Meet – an intimate performative encounter format
By Christine Gaigg
Performance Research 28:2, pp 94-100, published Dec 2023
For my choreographies the audience itself has always (from the beginning of my career in the 1990s) played its part as theatrical subject that contributes to the work by being integrated into it physically. In my larger formats (eg Sacre Material tanz2000.at; Maschinenhalle #1 opening festival steirischer herbst 2010 Graz; the staging of Elfriede Jelinek’s Über Tiere Zürich 2007) members of the audience move freely around within the space, always having the possibility to closely approach the performers and each other. Because over time the primacy of the visual in stage dance had irritated me enormously, I developed my choreographic work towards formats that could exploit the close physical proximity to the audience. The content focus of my artistic work is the status of sexuality and the changes of discourse on sexuality in social frameworks, with the main work Maybe the way you made love twenty years ago is the answer? (2014 festival steirischer herbst and Tanzquartier Wien). As a follow-up I conceived the Meet series (2018 Tanzquartier Wien and ImPulsTanz Vienna festival) to take the themes that were presented there - the somatic urge, the overwhelming, deep, full, broad and scary aspects of sexuality combined with an evaluation of the risks of imposition and transgression – and transfer them into a direct situational experience.
The Meet series
Meet is made up as a performative laboratory-like installation for a maximum of twelve participants to converge together with me in the “red salon,” a space-within-a-space in the theatre. Essentially, I see Meet as an opportunity for the participants to overcome inhibitions within the safe space of the theatre. Starting out provocatively by being naked myself I welcome the participants in the space. Over the course of the next fifty minutes I try to integrate the audience as co-participants in an experimental performance which neither seeks to exhibit them nor to coerce them into any specific actions.
Regarding the historical lineage of close encounter performances I found my path in reciprocity: I neither wanted to exclusively objectify myself for the audience as for example Yoko Ono did in Cut Piece, nor did I want to claim the power to transcend boundaries with the audience for the performer alone as Jack Smith did in his performance work in the 1960s or as Ann Liv Young does today. Instead, my aim in Meet was to create an experiential space that is equally open to all, in all directions.
In the year before the Meet series I developed a performance statement on site for the exhibition „Feminist Avantgarde of the 1970s” in the museum of modern art in Vienna. One part of it was myself performing a small piece as homage to Barbara Smith’s Feed Me (1973). I was sitting naked on a bed in a small cabin, people could visit me one at a time for personal exchange whatsoever. Out of sixty visitors only one man asked if he was allowed to touch me. This correlation surprised me, the experience was one more strand for the development of the Meet series, in which I wanted to offer the participants the possibility to dare to do something.
Fundamentally, I approach my performances on sexuality through speaking of my own desires and sexual behaviour, not because I feel the earth revolves around them but because I consider this an effective way to empower my audience to let down its guard and allow itself to be vulnerable. My experience reflects that of a heterosexual woman coming of age in the 1970ies, yet the perspective is not exclusively heterosexual.
I‘ve always been fascinated by intimacy between strangers. With Meet I wanted to find out how strangers would encounter each other in a focused, performative context, in an open experimental situation in which all the participants may attempt interactions with each other that might not be so easily possible in everyday life. In this kind of laboratory situation the group dynamics play a major role in providing the temperature, something I could not influence beforehand. My own role was rather that of a catalyst responsible for creating an atmosphere congruent with (good) sex: an atmosphere oscillating between being in control and losing control, where people can feel safe without knowing what would happen next. Twelve participants as the size of the gathering was to ensure that there would automatically be a certain physical intimacy within the small salon and that on the other hand there would be enough actors and spectators for encounters and scenic actions and that these roles could be varied repeatedly throughout the duration of the performance.
Meet premiered in the spring of 2018, after the launch of #MeToo but before the Covid pandemic. The potential for intimate physical connections was written into the concept as was the possibility to refuse such contact if one chose. Because the project happened prior to Covid the inherent necessary protective measures were not yet relevant. The laboratory offered a place where issues around consent could be safely investigated and practiced.
Set-design and warm-up
Three reddish-brown wooden walls and two red fabric walls with two entrances facing each other form the Meet salon. The pentagonal space is furnished with armchairs, a mattress on the floor, a sofa, stools, a rolled-up carpet, a lamp, a small table upon which there are tools and a little box containing condoms (which is not evident from the box’s exterior), a CD player, and pieces of clothing that lie scattered around. Before the visitors enter the salon, they are given a short introduction. A colleague, an experienced performer, meets each group outside the entrance to the theatre. He collects all their mobile phones and cloakroom items, promises to look after these possessions. He explains the following rules for the salon: we will not address each other by name, no one is obliged to do anything, and if anyone says no, that is always respected. That is the short contract.
For a few minutes he leads them in a meditation accompanied by music. The visitors are invited to join by either lying or sitting down, to close their eyes, and imagine erotic experiences and fantasies. Alternating between the two entrances, the people are then individually led into the space. I, myself, am sitting there naked, already present in the room. There is no script, not even a standard starting situation. I try to quickly gain a general sense of who these people are, if they’re shy or outgoing, confident, nervous or adventurous? Every day I met five groups in succession, thirty in all.
Program announcement
“Inspired by the experimental film maker and universal artist Peter Kubelka’s observation that once something has become outdated within society, it migrates to a territory of its own - when people no longer had time to cook for themselves, food preparation evolved into haute cuisine; when people no longer had to perform manual labour, physical exertion became exercise – I will provide a refuge in the theatre for the erotic encounters that are increasingly vanishing from our everyday co-existence. In an intimate setting with just a few members of the audience each time, I will construct erotic, magical or sexual moments of encounter. Meet zooms in on intimate relationships, to the places where emotion and daring, need and impulse, embarrassment and confidence establish an erotic aura.”
For the last ten years or so I had noticed a change in the relationship between liberties and regularities when it comes to encounters in public space and with the status of the erotic and sexuality itself. How do people deal with these changes? Do they adapt? Or do they experience contradictions? Do they unsettle them? what would happen if they followed their impulses? How do young people see the field of sexuality compared to my generation? Questions like these built the humus of the Meet laboratory.
The sessions
I call the Meet performances ‘sessions’ in a dual sense: they begin with everyone seated and the performances are also wholly improvised. In the beginning of the sessions I would occasionally insert my naked body between two people, or I would use the items of clothing that were lying around to dress or undress, put on a T-shirt but leave my lower body exposed, sit on someone’s lap. Sometimes I would sniff or smell the visitors and have someone bite my neck. This was to warm them up. But the most exciting and fascinating scenes emerged from the questions, wishes and desires of the participants themselves.
There are many variables that contribute to the temperature of the room; it is a mixture of directly articulated desires, subliminal unspoken yearnings, confessed fears and anxieties and self-aware stories. The concentration of triggered imaginations of all those present also plays a role in the atmosphere particular to each group. In some groups the vibe was inspired and sexy, in others agitated and nervous, while in others reserved or even tense and still in quite a few groups it was relaxed and good-humoured.
In some of the sessions a narrative developed that connected the participants beyond the actual performance. In one group we reconstructed one woman’s fantasy of coming out of the shower wet and being welcomed onto the mattress by her girlfriend. The ‘lead’ actress demonstrated pre-orgasmic movements of her body, her partner in play was yielding to her action. We followed this by re-enacting a fantasy of voyeurism set in a disco that had been put forward by a young man. The scenes took shape playfully and nimbly, the members of this group were particularly responsive to each other. A woman who was part of this session posted on Twitter afterwards that all the participants, who had not known each other beforehand, went for a drink together and continued their conversation about sex and intimacy and asked each other: ’Would you have liked to have gone further? Where does your fantasy come from?’ According to her, it was the unconditionally safe space that had facilitated this playful and unforced atmosphere.
In another session the task was to compose fictional dating scenarios between an American student, whose girlfriend was also in the room, and a young woman. Getting to know each other, changing location, what happens next, do they go to his place, and what then? The student played himself as a highly reserved character who wouldn’t dare undertake any action. Because another man in the group alerted him to the fact that while he does not have to jump on the girl, but has to do something for sure, a discussion developed about the right moment to take action, appropriateness, and the fear of rejection. I appreciated how the discussion developed out of the action, or rather how the non-action demanded an exchange between the participants. A few days later on the subway I happened to meet the student and his girlfriend and learned that right after the session the couple had gone to a club together with the young woman with whom he had performed the dating scene and that they had an intense discussion about their experience in the session which they labeled as mixture between psycho-drama and theatre.
Emergent desire
One participant felt pressured by the scenario of Meet and put this into words (although not in the performance itself but a few days later in a review). In real-life encounters, he wrote, he wanted to submit to the contingency of events, to be entirely accepting of chance meetings, whereas here he had to react within a certain setting, with rules and with the limits of shame that needed to be overcome in order for something to happen. It reminded him a little of the problem of the single people in Yorgos Lanthimos’s satirical film The Lobster who were under pressure to find a partner so that they are not turned into animals. Even though Meet was never about the normative selection of a partner, I find The Lobster a suitable point of reference. Making encounters happen in a performative setting does indeed require a certain pressure to activate one’s own ‘animal within” in order to be able to act at all.
Sometimes the animal revealed itself. I asked a young woman who described herself as shy to take my place on the mattress. She agreed, however, she didn’t simply lie down. Instead, she deliberately molded herself in a position as a body that had been cast onto the bed. She then described her basic masturbation fantasy: She is at a party hosted by her parents’ friends. Worn out from the party she lies down on the hosts’ bed. Sometimes the host comes and joins her, sometimes it is someone else; this varies. In her reclining position, I called her (for myself) ‘the deer,’ a touching image of emergent desire. Then something happened that I had not anticipated. A young man admitted that by seeing her lying there a fantasy hit him and he skilfully slid off his stool onto the mattress beside her and rolled around with her, who went along with this while playfully resisting. Or was the action harassment within the performative context? If so, the woman would have stopped it, as the Meet contract had foreseen.
Multiple desires
A recurrent motif in Meet was the experience of desire that is not directed exclusively at a single person (whereby I assume that the advance information about the performance primarily appealed to people who enjoy experimentation, though not only such people). As I myself would describe it: to be desired by two people at the same time is an explosive chemical combination. This kind of charged atmosphere was depicted in the sessions in different compositions and increasing degrees of reality. At first hypothetically, then based on relevant stories from the participants, and finally actually carried out.
A mutual game of attraction between a female tourist (who had deliberately chosen the Meet performance from the city’s cultural program) with two gay co-performers developed into a triangle of desire made up of glances and minimal, accidental, breezy touches, similar to the legendary ‘Römerquelle belebt die Sinne’ ads from the 1980s. For the gay men, heterosexuality is obviously not the norm, but within the context of Meet they could freely flirt with other kinds of eroticism and intimacy. This is a good example of how I wished and expected Meet to unfold: an effervescent atmosphere between strangers beyond desire patterns.
The day after a heterosexual couple tell their group that attending the Meet performance is a surprise birthday present from him to her. Again, a woman in her fifties (in general the more mature women are conspicuously forthright when it comes to their sexual experiences) tells of her amorous adventures with and without her husband. The combination of the surprise birthday present and this lively role model talking openly about eroticism leads the group to suggest that the woman in the couple might like to choose one of the men present to act out the situation of a threesome. She chooses a cool-seeming and notably good-looking man. This time we are not left with fictionality or confessions alone. She and the man she has chosen both kneel facing each other, her boyfriend embraces her from behind while she kisses the man she has chosen, properly and for a long time. While I am watching, I hope that the two of them do not push her boyfriend’s exasperation too far because he obviously isn’t accepting it all with a smile as he appeared to do at first. In any case, he is holding on to his girlfriend very, very tightly.
All these episodes took place with participants unknown to each other in a spontaneous atmosphere of willingness to exchange. The opposite – strict refusal to exchange – happened only once: with a group of exclusively heterosexual couples.
Gender and audience composition
What functioned as the centre of the room, the mattress, was often used as a stage, as in the situation of the threesome outlined above. However, sometimes the mattress seemed to be a place of refuge where people could flock together closely. Over time, I noticed certain behavorial trends which happened to coincide with gender. This was evident by the way individuals chose their seats: men laid claim to the comfortable and spacious seats without hesitation, while the women crouched on stools or on the mattress on the floor. It was also only men who remained standing by the wall and would move no further for the entire performance, thereby blocking an entrance with their body language and energy.
Despite their initial reservations or even fears, most of the participants could be persuaded to interact with each other regardless of differences in language, age, or social backgrounds. I mention this because the younger (under 35) audience at Tanzquartier Wien (where the first series of Meet took place in April 2018) is its own bubble of people with a specific interest in contemporary dance. The ImPulsTanz festival (which presented the second series of Meet in the summer of 2018) generally has a broader audience base. In one session, a typical Viennese man, who would most likely never otherwise end up in a contemporary dance performance and who understands absolutely no English, met a South American biologist who happened to be staying in Vienna with his wife and daughter and spoke broken English, plus an eastern European student, plus a number of local dancers. The scientist’s contributions dealt with hypotheses about sexuality in the animal kingdom and merit discussion, which was tricky due to the language differences, but somehow interaction through gaze, gestures and movement worked.
Point of transgression
A white man addresses a black woman who is sitting next to him. A non-politically-correct impulse shoots into his head. But because he imagines that she might not appreciate the action, he asks her for permission: would it be okay for him to touch her hair? She gives consent, yet confirms that to touch her hair without asking would definitely be transgressive, racist, and discriminatory. At that time, in the summer of 2018, this discourse of which the group got first hand instructions, was only just stretching its feelers out towards Austria.
An actor with whom I had previously worked and who is accustomed to more daring behavior in performative contexts is being consciously provocative: he surprises me by embracing me from behind and dragging me to the ground. The scene has a sexual yet violent touch. The room goes very quiet, the tension is palpable. In terms of ambivalent potential, I welcome the scene. Afterwards I realize I should have discussed the event with the participants (as we did with the scene above on racism): Did the participants have an urge to intervene? Or did they watch the scene purely as theatre goers? Did they trust that I would stop the embrace, if necessary?
Dramaturgies
When substantial differences collided it did not necessarily mean confrontation but sometimes a more subtle dramaturgy developed. I asked one group for suggestions about what should happen on the bed. A man answered that of course he wants to see a girl lying there, and in his view, those who said something more innocuous were being dishonest. A young woman (who of course did not want to be called a girl) volunteered. As a performative act she took off her socks, nothing more. That was the moment in which the different desires to shape events were reconciled and everyone in the room became noticeably more relaxed. Another man wished to see a woman of Asian appearance with long hair from behind, since there were two Chinese women in the room. Both were tired from the long flight and wanted to relax deeply. The whole group now participated in a sleep-in with everyone physically interlinked with each other. The scene played with all the energies in the room and integrated imaginary and physical needs, an event of para-sexual relevance so to say.
Generations
To watch how older men went about evaluating their own position within the group was something I found instructive. As stated above the Tanzquartier Wien audience is generally young. Cis-gendered white heteronormative men over sixty can be found rarely in the audience, because they feel almost being demonized by the others. In the Meet performances in ImPulsTanz I experienced a different scenario. First of all, more older men than I would have expected came to the performances. To my surprise, most of them were clearly cooperative, open and curious.
On one occasion, an obese man whose movements were consequently limited assured us both amusingly and credibly that he would have immediately occupied the bed earlier in life when he was still mobile, and he urged the younger ones to therefore represent him.
A man not older than fifty behaved so dominantly that I was worried he’ll ruin the entire performance. He sat on an armchair, four other men on the sofa opposite him. I didn’t even have to intervene, group dynamic took over. The men on the sofa consistently challenged his dominance, analysed his sexist remarks, and gradually left him without a leg to stand on.
One older woman advocated sex as the greatest thing there is, even and especially in old age. She acknowledged her sagging bosom, her belly and her varicose veins, and admited that no one had run away from her yet. The effect of this was very strong and authentic even though in retrospect it feels rather assertive. In another group a woman made precisely the opposite speech, saying how insecure her ageing had made her, because youthfulness is so engrained in society and especially for her as an actress. Here one young dancer reflected that she had initially held the view that age is an entirely irrelevant category, that ageing bodies are just as beautiful as young ones, but after the older actress’s remarks, she added thoughtfully that as a young dancer who is still universally admired, she probably is not in a position to know.
Because younger and older people intimately encountered each other in the Meet sessions, a rich and informative intergenerational exchange could take place. It was not only the old that learned from the young about the latest developments in theory of discourse, but the young also learned from the old about their life experiences.
Techniques and confessions
One secure reference point in the awkward territory of sexual experiences was the demonstration of acquired competence. In some sessions participants, primarily men, shared and demonstrated their knowledge of BDSM and bondage, which they had learned through courses. This was one way of demonstrating openness towards sexual topics, contributing physically, while at the same time not having to become too personal. One man demonstrated on a model (a young man who volunteered) how effective S&M relies on alternating surprisingly between hard blows and gentle stroking. This group consisted of ten men and two women. One of the women was irritated. It surprised her that these people were prepared to immediately enter something so violent even though they were strangers.
In another session knowledge from a course about erotic bondage was passed on. Removing the restraints had to be done with particular care. Here it became more personal, because some others could relate it to their own experiences.
However, when it had less to do with passing on sexual practices and technical knowledge and more with exchanging personal confessions a dynamic of depth and intimacy was established between people who were strangers. This happened when people discussed arousal, the lust for dominance, the thrill of surrender, the desire to be overpowered, and the joy of pain. The situations were also poignant when someone overcame their inhibitions and dared to show their needs by articulating desires which weren’t necessarily sexual which were then fulfilled by someone from the group, touching them on the hip in a specific way, an especially long hug with a stranger, dancing while pushed up against the wall, or lying entwined together on the mattress.
A woman held a lecture about how she was teaching her husband and her son to fold t-shirts correctly. A young woman picked up on this and showed us how to master the difficulty of folding a fitted sheet. When looked at more closely this was an eloquent act of sublimation.
‘Erotic Failure’ was the narrative element of the very last Meet session. This group was a homogenous one to the extent that they all liked to talk about themselves, were aware of an erotic charge through proximity, and knew how to use this atmosphere to produce an honest exchange. We heard stories of misunderstandings that thwarted the erotic adventures one was in search of. We talked about sexual frustration, when an attraction cannot lead to anything and how such frustration can be dealt with.
Magic moments
The spectrum of events that took place was incredible. What maybe makes the laboratory-like situation a bit diminished is the fact that the only person who can compare the sessions is myself. The visitors could experience situations that were dependent on their own willingness to contribute and to exchange, to the composition of each group and to my skill to pick up topics that were in the air and to integrate all participants in their own will. It might have heightened the value of the laboratory if I had scheduled an aftertalk after each session. On the other hand that might sometimes have ruined the single experience.
The Meet series for me is one step further on the path of performative formats that I believe are the future (or one of the futures) of the art of theatre. The mingling of questions of social relevance - in this case: Do I dare to do something in an encounter? How does a moment become magic? If somebody enters my space – and this is exactly what constitutes the performative quality of Meet – do I embrace the moment, am I welcoming or hostile? In the field of eroticism and the sexual, encounter is the first point at which moments can flourish that ‘ignite’ the participants in an unusual way. Moments that we later remember as: at that very moment something was decided.
