Ryynänen, Sanna: Theatre and performative arts as spaces of relations, encounters, and dialogue – case Saimaa Theatre and Voyeur
The presentation draws from my ongoing research project (2020–2022) that focuses on theatre and performative arts as social and political acts. From the four case examples in the research project, in my presentation I concentrate on two, Saimaa Theatre (Saimaan Teatteri) and Voyeur, to discuss theatre and performative arts as spaces of relations, encounters, and dialogue.
Saimaa Theatre is a touring theatre group of young professional actors established in 2014 that every summer travels around the villages of the lake Saimaa region in Finland for a month in a boat, taking their contemporary folk theatre with a participatory twist in places where cultural activities are scarce. The venues are old community houses and audiences heterogeneous, from young summer visitors to aged locals, from theatre connoisseurs to those who might see a theatrical performance for the first time. The theatre group fosters different kind of encounters and dialogues from the communal living in the boat to bringing together people from very different backgrounds in their performances. I am a researcher member of the ensemble since 2019 which includes, for instance, ethnographic participation in their summer tours. In my presentation, I draw from the research data from summer tours of 2019 and 2020. Another case example, Voyeur, is a wordless performance that “explores the dynamics of the gaze through bodily communication” and, therefore, addresses also explicitly the questions of relations and encounters. It had its third performance season in February 2020 with ten performances in Side Step Festival 2020 and in Universum Theatre, in Helsinki, Finland. Voyeur can be located in the field of experimental performative arts, and its audiences were composed accordingly: mainly young(ish) art enthusiasts with a considerable proportion of professionals in performative arts. I participated the spring 2020 performances as researcher, collecting ethnographic data and conducting interviews with audience and performers.