Article: Changing world, changing Mad House Helsinki

Mad House Helsinki is a venue for performance art in Helsinki. The house was awarded the annual national art prize at the end of 2020. The arguments stated that Mad House Helsinki has shown its specialty and proved it is necessary for contemporary and experimental performance art to have its own venue not only to make this art form visible but also to gather all its possible manifestations under the same roof. We talked about the history and the future of Mad House Helsinki with the house’s producer Annika Niskanen in the end of year 2020. We also ended up discussing what performance art actually is and what kind of audiences Mad House Helsinki has reached.

– I have worked with Mad House for only a year now but I have been following the story around Mad House for longer. Earlier I had been working with some productions that had visited Mad House and back in the days when I was working in Performance Center (Eskus ry) I also got to see what was happening in Mad House. Annika explains her history with Mad House Helsinki.

Mad House Helsinki was founded in 2014 by artists themselves. At that time Helsinki needed a venue where performance art could be seen. At first, the program of Mad House was season-specific consisting of a few months each spring. Since the fall of 2019, Mad House has got its own space all year round in Teurastamo, Helsinki. 

– In a way, we have been living the fulfillment of our dreams with our own space. That is, of course, until the pandemic. From the beginning, we have wanted to get a concrete house with a consistent program for performance art. Now the program planning has been going on throughout the year and the main task now is to strengthen the position of performance art in the Finnish art field. We still want to support the artists by providing the much-needed venue. On top of this, we can try to create a wider understanding of what performance art is.

Supporting the artists under the pandemic

The Covid Pandemic has challenged the entire field of performing arts including even the small venues that Mad House represents. After the spring of 2020, at the beginning of June, Mad House opened its doors for an audience of 20 people.

– Our first goal was to secure the salaries for the artists we had agreed on for the performances. We did not want to cancel any productions or use the force majeure -clause that we have in our contracts. However, we also have had to admit that we cannot postpone everything forever. It is tiring, both for us and the artists, to work on the productions without an ending point in sight. Now, a year after when the pandemic started, we are forced to make some tough decisions and to cancel some productions.

– One example is our BAD HOUSE-festival that has partly been my site to work on. It was an international part of Mad House’s program that was supposed to be a curated festival arranged annually in April. We had to postpone the festival from spring 2020 and now it seems we won’t be able to proceed with it this year either. We have thought about these virtual performances as well as the other forms but I have to admit streaming the performance rarely works. The performance has to be made specifically for streaming so that it would be reasonable to view it that way. And of course, there is a big question of who finds streamed performances enjoyable at all. 

Annika is responsible for Mad House’s marketing and audience work. She says that especially the pandemic has had a miserable effect on marketing as all the time and energy goes to communicating the safety-issues, the timetable changes, etc. At the moment there is not very much to communicate and the time is spent re-organizing the whole activity in Mad House.

– When we had our program running temporarily in the fall I noticed that it kind of eats away the performance when we needed to communicate so much about safety: “We have hand sanitizer on the location and the wearing the mask is required – please come, it will be safe!”

The capacity of Mad House is small-ish even under normal conditions. The size of the audience is approximately 40 people. The venue has its own established audience and the performances usually sold out quickly.

– A typical audience member is approximately a 35-year-old person who has good cultural capital, understands the cultural field, and dares to try out different things. Sometimes we receive inquiries from the potential visitors asking “if the performance is suitable for them”. Once, a person who had reserved a ticket was wondering if they would understand anything about the performance or if there would be naked people in the performance. Then I made the decision to clearly communicate what will happen: “There will be poetry and everyone has clothes on, no worries!” I said and welcomed them in. 

– These kinds of wonders may seem funny for the people familiar with art in general. But they are still real obstacles that people have when they try to approach performance arts. I think it is our job in the production to guide people gently towards this as it may be something that is uncomfortable and new for different audiences.

The improvement in accessibility has been one of the most important values and goals for Mad House. Inside the organization, it has been a continuous topic to keep discussing the ways not to underestimate the audience. Sometimes it can be a rather easy solution to imagine only a small segment of the art community will understand the performance art. This is the prejudice of which Mad House has wanted to abolish. However, the small capacity of the venue and short seasons have made challenges in reaching and gaining new audiences.

– First of all, we have a lot of programs in English but our challenge is to find non-Finnish-speaking audiences. Often we also notice our audience is very young and able. I think this is a big challenge for our marketing as well. How can we talk about performance art in a way that it won’t seem too complicated or “academic” for instance? At the same time, we want to keep Mad House’s original idea of being a laboratory, meaning our venue is literally a platform for experimental arts. We do not have so many of those in Finland.

Performance art is confusing on purpose

We ended up discussing audience work with Annika. Audience work is usually executed in larger institutions to educate the people on how to approach the art. The artists and groups working with performance arts are usually quite alone with their communication and marketing matters as the productions usually visit the bigger institutions or they are performed completely outside of the institutions.

– The special character of performance art is that it comments on the world around it in a specific manner and it has an ongoing dialogue with the world, Annika explains. 

– We see performance art as an art form that is heartfeltly present in the world and opens up discussions. The performances also challenge the audience and pose questions. They invite the viewer to ponder current events. That is why we also think Mad House is not only an experimental laboratory for the performer but for the audience member as well. This of course challenges marketing and communication. The performances often want to have a dialogue with the viewer and suggest new positions for them in relation to the performance. That makes the viewer’s role more active and self-questioning – why am I present in the performance like this? 

Performance art can be a difficult or even misleading as a term. In their marketing and communication, Mad House tries to emphasize the clear difference between theatre and performance art. Annika points out that sometimes it’s hard for people to let go of their preconceptions that the space and venue create. People might be more receptive to performance art when they are experiencing it in museums and galleries for example. It seems that in such surroundings it’s more understandable that the performance is something different than theatre and there is a lesser need for it to be mimetic. 

– I have to admit that we still need to discuss the “understanding of performance art” when we think about our audience in Mad House even though the topic is corny inside the art scene. The viewer might have an experience that they do not understand the work and they think they are the only ones with this feeling. They might get stuck with their feelings and miss out on the whole performance as they are trying to deal with it. That is why I always encourage everyone to make peace with the difficulties in understanding. The performance can be viewed differently – for example, it can be tiresome, slow, nerve-wracking, subtle, absurd. It’s good to remind oneself that I can think about my own thoughts here and I don’t need to understand. It does not mean one has failed if they do not understand.

– This lack of understanding is something we can acknowledge when we communicate about the performances and what performance art actually is. We cannot market the performances in the same way as theatre pieces. In theatre, we usually know the result already before the working group has started to rehearse. The performance art pieces are born in the process and oftentimes the result cannot be articulated before the premiere. I have figured out that when we market performance art we need different ways to approach the performances and the viewer has to accept that a lot of things are “open”. 

In her work, Annika has noticed that the marketing person has a lot of power over the performance as they are the ones who communicate about the performances outwards. Of course, there are working groups that are interested in working on the catalog texts but this seldom happens.

– Some artists process their work through writing the texts but more often it is my job to do it. In the communication, I try rather to talk about the working group and especially about their motives around the performance. 

Towards something new?

The rental contract on Mad House’s venue in Teurastamo will expire by the end of 2021. During the beginning of this year, Mad House has hosted a virtual “Think Tank” -events where the reality of the people working with the performance art field during the pandemic has been discussed. Now Mad House has started to contemplate what will happen for the field in the future. Again, Mad House has wanted to include the artists themselves in the discussion – what is needed in times like these? 

– Our small venue has made it possible to be flexible with the productions that visit us. As we producers are concretely present near to the working group, we can easily react if something needs to be changed or if the working group wants to experiment with something unplanned. If we had our office somewhere further, like on another floor, we would lose this possibility to be open for changes. Flexibility is an important value for us. If it starts to bother us or we start to feel that it’s tiresome to respond to these changes, then we know we’re going in the wrong direction. 

– However, the advantages of having an intimate venue can also be detrimental and restrictive to our overall goal of inclusiveness. There is always someone or some group of people that will be left out and the venue might seem hard to approach or something that only serves a small segment of “insiders”. That is why we decided to open our doors during the summer of 2021 and have planned a program that will take place outside in the yard of Teurastamo. 

We return to discuss the accessibility and the social aspect of performance art. Annika ponders if it would be reasonable for the performance art field to try to find partners to have a dialogue with outside of its own bubble.

– Maybe instead of audience work we should talk about community work or regional work? Could performance art and art and culture, in general, take part in the discussions of city planning and the cityscape?

– We should be sitting in those tables and over all it would be good if the art was more present in variety of places also in the form of concrete performances. Also the discussion should be carried out from the critique to other texts and from cultural sections and magazines to different arenas. Not only because the art field would need to have dialogue outside of itself but primarily because the world needs art.

Text & translation: Elina Tervonen
Proofreading: Gabrielle Vaara
Photo: Saara Autere