Tuomas Laitinen: Audience Body

Saturday 9.9. at 13:00 and 18:00
Venue: The Taiteen talo arts center, The main hall (A stairway, 2nd floor)  Nunnankatu 4, 20500 Turku
Arrival and accessibility information at the bottom of the page

Duration: 100 min.
Language: Finnish and English
Pre-booking is possible, but tickets will also be available at the venue, 15 minutes before the performance.  Pre-bookings here.

Audience Body is a theatrical event of shared reading. No performer will step on stage. Instead a subtle being appears — the audience body.

The performance addresses the collective corporeal intelligence of an audience and directs its gaze towards itself. It is composed of reading objects, proposing different arrangements and experiences: rolls of paper unwinding, love letters ripped, words eaten and multiple hands immersed in water. It deals with audience as a phenomenon: the collectivity, the density, the liveness and the related tensions that appear when we gather in order to receive.

Audience Body premiered at Moving in November festival in Helsinki in 2022, in collaboration with Zodiak the Center for New Dance.

It is the second artistic part of Tuomas Laitinen’s artistic doctorate at the Performing Arts Research Center Tutke in the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki.

The performance is bilingual: all parts are available both in Finnish and in English.

Tuomas Laitinen works as a director, performer, writer, curator and teacher between the fields of live and performance art, contemporary theatre and contemporary dance. Laitinen’s artistic practice is particularly focused on questioning the role of the audience, experimenting with it, and consequently developing new forms of performance. Currently, he works with a doctoral research project at Performing Arts Research Center Tutke, Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy, and is a part of the curatorial group of the Stage for Contemporary Performance at Helsinki City Theatre.

The visit is done in collaboration with the Reality Research Centre.

The work is supported by Brother.

Arrival and accessibility information

The installation space is located on the 2nd floor of the A stairway of the Taiteen talo Arts center. The outer door is barrier-free and equipped with a door pump. The building has an accessible elevator, but the elevator door is heavy and the elevator button is high.

You can find more info about arrival and accessibility from here (in Finnish): https://www.turku.fi/taiteen-talo/saavutettavuus

Toilet spaces

The accessible toilet can be found on the first floor, the toilet is right-handed. Other toilets are located on the second floor.

Language accessibility and audience participation

The performance is based on texts that are available in Finnish and English.

More information
Salla Karvonen, salla@newperformance.fi