ABSTRACT
Let me start by describing a lecture demonstration I gave at a research colloquium in Helsinki in spring 2019. 1 This serves as an introduction to my next meditation. The demonstration was about virtualization onstage. As you read, imagine everything in your mind.
Having briefly outlined the arguments I intend to substantiate in practice, I invite the audience to watch me make a series of short bodily variations. I announce that to start with, I will take a short one-minute nap.
Variation 1The lecturer lies down on the floor and closes their eyes. The timer of their cell phone beeps after one minute. The lecturer sits up and addresses the audience:
Commentary“What happened? Let's try to consider the happening phenomenologically. If you had not seen me lying down and if you had been the first to enter this room and seen a person lying on the floor, what would you have done? Maybe you would have tried to speak to them – No reaction. Then you'd have repeated what you said a bit louder – Still no answer. Next question: what is this about? What has happened to that person? The possibilities are not very many: either the person is sleeping, sick, dead, practising some sort of body technique, performing, or just playing. In order to exclude the wrong options and to find the right one, further observations are needed, and maybe a few tests.
In this case, I mentioned to you that I am going to take a nap, so that you knew that the person lying there either was either really asleep, or pretending to. All you had to do was to watch and reflect. What does a sleeping person look like? Do they dream or not? Do their eyeballs move? No matter if they move or not, the person in that state is elsewhere than here with you. But where are they? Well, you may think that they are dreaming, or sunken in their thoughts, memories, or fantasies. – But you can only think like that. You cannot see their dreams or thoughts anyway. You cannot be too sure about the contents of their mind. Instead, what you can see is their sleeping or dreaming body: a body full of sleep, dream, or memories, but not necessarily a physiological body, or not only that.”
Variation 2The lecturer stands up and turns either left or right so that the audience sees them in a profile. For a little while they do not say anything, just look ahead. Then, all of the sudden, without changing position, they start to speak.
Commentary“Now the person has stood up. They are standing and doing nothing. Their eyes are open. They stare at something, but obviously nothing outside themselves in this space. They rather stare at the void or, which means the same, they look “inwards.” Maybe they are thinking something? They probably are. What are they thinking? You cannot know. But you can still see their body. What does their thinking body look like? You see a body full of invisible representations, a body packed with thoughts and memories.
Variation 3 (the lecturer addresses the audience)“Now this person performs a theatre exercise, the kind of thing actors may do when they rehearse in order to activate and nourish their imagination and to familiarize themselves with what they are expected to perform. In other words, I now show to you something that normally is not meant to be seen. The exercise is called ‘Vision ball’ (näkypallo). The person who is doing it now invented it in the mid-1990s, for a stage production he was preparing with a group of performers. Afterwards, they learned that some others had come up with and used a quite similar technique, maybe even before them. But it does not matter now. It only proves that the technique works. It goes like this . . .”
The lecturer starts to jog in a circle about four meters wide. Their jogging is relaxed and the weight of their upper body is carried by their pelvis. They keep the palms of their hands opposite each other, close to their belly, at the height of the navel, and they have directed their gaze into the empty space between the palms. As the jogging continues, their arms start to open slowly and draw the palms away from each other. As the empty space between their palms get bigger and the lecturer starts to see invisible things within it. The larger the space is, the more the lecturer can turn their head in order to follow what happens in that imaginary space. Finally, when their arms are open enough, they run within that space. They cease to maintain the space with their hands, stops jogging and starts living and acting in the space they have imagined as if it were real to them. They do not say a word but they behave in a recognizable manner, so that the audience members can soon guess where they are pretending to be and what they are doing. The action ends when the situation has become obvious enough.
Commentary“How is this variation different from the previous one, where the person was standing and thinking, or from the first one, where they were sleeping? In the last variation, the person had in some ways, with the help of a certain body technique, externalized their imagination. Even if you could not see exactly what they saw or imagined, you could, as you followed their transformation, understand little by little where they were, what they were doing there, maybe even who they were. In your imagination, you as a spectator started to reconstruct an analogous situation around your own body so that in the end, between you and the performer, there was an approximative agreement on what was being performed. That happening, that performance was, I now state, virtual . . .”
