We can’t know from the outside what it is like on the inside,
just like we can’t see from the light what is happening in the darkness
(Performance program of Flashdance, 2016).
everything that exists is a singular expression
of each and every actual-virtual other existent
(On Difference Without Separation, Ferreira da Silva, 2016, p. 65).
These two quotes, although from the same year, propose two distinct ways of approaching a subject matter I will explore in this essay: whether it is possible to talk about differences in experience, as they pertain to those performing and those in the audience in the performing arts, without presenting them as opposites of each other. The citation on top comes from the program leaflet of Flashdance, a show I performed in, in complete invisibility, as the final project of my MA studies in the program of Dance Performance at the University of the Arts Helsinki. The lower one originates in an essay by Denise Ferreira da Silva, in which she identifies the logic of separability as the foundation of Western thought.
I take the tension between these quotes as a starting point for the argument that while it is different to perform than it is to spectate, these two ways of participating in performances are not opposites or mirror images of each other. What is at play instead, is a shared entanglement in a world, and a common confusion about where one thing begins and another ends. Alongside the exploration of the tension between these two outlooks, I describe the process of devising and performing Flashdance. By writing about it, I try to identify the logic that considered my performing in invisibility as an obstacle and a problem to be solved, rather than as an alternative way of engaging with performing as an artistic practice beyond solely visual means.
The essay consists of three parts, which are paced with short interludes. The first interlude is a description of Flashdance, as I’ve heard it depicted by those who have seen it. I will then move on to explore the notion of ”the inside” and ”the outside”, brought up in the performance program. I argue that, as a rhetorical device, it reduces performing and spectatorship to formalized, separate roles rather than expressions of entanglement.
As the second interlude I will give an account of my experience of performing Flashdance. After it I dive into a text that Niko Hallikainen wrote about the show and in which he describes his attempts at conceptualizing this very experience. Hallikainen ends up stating that his attempts were in vain, but I argue against this claim by saying that while our ways of engaging with the piece were no doubt technically distinct from each other, they had to do with the same essential sensation of entanglement in an event.
In the third interlude I describe an alternative meaning of the word performing that comes from my native language, Finnish, and conceptualizes my profession as a practice in such entanglement. I will then talk about the process of presenting Flashdance to my university as my final project as a performer. The process did not run without trouble, as I was initially told that my work could not be evaluated due to my invisibility. Through the critique of insistence on visual evaluation and the use of the alternative meaning of the Finnish word for performing, I try to picture a different way of engaging with performing as an artistic practice.
I write this essay from the position of a performer, one usually pictured as the inhabitant of the so-called inside of a performance. With this, I get help from Paul B. Preciado’s phenomenal lecture-turned-book Can the Monster Speak?. In it Preciado (2021), addressing initially a congress of psychoanalysts, describes ”the revenge of the psychoanalytic and psychiatric ‘object’” as a shift in perception, through which ”the object of study becomes the subject, while the person who, until now, has been the subject agrees to submit to a process of study, questioning and experimentation”(p. 55).
A former psychoanalyst himself, Preciado concentrates on himself as a trans man in the context of a clinical practice that refuses his transness as a thing existing in the world, identifying him as a monster and a nuisance to the practice. A connection from what Preciado describes can be drawn to performing by thinking of performers as objects on stage, as Niko Hallikainen (2016) comes to describe us in his text and as the research of Kirkkopelto (2024) suggests. What would happen if such an object, so used to being evaluated, chose to engage in a counter-exploration of sorts of those investigating it? What would it experience?
Interlude I
- a description of a show I’ve never seen
Flashdance was the first official production of the Finnish performing arts collective WAUHAUS. It had its premiere at Zodiak - Center for New Dance in December 2016. The working group consisted of performers Hanna Ahti, Wilhelm Grotenfelt and myself, alongside director Juni Klein, stage and lighting designer Samuli Laine, choreographer Jarkko Partanen, lighting designer Jani-Matti Salo, sound designer Heidi Soidinsalo and producer Jonas Welander.
In the performance the audience sits on four sides of a nearly pitch-black performance space. The dimmed stage lights are turned towards them, making it hard to see to the center of the space. Two industrial fans go off and start pushing air into a large plastic bag that covers almost the whole stage. Very slowly, the bag inflates, making it tower over the spectators. The surface of the plastic seems to take on unexpected shapes when it comes into contact with the stage lights. Most of the performance consists of the bag moving in space in different ways while slowly deflating. Towards the end it is possible to perceive some human-like shapes under the plastic. Soon they disappear back into the material - and complete darkness ensues.
As it has been described to me, Flashdance takes place largely in the imagination of a spectator. Some have called it a trip into their own neurochemistry, and others have been made acutely aware of the amount of projection that is present in the act of spectating. Others still have found it boring to watch a plastic bag move for forty minutes. Whatever the experience, the three performers of the piece were never seen on stage. The audience could only see us when we emerged from the bag for the applause.
An inside, an outside, and a border in-between
How to describe a performance that takes place in nearly complete darkness? I am sure that those in charge of communicating about Flashdance to potential spectators found themselves facing this problem. Due to the fact that each spectator’s eyes would adjust and react in their own way to the low levels of lighting in the performance, it was very hard to state what an average audience member would end up perceiving. The statement that it is not possible to know from the outside what takes place inside was undoubtedly born as a solution to this problem. It served as a sturdy enough rhetorical device, through which some of the confusion inherent to the performance could be made less prominent. At the same time, the idea of an inside and an outside proposed an insurmountable separation of performers and spectators. Later in the actual performance, the surface of the plastic bag would come to act as a concrete expression of this figurative border between them. It made it clear that there would only be two positions that could be taken in this event - and that those positions would be at odds with each other.
The statement, however, did not originate in some meeting room, where people who had only just experienced the performance had to come up with some way to write about it. It emerged, instead, from the artistic process itself, and found its way from there to other facets of the production. After having worked with multiple possible materialities for the performance, we made the decision to have the plastic bag as the main element of the piece. At the same time it became clear that the habitual ways of communicating about what we were doing didn’t really work. This was mainly because what we performers did with the bag could not be visibly perceived by those spectating it. They could see the motions of the bag, yes, but not what made the bag move. This resulted in confusion summed up perfectly by a single moment where one member of the artistic team yelled at the moving bag from a meter away: ”WHAT IS GOING ON THERE!?”, while one of us performers replied in a calmer voice: ”you don’t have to shout, we’re right here.”
Unlike in most performances, in Flashdance the knowledge about what performers did lay with us alone. This resulted in a shift in working dynamics, especially in relation to the roles of the choreographer and the director. In my opinion, it had an even bigger potential to disrupt our initial outlook on what was perceived interesting in the project. However, as we were not sure how to approach making a performance in a way that relied on performers as the holders of such knowledge, we ended up using the notion of an inside and an outside as a communication tool about what would make the bag move in ways that would be interesting to look at. Here we were no doubt building on the habitual division between the performers and the audience as symmetrical, complementary opposites, and relying on an understanding of the theatre scene as something that can only reflect reality, not as something real itself. This made us describe that which we performers did as something taking place inside of the bag, that then translated to something else on its outside. And while we used this tool to help us navigate something that was hard to conceptualize, we might not have thought through how adopting this logic would affect the way we engaged with the materiality of the piece. Through this process the notion that there were such things as an inside and an outside became the outlining epistemology and the paradigmatic framework of the whole process.
For Preciado (2021) ”an epistemology represents a closure of our cognitive system that not only offers answers to our questions, but determines the very questions we can pose” (p. 33). On the other hand, he describes a paradigm as something that ”determines an order of the visible and the invisible, and … establishes the difference between what exists and what does not exist” (p. 32). I think that our reliance on the notion of an inside, an outside, and a border between had a huge effect on the questions we were able to ask and the primary outlook we adopted. Rather than opening up possibilities for being in relation to the material beyond visual means, it set up rules about the way the performance could be approached. What was
implied, therefore, was not only a difference between spectators and performers, but a separation of them. I think this tendency of thought is what Ferreira da Silva gestures towards when describing the:
scientific imaging of The World as an ordered whole composed of separate parts relating through the mediation of constant units of measurement and/or a limiting violent force. When deployed for thinking about the social, this imaging renders sociality as being contingent upon the inhabiting of the same (juridical, spatial, or temporal) parts (Ferreira da Silva, 2016, p. 57-58).
When we chose to mostly talk about Flashdance in terms of an inside and an outside, we might have given in to this habitual way of understanding what makes it possible to relate to one another: the sharing of a common position. In the case of the performance, the position considered common was that of a spectator, probably because that was the position occupied by most artists in the group. Therefore the performance became communication between the artists in the audience and the spectators via the performance. This made us in the artistic group focus on what was seen or not seen, rather than, for example, on what was felt while engaging with the material of the performance, which might have had more to do with the experience of performers. I think that this had a clear effect on the form of the performance. After the second interlude I will go into detail about the experience of one particular audience member and try to show how what I’ve described might’ve resulted in spectators engaging with the performance through mainly visual means, too.
Interlude II
- a description of a show I’ve performed in dozens of times
When the audience arrives I’ve already crawled into the bag and made myself a hole for breathing in its surface. The first 10 or so minutes are mainly about lying down, feeling the touch of the industrial fans when they push cold air into the plastic bag and me. It is so dark that I have to touch the bag to know when it has inflated enough for me to start moving inside it. The next part is about pushing and pulling the bag to make the air circulate more. When I look around me I notice that my eyes have somewhat adjusted to the low levels of light. In the grey mass that is everything around me I perceive the figures of my fellow performers, on the floor like myself, wearing fluorescent wristbands that we use to communicate with each other. When the bag is full enough for us to start moving it, we huddle up for a moment, before starting to very slowly and arduously drag the bag in space. We mainly navigate the space by using our feet to search for the ropes we have taped to the floor to act as tactile information about our orientation.
Performing Flashdance, for me, resembles a very long dive. Another performer has described it as steering a ship through a storm. This is quite fitting, since the bag moves as it wants to move and we are part of it. The plastic handles we have taped on its interior in order to operate it lose that application altogether at some point and become portals for further entanglement. They spin around us; choking us and stroking us. We rip holes into the bag to let more air out (the dramaturgy of the piece for us is a straightforward one: how full the bag is). We will need to mend these holes for the next performance to be possible but for now there is no other way to survive the dive than to become the storm. When there’s no more air we screw ourselves into the plastic. Breathing is impossible, this dive has lasted for too long, and we dive just a bit further as the lights go out and complete darkness ensues. If we’re able, we make holes in the bag for gasping for breath. We can only see the audience when we emerge from the bag for the applause.
Unknowable echoes
We’ve established that our artistic group ended up communicating about the performance through the logic of an inside and an outside. This led us to engage with the material of the performance in a way that prioritized the spectator’s position, which also manifested in the marketing of the piece. This logic of separated sides was perceivable in how spectators responded to the performance, as well. To explore this facet of the topic I use the text Niko Hallikainen wrote about Flashdance in 2016 as a written account of the experience of a spectator of the piece. In the text Hallikainen describes the movements of the plastic as unknowable echoes of our dancing bodies. He also gives an account of his attempts at conceptualizing what it was like for us to perform the piece - as if trying to reach through the opaque surface of the plastic bag. Ultimately he deems his attempts futile, not only due to the fact that he is unable to perceive us visibly but also because to him, the plastic makes an object out of us three performers by robbing us of individuality. It is especially his description of attempting to expose something hidden that interests me.
In his lecture Preciado (2021), talks about the ”invention of new secular and sanitized methods of accessing the … ’invisible’ and ’untouchable’” (p. 36), that psychoanalysis has claimed to have given the world. To me the foundational logic of the wish to expose that which is hidden resides in the same place as the binary notion of an inside and an outside of a performance. What can be found in this wish is a positioning of the self as an analyzing, spectating subject that doesn’t only have the right, but the responsibility to know what is going on behind the scenes. This kind of a spectating subject positions that which they are looking at as something other to themselves, that is, a performing object. This object cannot be trusted with its own experience, and is also easily condemned if it denies the subject the access to this experience. It is always up to the spectating subject to reveal the thing that can only be found inside of the object, not on its surface.
I find this urge to reveal something that is hidden interesting because it was also found among the artistic team of Flashdance. In the working group it took the form of an in-joke, when someone proposed that we should make a second version of the piece with a see-through bag, in full lighting and in a completely white performance space. This, it was argued, would make the audience privy to what was taking place in the bag. But when we think about this from the perspective of performers, it is clear that the logic behind this idea is lacking. This is because it would not really make much of a difference for us performing whether the bag was see-through or not; the fact that we’d still be performing would not change. This could be perceived as yet another gesture of hiding something, simply because a logic that claims to have the power to reveal that which is hidden will never settle for that which is visible.
The notion of an inside and an outside of the performance we used in the working process of Flashdance made us focus on what was seen instead of the things that could be perceived in other ways. This was also the way Hallikainen (2016) seems to have engaged with the piece, resulting in him feeling like there was no way for him to conceive how it felt to perform in the show. He would instead describe being troubled with a sensation of incalculable panic due to not being able to understand what it was that he was supposed to see or look for. But, if we look at the short account I’ve given above of my performing in the show in the second interlude of this text, I’d argue that we shared this feeling of confusion and awe in the face of something that cannot be grasped - past the obvious technical differences of our experiences, that is. In this sense Flashdance robbed not only us performers of the subjectivity usually associated with being a human individual, but those spectating it as well, making them feel exactly the way we felt; unable to refuse a fundamental entanglement with the world.
Interlude III
- an alternative description of a word
In my native language Finnish, ’to perform’ (esiintyä) can mean two things. First is the direct translation to the English one and can be summed up as someone doing something on a stage of some sort with other someones observing them. But the second one refers to an ecological, relational process. This meaning of the word can be used when talking about, for example, a species of mushroom that can only be found in a certain environment that it can’t be separated from and in which it ’performs’ fundamentally connected to everything. I have previously used ’to occur’, ’to appear’ and ’to become’ as translations for this use of the word, as well as the Swedish ’uppträda’ - for those who have access to that language. The concept of entanglement is also a great way of envisioning what this alternative meaning of the Finnish word conveys, since the notion of undeniable interconnectedness is present within both words.
Performing in invisibility
Flashdance made us performers inseparable from the plastic bag and each other. This resulted in reliance on binary rhetoric. Before concluding the essay I will explore the evasive way in which University of the Arts Helsinki, where I was studying at the time, responded to me presenting the piece as my final project of the MA program in Dance Performance. By bringing an academic institution into the conversation I investigate the dualistic separation of performers and spectators, as well as the prioritization of the visual, as a broader foundation of the way performing arts are produced, taught and researched.
As I mentioned in the introduction, my university initially forbade me from using Flashdance as my final project. The reason was that due to my invisibility I could not be evaluated, and that I should choose a project in which I would be performing in a more ’traditional’ manner, that is, visibly. However, the university had to ultimately give in, since there was no clear requirement of visibility in the evaluation criteria at the time. This did not mean that the rest of the process was easy. My evaluators seemingly were not given much help with how to engage with my work in the performance in alternative ways, resulting in me using my MA thesis as a way of giving a supplementary account of the working process that led us to be performing in the bag. I can see now that, by giving this account, I in a way agreed that my performing in invisibility was a problem rather than a possibility.
In an academic institution that claims to support artistic research, such disinterest in methods that go beyond the habitual way of thinking about performing seems very strange. But I think it can be understood through the logic of a dualistic tendency that we have come to know in this essay. When we see this tendency as something that pushes performing and spectatorship as complementary opposites of each other, we can see why the prerequisite of visibility of a performer was so important for the university. The university had assumed the position of a spectator in the process of my evaluation, who would be there to make my incomplete experience of the performance total.
This presumed logic rests on the same binary way of thinking about performing and spectatorship that we have encountered in this essay, where the experience of a performing-object is considered fundamentally lacking something that a spectating subject can give it. When I refused this dynamic through my invisibility it made the university uncertain of its function. Because how could the university perform its authoritative position as a spectating subject, if it could not see me performing and tell me what I was lacking in my experience?
But I have to ask if it would not be more helpful for a program that claims to study performing to actually develop ways to engage with its topic beyond assuming the position of a spectator? What if the institution were to assume the position of fellow performer, instead, or to agree in other ways to take part in an investigation of what performing is and could be? Or what if, when it became clear that I wasn’t visible on stage, my two fellow performers in the piece - both my seniors and much acclaimed in their field - would have been asked to take up the roles of the evaluators? I think that the reason can be seen as the notion of fundamental separability that we have explored. It is simply out of the bounds of the prevailing epistemology that another position than the one of a spectator could be assumed to engage with performing as an artistic practice. It also needs to be said that, probably, a fellow student in choreography would not have faced such issues. I believe that in academic settings performing as an artistic practice is particular in this way.
And here we find ourselves facing the shift in position that Preciado (2021) describes as ”the revenge of the psychoanalytic and psychiatric ’object’” (p. 55), and in which:
the subject/object duality (both clinically and epistemologically) disappears and is replaced by a new relationship, one that conjointly leads to mutation and to becoming other. It will be about strength and mutation rather than power and knowledge. It will entail learning together, and healing our wounds (Preciado, 2021, p. 55-56).
Preciado (2021) further notes that it is important to understand that when asking for such a reform ”[w]e are not calling … for a simple reversal of hierarchies. Rather, we are talking about a proliferation of practices and forms of life” (p. 53). The way I see this connecting to the conversation at hand is that it is not necessary to think about elevating performers to the same level or above those spectating, since such an elevation would still be operating in the confines of the binary we have investigated here. Another way of thinking about this relationship is needed, one where differences are means of actual collaboration rather than reasons for opposition and hierarchy. This shift towards an alternative way of thinking and relating is also perceivable in the end of the essay of Ferreira da Silva (2016), where she states that when ”nonlocality guides our imaging of the universe, difference is not a manifestation of an unresolvable strangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement” (p. 65).
The secondary meaning of the Finnish word for performing that I’ve described above helps to imagine what such an alternative could be. It moves away from that which can be visually perceived as skill or virtuosity of an individual subject and focuses on the relationality between things, accepting and appreciating their differences while moving towards the confusing unknown side by side. This gestures towards an epistemological foundation that is not about separation and insistence on the primary position of an outside eye. It is more about engaging with the strange communions that take place when participating in performances from the myriad possible positions that exist. When thought about this way the human centered idea of agency, based on the volitional action taken by an individual subject, is refused. What takes place instead is the acknowledgement of the fact that it is never just about who or what we see but also about what surrounds them. Flashdance, in my experience, was all about this latter possibility of relating through difference. The bag hitting the light fixtures on the ceiling, as well as the audience, walls, ground and air made our co-existence palpable. It showed that it is impossible to not exist in relation to others.
In conclusion
To close off this essay, I want to state that I’ve also heard accounts of many other ways of engaging with Flashdance. This has been very important, since the artistic process of the show was and still is one of the most gratifying experiences of my professional life - one that apparently keeps giving even 10 years after the premiere of the piece. However, I’ve wanted to center this problematic in this essay since so much of my own practical and lived experience around Flashdance was about dealing with a dissonance between what I felt to be at the heart of the work and the visuality-focused response it received.
What I’ve found most interesting this time around about the artist process of the piece, is that even though we set out to investigate the notions of darkness and invisibility on stage, we ended up talking a lot about seeing. There is of course nothing inherently wrong with this, but I think that we can accept, that approaching something primarily through visual means results in certain outcomes, and that focusing on other things would lead to different conclusions. I think that when we devised Flashdance we engaged with this problematic, but due to us being unprepared for the epistemological transformation that the material of the performance gestured towards, we ended up - at least in some capacity - reproducing the binary way of thinking that tends to posit spectators and performers as separated subjects and objects with no real possibility for communication and co-living. This resulted in the finished performance inviting others to encounter it in this way, as well.
While I admit that it is hard to try and conceptualize ways to engage with performing beyond visual means, I think that this conversation needs to happen in order to study performing as a potential - not as a problem to solve or a secret to reveal. I think that by approaching it in terms of entanglement, rather than skill or ability, we can move on to really think what a performer does or is outside of being a mediator of the communication that takes place between spectating subjects.
Apart from the ecological meaning of the Finnish word for performing, I have not gone much further into wondering what kind of options are available to the dualistic logic I’ve described in length here. I know that there is a lot of further work to be done, not to mention the countless existing practices that already engage with alternative ways of producing and approaching art making and existence in a broader sense. What I’ve wanted to do in this essay is to study the underlying logic that I know I myself reproduce as well, and use the process of writing about it as a part of a continuous process of unlearning.
In connection to this, I acknowledge that the works of Denise Ferreira da Silva and Paul B. Preciado that I reference in this text emerge from specific historical conditions and struggles against racialized and gendered forms of violence and exclusion. My own examples, however, emerge from artistic practice and experiences of performing and institutional education. I therefore do not wish to collapse these contexts into equivalencies or present these concepts as universally transferable explanatory tools. Rather, I have tried to think alongside these texts and cautiously borrow from them as a way of opening questions around performing, spectatorship and relationality within this particular discussion.
Literature
Ferreira da Silva, D. (2016). On Difference Without Separation.
published in the catalogue of the 32a São Paulo Art Biennial, "Incerteza viva" (Living Uncertainty) pp. 57-63, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/574dd51d62cd942085f12091/t/5c157d5c1ae6cf4677819e69/1544912221105/D+Ferreira+da+Silva+- +On+Difference+Without+Separability.pdf
Hallikainen, N. (2016). Always in the Dark, Title translated from Finnish by Johannes Purovaara,
published in the Okulaari-series by Zodiak - Center for New Dance on their web page, https://www.zodiak.fi/fi/paivakirja/okulaari-aina-pimeassa
Kirkkopelto, E. (2024). Logomimesis - A Treatise On The Performing Body, Routledge, pp. 62
Performance program of Flashdance, (2016).
Performance produced by WAUHAUS and Zodiak - Center for New Dance
Preciado, P. B. (2021). Can the Monster Speak?: A report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts Fitzcarraldo Editions, pp. 32-56, https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2024-10-15_670dc9b2c9191_Can_the_Monster_Speak_A_Report_to_an_Academy_of_Psychoanalysts_Paul_B._Preciado_Frank_Wynne_translation_Z-Library.pdf