Letter to the time and space sharer

Written By Lia Haraki

Dearest audience member or rather : Dearest time and space sharer,

Thank you for accepting my invitations throughout the years into the performance frames I created and for letting yourself be guided to experience your own world being stimulated through mine. My invitations to you would often call you to experience the several works through different levels of proximity each time, which also defined the way I would name you. 

For example, you would often be invited to witness a work while holding a very clear physical distance from it, either seated in an auditorium chair or standing in a space. I would call you an audience member.

Other times I would ask you to be closer to the work as if I was sharing amongst friends in a friendly environment. During these cases, you would be part of the work as an active witness, like friends sharing stories around a fireplace.

The most engaging role you were asked to take on, nevertheless, would be the times that you were invited to come so near the work that we would actually switch places; you would literally become the performer and I the witness of your becoming. An active spectator or participant. With these specific participatory pieces, you would trust me and permit me to guide you in experiencing the work through your own vessel, your own body. You would allow yourself to touch and be touched, smell and be smelled, see and be seen, hear and be heard, and initiate actions and make choices that would often determine the development of the piece.

Thinking back, these kinds of participatory pieces could not have existed without your presence and active participation, and that is why in some of my works I dare say you are a co-author or a co-experiencer or even a co-maker. Your aliveness was necessary for the work to come to life. Your presence was the work’s activation.

Overall, thinking back on our several kinds of relationships, I feel you are also something more than your presence; you are the driving force for making the pieces in the first place. Knowing that your senses will eventually be the receivers of my works, imagining how the piece will feel in your body, makes you, an essential part of the concept of creation. An important collaborator.

I sincerely thank you.

Lia

Lia Haraki

Lia Haraki is an interdisciplinary performer, maker and practitioner working across performance, devised theatre, choreography, song, spoken word and what she calls repetitive poetry. As a creator, she is occupied with issues related to identity, community and value and she beleives in the power of art as a medium that can trigger shifts in perception towards a fairer world.

Lia usually works with the moving and sounding qualities of the human body, in order to speak about its sociopolitical position, by challenging notions of normality associated to it. Beginning from self-sarcasm and working with satire, she enjoys finding performative ways to crack socially constructed narratives and reveal the illusion we have of them as ‘real’. In her pieces vulnerability and empathy are celebrated as human super powers and act as threads that connect the performer with the audience.

Her work in general takes the shape of staged works, site-specific pieces, one on one experiences, sound installations, standup shows, music bands and performances in shops.

At the same time she is proud to have developed several practices through the collaborative artistic research of the past twenty years in the forms of workshops, coaching and artists’ mentoring. In general she considers inspiring others and triggering creativity awakenings especially in younger artists is her most sacred of services !

https://www.liaharaki.com/
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