Unexpected encounters and conversations on performance 

I choose the performances I would work with as ambassador in a rather intuitive way. I hadn’t seen any of them, so it was just a hunch: Parsa Kamehkhosh’s Calling Piece, and Darius Fodczuk’s Dialogue with a Son. Then I noticed that these works were connected to motherhood, to communication with one’s mother, personal life stories, and perhaps past generations. To be a mother is the most important, happiest, greatest thing in my life. I thought that it would be nice to get to know what these two men had to say about the subject.

Who were my participants? It was a challenge to find people to invite to this experience when their normal activities had not begun after the summer break. We were supposed to find about 10 to 15 people, but I think working with a group of 7, like I did, was perfect. I wanted to invite musicians, family caretakers, and volunteers working with children and teenagers, but the institutional channels I tried did not work to reach them. One day, talking about this with a friend on the telephone and describing what I was planning to do, she immediately got interested. Hours later she called again to say she was coming with three friends of hers. Two of them traveled 500 km, one 200 km and another one 150 km, to get to Turku. A colleague from audience ambassador training joined us as well. We were all more or less in the same generation, born around 1960.

The creative time with people

I wanted the active part of the experience, the workshops, to help people and myself understand what performance art is, but I didn’t want to be a teacher. Instead, I wanted to start by playing (like children), which is a natural thing to do, to create a nice atmosphere.

For my first workshop, I worked from my interest in names and naming – from a cultural, etymological and social point of view. Our name is a central part of our essence. But a name is also a social definition, carrying connotations that may conflict with our image of ourselves, and is charged with other people’s emotions.

When I was a child there was an oral tradition of rhymes, songs and riddles in my family going back hundreds of years. One of them asked: “What belongs to you only but is used mainly by others?”. That’s your name. Inspired by Parsa’s work, I wanted to explore with my participants questions like, who chose my name? Do I feel fine with it?  What do I associate it with?

In the workshop I provided many postcards for people to choose one related to their name, and then I invited them to write the story of their name on it. Afterwards everyone had a lot to tell. The topic was both personal and universal, family histories and dynamics emerged; how different things were when we were born, and how people felt about their names. They were so eager to share, we could have gone forever discussing all the aspects of their name, who had given it, and about their nicknames! I even had to leave out other activities I had planned, because we had to wrap it up to go attend the shows. Before that, I asked everyone to address the postcards to themselves, writing their addresses, and I collected them to post them later.

For the second workshop, the next day, I thought Fodczuk’s Dialogue with a Son would be an interesting continuation. For me, this work suggested a conversation that led nowhere. I began to think, what does it mean when a conversation is a failure? When is conversation balanced instead of just satisfying the desires of one part? I decided to think about it all as a question. What do we want to know in a conversation, what type of questions do we ask in it? Before attending the performance, I proposed that each of us write one or a few questions that we had in our mind (in the moment or quite often), for which we didn’t have answers. Then I read all the questions out loud, one by one, and the group answered what first came to mind for each of them. I wrote the answers on a board.

I was thinking that facing each other is perhaps equally important as the topic discussed, and noted also how often the questions we wrote may include the answers. We discussed people’s perceptions of this process, and reflected on how questions affected their mood then. Despite the process being quite rational, it was also emotional, which I didn’t expect. I had wished it just to be absurd, funny, foolery. So I started with one mine: ”Why don´t I wash the windows of my house although I can do it and actually would like to have them clean? The participants’ questions that came up, however, were quite personal. Some dealt with family issues or even personal life situations that were hard, stressful, or created uncertainty; and generally things that they each felt they wanted to be more active about. They evidently felt in a safe space to share serious stuff (which made sense because some of them were friends) and I had to leave aside my carnivalesque mood, but this was fine too —the participants made the workshop their own.

Watching the performances

The workshops on both days were very engaging and prepared my group to attend the performances with curiosity. And yet, I wish I had had the opportunity to see these works beforehand, because perhaps I would have made different choices for the workshops.

The performance was felt somewhat negative and aggressive and the relation between the son and the mother passive-aggressive. At the same time, we all got many bits of new thoughts. ”So, our whole life is a chain of performances, right??”, said one. ”I just make coffee, take a walk and brush my teeth …and there is someone making his or her interpretations. Most probably in a totally wrong way.” We had so many good laughs.

In contrast, Fodzcuk’s performance was easy to watch. I didn’t find a straight connection between it and my workshop either, but now I think that the workshop is one thing and the performance another. The performance was very inspiring. Someone really disliked the hard noise of stuff breaking, but still we all liked it a lot. It was wonderful to see dishes crash just like that. The old lady on the stage was interesting and everyone loved her. One said, “It would be nice to be in an action like this when you are very old”… ”But your children are not artists!” 

The son seemed to be very protective of his mother. We imagined that perhaps the performance was about the violence at home when the man was little, or perhaps it told about the war? Still, the performance was hilarious and wild in an energetic and good way.

Making sense of the ambassador process

To make the workshop was a nice and easy process, but combining that creative part with the outreach for participants was too hard then for me. Summertime is not a good time to reach communities. Most don’t know anything about performance, maybe they had negative thoughts about it, or didn’t find it interesting enough to join. It was hard for me to focus on the creative and content part when important practical things were not working. At some point I decided to quit. I felt that I couldn’t manage, but after a couple of days I decided to go on because of the encouragement from the NPT staff and fellow ambassadors. I still think the festival could support this better next time with a dedicated person to do press and invitations.

In the end, I feel that I managed quite well. As an audience ambassador the new audience and the new art genre was special for me. It was so inspiring to lead the workshops and it reactivated my teaching skills. I can rely on my own experience of decades.  One new thing was to ask for help when I needed – and how great it was to get help. I am an open person and quite brave, and I need and appreciate learning from new challenges. 

The whole festival, people there, it all was fine. I think the participants got a lot from our long discussions. They said that they are eager to continue taking part in art like this later too.