artwork. For me working outside the art school premises is a continuation of what I learned from Jaan Toomik. I particularly remember a morning when we were shoved into a minivan and driven to a lavish private home in ‘the most expensive district of Tallinn’. On arrival we entered a gated house where we gazed at awe as the owner presented us with their personal gym. We witnessed an inflated exercise ball sulking under a full-wall-TV, after which we were allowed to toggle the automated curtains of the eight-metre-high living room-hall. Right after this we were crammed back into the van and driven to the ‘poorest district of Tallinn’. On site we met an impoverished man in his jam packed one room apartment, which he shared with a dozen stray cats. The act of moving fast, within a day, between districts, architectural sites, and social classes, and through the city spaces that separate them, presented the city in itself as an educational device. The speed at which we traveled taught us to read the history of the sites. Toomik’s drives offered the city as a laboratory in which we could test our ideas.
In an Al-Jazeera documentary, Architecture of Violence (2014), the architect Eyal Weizman introduces architecture as a weapon that Israeli forces use for maintaining segregation and exercising control in Palestinian territories. He interviews Ebtisam Ameen Em Alla’a, a resident of Nablus city in Palestine. She depicts a moment when a group of Israeli soldiers burst through the wall of her home during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. Instead of advancing on the streets, soldiers moved through the city by making tunnel networks through the walls of tower blocks. The manoeuvre constituted private homes as military infrastructure, which provided a vantage point from which movement on the streets could be halted. This flipped the domains of private and public. The resident details the moment when the soldiers blasted through her wall. When the soldiers stormed in, she turned her head, insulted them, stared the troops down and continued smoking her water-pipe. This defiant and nullifying act – smoking a water pipe while being raided – reminds me of the poses I was taught in Tallinn, where in recent turmoil, private and public space had lost their boundaries. Seeing this type of defiance as a skill which emerges in particular surroundings, opens up the possibility of developing solidarity between the Palestinian who had her home invaded and art students trained deep in the north.
In Weizman’s example the process, in which the Israel Defense Forces move through a city by forming tower blocks into tunnels, is a powerful example of the effect critical thinking that is meant to deconstruct binary opposites, can have if it is applied as an oppressive activity. The example teaches us both to identify private and public as binary opposites, and how to read their relationships anew. In this case this skill, reading space anew, without having to respect the boundaries that cohabitation depends on, has provided the Israel Defence Forces with the upper hand, which it uses violently against people who inhabit the city. In light of this and similar examples, performance art education which centres on teaching practitioners to use their bodies as tools to read spaces anew and to produce artworks from this, should be re-evaluated. Suddenly the exercises of a humble performance artist, who experiments with the boundaries of public space, is revealed to be parallel to the activities of soldiers, who are training to navigate private spheres as if they were theirs.
When I’m having a bad day teaching, I start to imagine how soldiers train. Do they warm up with dance in an effort to heighten their peripheral gaze, which they use to assess the effective range of their explosives? At times it feels apparent that the same exercises I have been taught and that I teach are also practised by combatants, who are training to scope out public space to enable its exploitation.
I think Finland and Estonia are rare because art students who are motivated to work with issues related to class and social justice, most often talk from personal experience. A distinctive quality of present and emerging Nordic welfare states is that the student body is a close representation of society. Art students seeking to confront issues related to class and social justice engage with the topics having themselves lived the effects of the underclass. Many of them echo a familiar disgust of authority. Unfortunately, suffering or poverty does not heighten sensitivities or make us better artists. People are at their boldest when they don’t have to fear setbacks and when they have support. This is why developing body awareness through kettlebell exercises and learning how to rely on others has very practical effects. I like to believe that a particular asset people take from the courses I teach is learning to work together. Art education should serve the development of models for organizing in solidarity. In my view performance is the most relevant tool for figuring out contemporary society: it is not relevant to debate what the term ‘Defence’ in ‘Israel Defence Forces’ means; it is relevant to see how the organization performs and what kind of agency they facilitate through their actions. Performance art that fosters cohabitation is essential for surviving an era, which is defined by the violent public performances institutions deploy.