(Lue haastattelun suomenkielinen versio)
Performance artist Tuomas Laitinen defended his doctoral thesis at the University of the Arts Helsinki’s Theater Academy at the end of October 2025. The topic of his thesis is how the audience bodies form in artworks. The path to a doctorate has not been straightforward for Laitinen. Coincidences and impulsive decisions led him to study art in Turku, and encounters and experiments established him as part of the Reality Research Center collective in the early 2000s. The spectator, the spectator-experiencer, the participant, and the audience have long been at the center of Laitinen’s art in one way or another, as has writing as a practice. Laitinen has also done a lot of work behind the scenes in the field of performing arts as a curator and on the boards of various art associations. This combination of experiences and ideas inspired him to write his doctoral dissertation, How Audience Bodies Form.
Following the publication of the dissertation, Performing Arts Centre and the Reality Research Center asked Laitinen to sit down and reflect on his career to date and how his various layers of experience are reflected in his doctoral research. The interview is made by Heidi Backström, who got to know Laitinen in the mid 2010s through Esitys magazine and has followed his artistic thinking and work in the roles of specator, co-creator, and curator.
Tuomas Laitinen (photo: Eeva Anundi)
Heidi Backström: I asked you in advance to think about the milestones, significant moments, turning points, and works in your artistic career. Tuomas, how did you become a performance artist?
Tuomas Laitinen: I grew up in a home where music was very present. In my twenties, I studied musicology at the University of Helsinki, then theoretical philosophy. I never graduated, but instead drifted into pursuing art, which slowly opened up new areas for me. First, I realized that I could play anything, and I started playing all kinds of instruments that I didn’t know how to play before. Then I also became interested in dance. I ended up taking dance classes and performing in projects, and eventually even acting.
I got bored with university studies, traveled, and pursued my hobbies. At that time, I was interested in meditation, the body, the mind, the world, philosophy, political activism and art. Then, in the early 2000s, I ended up joining a project by Laura Mannila and Kati Jelekäinen at the Turku Arts Academy. They had a group called Vapauden teatteri (Theater of Freedom). It was my first experience of what I now understand as esitystaide. We worked as a group, discussing, reflecting and creating scenes together. While I was there, I happened to notice that the Theater Instructor program at the Turku Art Academy, which Laura and Kati were attending, was accepting applications. I quickly put together an application and ended up studying there under Pieta Koskenniemi.
Until then, I had been in a kind of search phase in my life. I didn’t have any specific career plans or such; I was interested in understanding life and experiencing all kinds of things. When school started, I also had my first child, and my lifestyle changed. I ended up doing art and taking care of children, and that’s where I am still today.
HB: What was the Turku Arts Academy like in the early 2000s?
TL: At that time, the Turku Academy of Arts was a more experimental art school than the Theater Academy, which taught more traditional roles and genres of theater. You could say that Arts Academy in Turku was like a school for contemporary theatre, with both a pedagogical side and an artistic side. The starting points for artistic work were multidisciplinary and open, and a lot of group-based processes were carried out using the devising method. When a particular topic or issue caught our interest, we started to think about how it could be presented. We didn’t need a script or specific job roles to get started. It was in Laura’s and Kati’s project that I realized that, rather than university, this kind of artistic thinking and activity was more characteristic of me.
HB: Reality Research Center is an important artistic community for you. Where did you first encounter it?
TL: Eero-Tapio Vuori and Julius Elo ran a seven-week course at the Turku Arts Academy called the Dream Workshop, with the subtitle Applied Course in Theater History. It was a really impressive course for all of us students. I asked how I could join the Reality Research Center and ended up participating in the Helsinki by Night production directed by Elo and Vuori and becoming a member of the collective in 2005.
I returned to Helsinki from Turku and began collaborating with Julius in particular. Second Reality Research Center work I was involved in was a one-spectator performance called Olotila (2006). In it, the spectator was first guided by an audio recording around the district of Eira in Helsinki and then they ended up in a private apartment where dancers moved the spectator’s body and a musician created a soundscape just for that one person. The performance lasted almost three hours and was experienced by a total of about twenty spectators. The workload was huge and the pay was a few hundred euros. But we did it because we were so excited about the idea.
HB: Even 20 years later, I can still recognize both your and Julius’s way of thinking and doing art in this…
TL: You can, yes. At that time, Reality Research Center had a structure where there was a year-long research plan at the time, and Julius and I were the research coordinators for 2008. The title was ”The Body of the Spectator-Experiencer in Performance”. We did the performances Luopuminen (Renunciation) and Näkymätön valtakunta (Realm of the Invisible), and held many workshops in which we explored different ways of approaching the spectator’s body. It was a really influential year for me.
Even now, colleagues still occasionally recall Renunciation. The idea behind it was the dramaturgy of a retreat. The audience consisted of about ten people. Each spectator-experiencer arrived individually, according to the instructions they had received in advance, by bus, on foot, and by boat to the manor house which served as the performance venue in Laajasalo, South-Eastern part of Helsinki. Then they gave up their important belongings and speech and spent the night at the manor house. We had constructed various scenes there that explored the idea of letting go. Nowadays, it would be called an immersive performance.
Renunciation was really demanding for us as creators. Training for days in a cold house in April and then the performance lasted all night. We got to sleep somewhere in between, but still… It was completely too much, when you think about it now.
HB: Did it feel too much at the time?
TL: Not so much. I didn’t think about money at the time, but I did realize that we were completely exhausted. As a director, you also feel the most responsibility. I tried to make sure that the others got at least a little sleep… But it was such an early stage in this field that I just wanted to explore and try everything that interested me. That’s how I had the energy to do it.
Luopuminen (RRC photo archive)
HB: I’d like to ask more about that changing field and unreasonableness, but let’s continue this timeline a little further.
TL: In 2010, I was the research coordinator for one year. The theme was ”Can the Sacred Be Performed?” From there, I want to highlight the performance Uskominen (Belief), which was again a project for one participant. It looked at the city and reflected on urban environmental beliefs in a broad sense. In addition, I created a 12-part work with one performance per month. It was called 12 etydiä ikuisesta elämästä (12 Etudes on Everlasting Life), and the idea behind it was eternal life, immortality, or death. I invited 12 artists to collaborate, and the method was that we always worked together for three days. We spent three days just working, and the result was a kind of work and an exercise that could be used to practice not dying.
HB: I have read these immortality exercises in book form. Was it your idea to start publishing at Reality Research Center?
TL: Publishing didn’t come from me, we have to go back a little. There were many people at Reality Research Center who were interested in writing. Even when I joined in 2005, there were a few columns in Teatterilehti, the Finnish theatre magazine, run by members of the collective. “Detail critics”, “metacritics”, and “Pride and Prejudice” in which director and performance maker Janne Saarakkala wrote about performances he hadn’t seen. I also started writing for the magazine.
Somehow, however, we were dissatisfied with writing for Teatterilehti. On the initiative of Pilvi Porkola, it was decided to start our own magazine. Esitys-magazine was launched in 2007. I was involved in the magazine for the entire ten years it was published.
Since joining Reality Research Center, I have also been involved in various working groups producing books. The first of these was Ei-ymmärtämisen eteisessä (In the Foyer of Non-Understanding), published in 2008, a collection of writings that was written over many years using a dialogical working method. We met regularly to read and comment on each other’s texts at different stages of the work. After the research year in 2008 we edited a collection of writings based on that year with Julius, called Kokeva keho (The Experiencing Body). The project of 12 etudes on eternal life sprouted The Manual of Everlasting Life, which includes those exercises you mentioned. This is also a rare example of something published in English by the RRC.
HB: Now we are at the turn of the 2010s in your time span, and writing has become part of your practice…
TL: In retrospect, I think writing must have come from my mother, who is a linguist. And at school, I received good feedback and encouragement for my writing. That’s where it all started, I suppose.
One important research project was “Utooppinen todellisuus” (Utopian Reality), which lasted from 2012 to 2013. It was led by Pekko Koskinen and Saara Hannula, along with me. We considered how performing arts could open up utopian possibilities in everyday life. Part of the project was the working group Lasten valta (Children as Authorities), which organized workshops in daycare centers and schools. The workshops included various exercises that explored how children experience and express power. This also resulted in a book-format guide for teachers. It was a really great project for me, partly because it involved such a different reference group to my own work than usual, as it is often people from the art scene. Here I learned a lot about assumptions and realities. For example, the children were primarily interested in power between children, whereas we had thought they would challenge school authorities.
HB: Are there some other works that you feel have particularly shaped you as an artist and researcher?
TL: Yes, two. Mine and Julius Elo’s (together with the working group) The Circle (2013), where the idea was to bring the working group members and the audience together in a circle. In addition to the form, we had the idea of an instinctive encounter. The simple form with performative tension and the organic audience participating was very interesting to experience. There were three themes that we thought were the basic forms of encounter between humans and other species like us. We hypothesized that they would be power struggle, care, and sexuality. From these we formed three functional themes: fighting, feeding, and mating. Each month there was one performance that focused on one of these themes.
The Circle was easily adaptable to different contexts. For example, in children’s workshops, we used the circle as an exercise to explore what you can do for another person. First, we listed with the children all the things you can do to another person, and then we were able to try them out in practice in the circle. This form of performance made it possible to consider difficult moral questions in practice. For example, the children intuitively chose to act out non-violent forms of interaction ”for real” and violent forms of interaction mimically, you could say playfully. It was interesting to see how the relationship between theater and morals emerged through the children.
Kehä (photos: Rami Aapasuo)
HB: I experienced the mating circle, but this violence fantasy circle sounds tempting… Was there one more work you wanted to add to your timeline?
TL: Yes, Plato’s Republic (2013), made with Maria Oiva and Jani-Petteri Olkkonen.
We started the project by reading Plato and began practicing Socratic dialogue. We talked specifically about beauty. What is beauty? In the end, we developed a mystery play in four acts that was performed for small audiences at a time. The performance itself lasted several days and the audience members came to different acts on different days. The first act was for one person at a time, then in the second act there were three spectators at a time, and in the next act there were four at a time. In the final act, or feast, all twelve audience members were present. It was performed in New York at a theoretical theater symposium, and it was an impressive experience for both us creators and the participants, who were all intellectuals, artists and researchers. In a way, it was a transgressive or ritualistic thing. We made a couple of sequels to it, Platonin luola and Platonin valta, which were also multi-day mystery plays.
Reality Research Center has had an impact on me that led me to this doctoral research.
Platonin valtio (RRC photo archive)
HB: Listening to you now, it seems to me that your milestones point to a fairly clear path to that dissertation. Locating the spectator-experiencer and studying their agency plays an essential role in all of your examples. Incidentally, before reading your thesis, I didn’t know that spectator-experiencer was a term coined by you and Julius Elo. As a slightly younger professional, it’s part of my basic vocabulary.
The artistic framework of your thesis is esitystaide/beforemance. You introduce neologism beforemance art due to a lack of an English equivalent. You present esitystaide/beforemance art as a genre of art, “in which the complicity of audience bodies is a fundamental material of artistic creation. The Finnish word esitys, being the medium of the genre of esitystaide, is defined as the sum of a performance and an audience body.” You define esitystaide as a local genre that was developed especially in the Helsinki-area during the last 30 years. Can you tell us more about this?
I wanted to pay tribute to the field in which I have grown as an artist. I feel that something unique and valuable has been developed around me in Finland, but it has not been recognized as it should have. Not even in Finland, and certainly not internationally. Amazing and groundbreaking works have been created, perhaps even an entirely new genre was developed, but it has received very little attention and the creators are living with minimal incomes somewhere in the corner. Many of the creators are comparable to British and German pioneers, but they have not been written into European art history, if I have noticed correctly.
Now that I had the opportunity to do something that would have some institutional weight, I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to draw attention to this as well. At the same time, I was also interested in what esitystaide was all about, in a theoretical sense. I went through everything I could find written about it, that is, where the term esitystaide was used. I noticed that there is no comprehensive presentation on the subject. There is no history of esitystaide, nor theory. There are some reflections on the term and then narrower reviews, such as the history of the Live Art and Performance Studies MA program.
In my dissertation, I propose a theory for esitystaide, perhaps even a kind of outline of its ontology. I root my theoretical model in this local context, although it would probably also be suitable for wider use. I have included a brief historical overview and my interpretation of the term esitystaide as background information. I also propose a new word, beformance, because the English word performance and Finnish word esitys, which are usually used as synonyms, are not the same thing, as many others in addition to myself have pointed out.
The term beforemance has its root in the etymology of the Finnish esitys, which denotes a relation, a position in relation to another. The prefix “esi” is similar to the English “pre” or “fore”. I consider that the makers of art have to do something before in time, before the audience encountered this art. Then this art is placed spatially before the audience. So there is temporal and spatial beforeness, and in this beforeness a relation between a performance and an audience body. This relation equals a beforemance.
Over the past twenty years, I have been involved in many significant projects and had many different roles in the field of esitystaide in Finland. This has given me the competence to say something about what this all is about.
Esityskioski (photo: Iiro Rautiainen)
HB: We’ve been talking about some of those projects and roles already. And as I said, to me it starts to look like a surprisingly clear road to your doctoral researcher’s phase. You have an academic background from the 1990s, which then shifted to art and its practice!
TL: Yes, I also come from an academic family. I had some resistance to an academic career and I wanted to do something else. But here I am. And many things have influenced it. Being in an academic context has been natural for me in the end, I must say.
HB: I think your dissertation was a reading experience that took the audience into account. You start it in a way that is known from popular non-fiction. You begin with frustration, a situation where you are alone running an open studio in Pori and no spectators come.
TL: I’ve fictionalized it a bit, but yes, I frame the beginning of my research by saying that I was at the Poriginal gallery in the summer of 2016, holding a weekend-long open studio. On the first day, no one came, and I was frustrated and confused.
At the time, I was in a phase where I was a little tired of my own practice and felt that things weren’t progressing. We had just ended the Esitys magazine, and I was tired of working in the same old way that I had been doing for 10 years. I felt that I needed to move forward in my career in some way. I was redefining my life also in a broader sense at the time.
Then, when no one came to the open studio, I wondered why I was making art if no one was even interested in it. Being a creative person, I ended up writing an email that same evening to about thirty people, in which I asked, half-jokingly but also seriously, whether I should start doing something other than art. I gave them the following options: a) No, b) Yes, what, and c) Neither, by which you mean what?
Quite a few people replied to my email. The most common answer was c, neither. I don’t know how important those answers were in terms of me applying for further studies, but I suppose it was important that people replied to me. I applied and in 2017 I started the Doctoral Programme of Artistic Research in Performing Arts at the Uniarts Helsinki. That became my option c. It was my way of continuing to make art and, in a way, not continuing it.
HB: Has your research question been the same all along?
TL: I don’t remember exactly how the spectator changed into the audience. I had previously been thinking a lot about questions concerning the spectator or the spectator-experiencer. We also had been using the word participant. These were all individuals. Now my interest turned toward the collective formation.
HB: How did your research work begin?
TL: I encountered a couple of problems when I moved into the academic context. One was that I only then realized how enormous the academic tradition of writing is. At The Performing Arts Research Center Tutke, we read enormous amounts of philosophy, art theory, and other subjects. It seemed to be far from the performing arts practice I had been involved in. Even though writing has been part of my practice as an artist, the performances I have created have rarely been related to or based on text. How would I work between these two mediums? It felt like I couldn’t use text to capture the essential aspects of performance making.
Another similar problem was that I was interested in studying the audience and what it means to be an audience member. However, artistic research is largely based on the artist examining their own practice in a research-like manner and highlighting things that are not visible when an outside art researcher examines their performances. How could I, as a creator, study my audience? I can’t be the audience for my own work, at least not in the same sense as others. How do I bridge the text and the performance? And how do I bridge the audience’s author, meaning my own authorship? I accidentally found a way to do this through written performances in which the audience reads. Platon’s Republic was already a performance in which the audience read. In a way, I started doing the same thing again. I began to unpack something I had thought about before, but in a more minimal and slower way. This is how the artistic parts of my dissertation, such as the final work Yleisöruumis / Audience Body (2022), came about.
Audience Body (photo: Rosaliina Elgland)
HB: In your dissertation, you use a lot of examples from other works. How did you end up doing that?
TL: It’s a bit of a political act. I did quantitative research on the articles published in The Performing Arts Research Center Tutke and noticed how long the bibliographies were and how short the lists of artworks were. That seemed problematic to me.
I deliberately wanted to include a lot of artworks in my own research text. I refer to the works in the text, and at the end there is a long list of all the performances I have seen or experienced during my research process. I also comment briefly on most of these performances in the appendix. This is my way of encouraging the use of artworks as source material for research. To engage in dialogue with other artists and their work.
HB: What is the audience and how is the audience body formed? What did you find in your research?
TL: Early on in the research process, I started thinking about how I would answer this question about the audience. It’s the kind of question that can’t really be answered. It’s too broad. However, it did generate a lot of thought for me. I started thinking about what the parameters or other definitions for an audience could be. I like to construct thought models or systems, and that’s what I ended up doing here.
Somewhere towards the end of my research, partly due to the pandemic, I ended up using the concept of audience body instead of audience. When the Covid-19 restrictions began and performances were canceled, I became aware of the obvious fact that a characteristic feature of the performing arts and performances is that the audience brings their own bodies close to the bodies of others. Of course, there are exceptions, but it is typical in the performing arts that the audience is exposed to the proximity of other audience members, and they influence how the artwork or performance itself is formed. This observation provided me with the answer to the question I mentioned earlier about how text and performance differ from each other. One difference is how they are received. The method I developed, the reading event format, combined these media in its own way.
The physicality that had been present in my and Julius’s work years ago returned through this. I began to think about what makes the audience body form and why it differs in different works. Then I built a model of it.
Graph: Tuomas Laitinen
HB: Could you explain that model?
TL: It’s a bit rough. In the model, the formation of the audience body is explained through three things: the preconditions required for its creation, the conditions that make its life cycle possible, and the variables that determine what it is like.
First, the artist needs to do something, such as create a work or announce in a newspaper that a performance is coming. This allows the audience to begin to form as it is invited. I call this subordination. It relates to the fact that the audience is subordinate to the work or the creator. Because the artist has worked on the work in advance, they have a certain position of power in relation to the audience through their prior knowledge.
Another term I use is gathering. The artist’s invitation brings the audience together, i.e., the audience becomes plural. This also applies to solo performances, where members of the audience simply arrive at different times.
These are necessary for the audience to come into being. In addition to these preconditions, conditions are needed to enable the audience body to exist during the art experience. I use a concept inspired by ritual theory, liminoid dramaturgy, which basically means that the audience body is temporary and takes its members into an altered state of being that is detached from everyday life for that moment. This is the stage when the audience body is realized and then dissolves back into nothingness.
These conditions also include resonance. I chose this term when I was thinking about the English word ”reception.” The subordinate relationship between the artist and the audience results in the audience reducing its own agency. I think that when something is reduced, something else increases. I wanted to name this. The word reception did not fit my concept, as it also, for example, implies a radio broadcast that someone receives. There are separate senders and receivers, and the message goes through a transmissive medium.
Resonance involves the act of listening and how the sound affects the listener. The body resonates and vibrates with the sound. The audience body is not only the receiver, but also the transmissive medium that vibrates. In it, reception is embodied.
Then the variables that determine what kind of audience bodies are formed. Researcher Dorothea von Hantelman has written a text in which she used the word gathering to refer to exhibition visitors, saying that exhibitions invoke individualized gatherings. Theater by contrast invokes collective gatherings. Exhibitions gather people in the same space, but at different times. This showed me that gathering can be thought of in a broad sense. It does not have to mean that everyone is in the same place at the same time.
The audience body can therefore also be formed at different times and in different places. For example, readers of a book can read it in different centuries and in different parts of the world. Theoretically, one can speculate that the bodies of the readers share a common experience. This audience body is thin and not as actual as, for example, in a theater, where people gather in the same room, sit next to each other, look in the same direction, and hear each other’s whispers. Different art forms are distinguished by the fact that they seek to form different collectivities or collective bodies. The variables that determine the form of the audience body are therefore time and place.
In addition to time and place, the variations of the audience body are created by complicity. It somewhat replaces what is referred to as participation. I don’t like the word participation myself, because it is used in such a way that there are participatory and non-participatory performances. I don’t think there really is such a division. In some performances, participation is just less prominent or more conventional than in others. I think complicity nicely describes the extent to which the spectator is involved in the art happening. If the spectator’s own agency has a greater impact on the work, they have more responsibility in a sense.
My suggestion is that these three variables—time, place, and complicity—can describe the collective body of the audience evoked by any artwork. I have visualized this as a cube, with time on the x-axis, place on the y-axis, and complicity on the z-axis. Any work of art could then be placed somewhere in the three-dimensional space of the cube according to the kind of audience bodies it evokes.
This is a fairly concrete conceptual system, after all.
Photo: Tuomas Laitinen
HB: What kind of observations did you make about this?
TL: No art form is better than another. They just form different collectivness. As an artist, you could consciously think that if you want to create intimacy or make people feel close to each other, then you should do performing arts. Or if you want to create works that allow people to be alone and at peace, then you should be a writer. When you choose your own medium, you are also choosing the kind of community you want to create. And through that, you choose what kind of worldview you want to produce.
But this really is a pretty rough division. Audiences and their behavior are in a way more collectively embodied at a punk or heavy metal concert than they are at my performances. In some areas of the performing arts, collective corporeality can be much stronger than in others. In my own works, I have tried to induce thinking, and this has given rise to certain choices. In these works, there is a tension between individuals and the collective, rather than them being purely collective.
HB: Do you have some observations about the research process itself that you would like to share?
TL: Often when we talk about research, it sounds more impressive, determined and clinical than it actually is. I would like to mention the importance of coincidence, mistakes, and failure. My commentary also seems coherent and clear as a whole. That is partly fake. Research processes are not coherent, but involve a lot of coincidences. I did a lot of experiments on my own, but also got invitations from others to do things for their contexts. These external invitations also influenced the direction of the research.
I am good at what I do, my research is high-quality and accurate, but these random factors and influences, independent of the researcher, are easily overlooked. In the same way, an artist cannot control their work beyond a certain point.
HB: Doctoral dissertations are not very common in the field of esitystaide in Finland. Would you like to say something to colleagues who are wondering whether it is worth it or not to start the process?
TL: Making research has suited me well. Of course, there are also problems with the art field becoming more research-oriented. It seems that in recent years, research language has become more desirable. There is an assumption that it is easier to get funding that way. Art discourse has become closer to research language. This easily creates pressure to come up with impressive topics, sophisticated vocabulary, and other things that will help you succeed in this field. It marginalizes other ways of doing things. On the other hand, when you have to explain why it is valuable to make art, research can also contribute to that explanation.
HB: What do you hope your research will achieve?
TL: There is a lot of literature on performances and participatory art, but I think I have developed a new way of thinking about performances. I hope it will encourage others to think about new models. They can always reveal something.
Then, in the summary of my doctoral thesis, I wrote something about it also serving as a basis for thinking about the political significance of art forms. The state of the world is extremely problematic at the moment in many ways. The media environment hides from us much of the impact of our own actions and choices. The media enables distance. In a way, this defends live art. In esitystaide, some of the effects of our actions are close and observable. If you go to the theater and start shouting obscenities, everyone can see the effects.
And then there is what we already talked about, that art should be used more as a source of research.