What would Skomorokh do?! On humor and performance making

What would Skomorokh do?! is a two-year long experiment by Mean Time Between Failures performance art duo founded by Dash Che & Suvi Tuominen. The project approaches the problem and concept of humor in performance making through various perspectives and histories. It highlights East Slavic jesters, Skomorokhs, as its invisible protagonists and companions.

What would Skomorokh do?! is a two-year long experiment by Mean Time Between Failures performance art duo founded by Dash Che & Suvi Tuominen. The experiment weaves dance, performance art, clowning, folklore, heritage and performance studies as well as queer theory together in order to create a novel performance methodology called Skomorokh.

Skomorokh is an extinct performing arts profession, a mode of living and a way of critiquing the layers of society, politics and art for that matter. But who and what was Skomorokh? What happened to Skomorokhs? And why did we, as a performance art duo, want to foreground Skomorokh as an embodied method for contemporary performance making? 

Skomorokhs were East Slavic traveling entertainers whose appearance is dated all the way to the sixth century. Official sources nearly exclusively portray Smooch’s as men but we like to fiction an alternative history where Skomorokhs were genderqueers and other non-men people in-drag. Fictioning gender uncertainty makes it possible and exciting for us, two white AFAB¹ performers, to embrace Skomorokh as a contemporary performance artist.

We are attracted to Skomorokhs’ risky and non-negotiable character. Often they entered complex and even dangerous settings with commitment to both criticality and joy. For example, there are early mentions of three Slavs who confidently walked into an enemy military camp with lutes instead of weapons and started to perform. The Byzantine emperor was so impressed by their bravery that not only spared them from imprisonment but also welcomed them as guests. It seems that Skomorokhs carried a profound skill to improvise and perform themselves out of a tough spot². Yet, later in history Skomorokhs were harassed, imprisoned or even murdered for their performances.³

As performance artists we relate to Skomorokhs tension with authorities as well as their unclear and shapeshifting relationships with institutions. For instance, even though the early Orthodox church somewhat approved their activity, later Skomorokhs ridiculed the church and were feared and despised by it⁴. East Slavic jesters came from communities of paganism and many of their performances consisted of a mixture of unorthodox elements: absurd jokes, acrobatics, tricks with trained bears, uncanny sexually-explicit songs, unruly music and nudity⁵. Skomorokhs’ performances opened up the gender and class dynamics – mocking traditional family roles and structures and greed of the upper classes. The subjects that Skomorokhs chose for their performances both annoyed and threatened institutions of power.

Skomorokhs had a societal and cultural role that once assigned they could not abandon and had to carry it responsibly throughout their life. Skomorokhs were immersed in their communities and their troubles fully. By creating layered performance styles they were able to address matters that might have not been so obvious or stay hidden from the collective consciousness. These qualities of Skomorokhs inspired us and we wanted to create a certain analogy between our agency as performers and Skomorokhs. We believe that our duty is to carry this role of performance artists assigned to us responsibly and with passion.

Additionally, our ancestral and bodily histories stem from Eastern Europe. Dash grew up in post-Soviet Russia and Suvi’s pre-Second-World-War family roots voyage to East Slavs. Thus, we felt a closer connection to Skomorokh as an invisible protagonist who would guide our performance making journey.

When we began this experiment we asked a simple question: what would Skomorokh do? By asking this question we wanted to ground our performance practice and research as a part of deeper performing arts history. 

Our experiment thus far has led us to the concept, entity and problem of humor. Humor seemed to be one of the key methods for Skomorokhs to target multiple matters of society, politics and body with performance. 

Humor involves risk-taking, the ability to withstand one’s own ridiculousness, laughter and the possible awkward silence in the room. Humor can be threatening to some, and empowering to others. As performance makers based in Finland we felt urgent to address matters of performing with humor in a landscape that seemed to go into a direction of too much self-consciousness and seriousness. Nonetheless, humor is signaling through more and more in the Finnish performance art field and shows up, for example, in works by Karolina Kucia, Milla Jarko (Tiikeri), Onur Tayranoglu, Sara Grotenfelt, Jamie McDonald, Leik Silvestrini, and Raphael Beau.

On humor

Humor is rhythm. Humor is hard to trace. Humor is precarious. Humor is hard to repeat. Humor is contingent. Humor is heavy. Humor is a backdrop for a performance event. Humor is performative because it does something. It does not necessarily make someone laugh. Humor might make someone annoyed or want to leave the show. Humor is a peculiar thing and nearly impossible to choreograph. Especially, for a performance event that does not follow the legacy of humorous genres such as comedy. And even in comedy, at times humor evaporates leaving the stage dry before anything begins. 

Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič has been writing and lecturing extensively about comedy. In one of her interviews⁶ Zupančič notes that comedy flourishes in the times of crisis specifically referring to the emergence of comedy clubs in Ukraine after the Russian full military invasion in 2022. She states that comedy does not only bring a sense of relief or opposition to the hardship but rather it “keeps people alive as subjectivities” and prevents reducing them to victims or suffering subjects solely. In this sense joking about it carries a political power in it and laughter is the manifestation of this.

French thinker Henri Bergson has made extensive analysis of laughter and eventually brought forward that laughter is not something that can be conceptually tamed or categorized because it is in a sense a living organism. He noted that ‘’we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition… We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand.’’⁷ In other words, where laughter comes from remains a bit of a mystery.

In his book Queer Art of Failure⁸ Jack Halberstam resists seriousness by beginning the book with the quote of SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon character’s dialogue. Throughout the text he brings forth so-called low theory – a discursive paradigm that works with confusion, awkwardness, negativity and, in the end, failure. Thus, he presents the concept of failure as something that lies at the very core of queer existence. We see humor as a route that holds so much potential to fail that similar to queerness, it offers an alternative to normative and hegemonic systems. Humor can be a path to relate differently and on queer terms.

In her staged solo dance work Cutlass Spring (2019), the performer and choreographer Dana Michel works with everyday objects. She wanders through, rearranges and re-piles the objects at times enterinwordg the objecthood herself. Other times she subjects the objects to various queer-handlings. For example, she throws the objects across the stage, sticks them inside her mouth, breaks them or caresses them. The work deals with Michel’s sexuality while bringing forth the concoction of other complementary identities that the artist possesses. The work is uncanny, messy and violently playful as it travels through genres and registers. Michel’s “work relates improvisation, sculpture, hip-hop, comedy, film, dub and social commentary to create a centrifugal experience”, says in the description of the piece. Humor penetrates the piece throughout but is never obvious. In many ways the funninness of the work remains a mystery despite the elements that support its appearance.

We rely on humor in our multigenre conceptual-dance-performance-art making as something that frames our performance works. Humor allows us to touch on controversial and challenging subjects as well as enables us to take distance from the seriousness of our own art profession. 

However, our work does not strive to become a comedy even if we approach genres of performing that identify as such. But rather we want our work to become – something else.

Skomorokh methods: Welcoming and Layering

Over the last years we as a duet have been continuously arriving at humor. Humor is not something we consciously began to rehearse, but rather, it appeared here and there both in our solo and our collaborative works. One comment we received from an audience member was that we appear as clowns. Thus, humor was present all along.

This year we trained with a Finnish clown teacher Taina Mäki-Iso. From Taina we learned essential clowning tools such as breathing, brilliant stupidity, shiny eyes, connection with the audience and delay between action. We used some of these tools for our duet’s performance practice. 

For us, in a performance situation it must be made immediately clear that humor is present in the room: ok, this is how we are going to be in this space from now on. Usually in Mean Time Between Failures’ performance works we do this by welcoming the audience into the space and blurring the beginning of the performance. For example in our recent work DOWN BEAT we welcomed every visitor at the door of Yö Gallery exhibition space where the performance took place. We served chewing gum in shot glasses to everyone entering while engaging in small talk with them. The performance started casually, slowly transitioning toward the next phase.

The seriousness of an art situation must be deconstructed immediately for the audience. Thus we aim to welcome audience members with an intention that the space is also for collective enjoyment and laughter, and not to witness any groundbreaking virtuosity or smart posturing. We need to be ourselves, Suvi and Dash, in order to do this welcoming. Similar to Skomorokhs we are not acting to be someone else. 

This mode of welcoming the audience and blurring the beginning was also done by a Russian genderqueer stand-up comedian Sasha Dolgopolov. She, when performing in Helsinki, welcomed each audience member by looking them in the eyes and checking their tickets by the door. This gesture of welcoming could be seen as a possibility for an audience member to connect with her presence and body more intimately. After, when the performance space was full the artist entered the stage and started giving disclaimers about her horrible skills in crowd work and English language. The disclaimers created tension between the audience and the performer while unfolding both lingual power structures and social expectations. As an invitation to feel Sasha’s path in humor this blurry beginning enabled the audience to land into a space of comedy which often also took turns toward dark and conceptually complex corners.

After blurry beginnings and welcomings, the audience members are ready to follow the performer’s invitation into the realm of complete foolishness. The performer gives up any smart posturing to submit to the power of stupidity, remaining receptive and open to contingencies that unravel. 

A naked performer wears only a skirt made of one-dollar bills and has chained himself with an Italian sausage link to an ATM machine. The performer stands in front of Chase 24-hour Banking Center in midtown New York. This was the performance artist William Pope L. during his performance ATM Piece (1997). The work “was a quasi-protest against a law that forbids panhandling within ten feet of an ATM machine”⁹. Pope L. intended to reverse the roles of panhandlers and ATM services users. Every time a customer walked into the bank, the artist planned to tear a dollar bill off his skirt. He would hand it to them until the bills would run out and he would become fully naked. The performance was cut short as the bank security guard called the police on the black artist. This piece as many other performances and installations by Pope L. are highly conceptual and political yet accessible and funny. From the outside the work is absurd and silly, and one of the strong skills of the performer is the ability to be, withstand and embrace his own self-imposed ridiculousness as long as the performance demands.

In our work ORGANS Suvi and Dash are standing naked, only cheap Lidl shoes, neon-colored socks, fake golden chains and caps on them, their only prop – painted potatoes are piled by the gallery wall. They smile at each other shyly and bump into each other’s backs. They are slightly disoriented after doing a number of movement sequences. They try to see all of the audience members seated around the perimeter of the space at once, therefore constantly turning around as a unit. They stare at the audience to an eerie pre recorded soundtrack of a dialogue that goes: 

Suvi: Is your view clear? 
Dash: Clear as a daylight. Clear as these two white bodies shining in the sun. 
Suvi: You mean shining in this performance? 
Dash: Yes. 
Suvi: Ok. 
Dash: Yeah. 
Suvi: Ok.. wait what? 
Dash: hmm.mhm.
Suvi: Ok.
Dash: Yeah. 
Suvi: Ok.
Dash: Yeah. 
Suvi: Ok. 
Dash: Yeeeah…
Suvi: ok
Dash: Yeaaah…
Suvi: wait what? 

The monotonous and repetitive dialogue makes the performers linger in their ridiculousness. At the same time it creates a new layer which exposes the omnipresence and problem of whiteness altogether. 

Hito Steyerl’s media art work How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File from the year 2013 shows how humor can exist in an otherwise highly conceptual work. Humor is layered in the sound design of the video, in the rhythm of the voice over and in the visual landscapes following some of the tropes of the digital age. Steyerl creates a complex maze that touches upon questions around surveillance and world-making in the times of militarisation and mass production of images, a “regime of (mutual) self-control and visual self-disciplining”. She states that “hegemony is increasingly internalized, along with the pressure to conform and perform, as is the pressure to represent and be represented’’.¹⁰ For us, the film stays humorously troubling because its main aesthetic tool is funniness, even though it touches upon acute and politically concerning subjects. Or, like the Youtube uploader of the film writes, I don’t know shit about contemporary art, but I saw this at the Tate Modern and really liked it.

We reference all the aforementioned artists as our inspiration in finding a contemporary Skomorokh methodology for performance making. Through this we realize that enjoyment, funniness and laughter as critical performance components are not possible if the artists did not do the labor for the rhythm, conceptual layers and aesthetics of the work. 

In other words, humor alone does not save one if one does lazy performance art.

Skomorokh methods: Delays and Raptures

Another method that we have practiced in our performance making is to create pauses in between aestheticised actions and produce a delay in the performance. By doing so we can enable a total shift of register and lead the audience elsewhere. Still, this leading to elsewhere is also quite precarious. Where is the audience being led to?

The example of that shows up in FRACPTURING, our black box work which was done in collaboration with media artist Sini Henttu and sound designer Oula Rytkönen. The work explored dance in the time of screen cultures and was co-produced with Zodiak – Center for New Dance in Helsinki. After a non-stop intensive and flashy sequence that features loud sounds, huge bright screens with media content, and dancing bodies, all this theater magic suddenly stops. We turn on the house lights and expose ourselves in the bright industrial fluorescent light – red-faced and sweaty from dancing. Then we have a short, nearly absurd set of actions: we rearrange the stage, Suvi and Dash change their shirts and change them back again, Suvi spits on the shiny panels on the floor and cleans them with Dash’s shirt while making a joke. After, all four cast members freeze multiple times accompanied by Sini’s smartphone camera recording before the performance jumps back into the magical darkness of the black box. 

Staying in this slight delay defies the immediacy for the art work to find a closure or a smooth transition to the next thing. In other words by creating a delay we do something to the narrative of the work. Skomorokh appears in this delay. They are the negation of something that took place just a moment before with a full-on seriousness and then was thrown away.

During our Skomorokh experiments we have discussed the concepts of care and safer spaces, something which has undeniably been popularized as discursive tools in the Nordic cultural context. While these tools are crucial for space-making we want to continuously examine and revise them especially as performers, one of whom is a cis woman and another is a genderqueer. We challenge the aesthetic registers and frameworks these tools bring to performance-making by introducing harshness and risk back to performance situations. Revising can be practically done by an element of surprise which creates a rupture in a performance space. 

Our performance work ORGANS is an example of this. Toward the end of the show, when colored potatoes are already spilled on the floor, Dash starts listing the flag colors of different colonial nations. They continue with the listing for so long that it becomes absurdly boring. Then Suvi suddendly shouts into the space “just shut the fuck up!’’ Usually this scene is followed by hysterical laughter by a few audience members. The laughter also grasps us, the performers, which makes more audience members laugh. The space is relieved from tension into laughter and the laughter keeps finding bodies in the space that would join it. 

The risk that lies in these kinds of ruptures is that as performers we can not know the audience reactions beforehand. Still, we can choose to take these risks together. These risks can lead us into s(h)ituations where the thing we thought would cause laughter doesn’t, but some other unintended thing does. S(h)ituation is a concept that was used by our clown teacher Taina Mäki-Iso whenever a performer ended up in a tough spot. In these moments the performers have to ride the wave of listening to the momentum of laughter. We can trust that the laughter builds in the audience body much earlier than the funny thing arrives in the space. Afterwards we can take notes around who among the audience actually laughed and thus better understand the political dimensions and potential of the work.  

Skomorokh methods: Producing a performance 

As a duo we have been engaging in an ongoing discussion on Skomorokh ways of producing a performance. Things that have come up are: DIY and grassroots art production, alternative ways of collaborating with an institution, affordability and accessibility of an art production, the issues of economic class, and personal life experiences with resourcefulness, access and the lack of it. 

We both carry multiple self-organizing and self-production experiences. 

Dash comes from post-Soviet collapsed and dysfunctional institutions of Russia that required hustling and resourcefulness to survive. Later Dash acquired an experience of living as an undocumented DIY performance artist and activist in San Francisco, United States. Again they learned to pull resources together to produce art and collaborate without any institutional and financial stability and support. 

Suvi comes from the safety of a formerly social democratic state of Finland. She had the privilege to explore artistic paths from a young age. Still, instead of following conventional paths Suvi ended up doing bellydance as her profession in her early adulthood. Bellydance required a lot of resources to deal with various situations such as changing clothes in the kitchen of a Turkish restaurant, giving a push back to misogynistic bosses, handling tips shoveled directly into underwear, and bargaining over costume prices with vendors on the streets of Cairo. 

Currently, using our privileges as both Live Art and Performance Studies master’s program graduates and Kone funding recipients, we still lean onto our DIY resourcefulness and try to diversify our support structures. Skomorokh production method is also a DIY approach layered on top of institutional ways of support. We take initiative to co-produce or to latch onto the existing production models to improve or enhance it with our own methods. Even though the Nordic welfare state still (and maybe not for long) does an amazing job supporting art and culture compared to, for example, the United States or Russia, we are fully aware of the limitations and precariousness of funding and societal support. 

Thus, we try to think of performance production creatively. For example, during the Riga International Performance Festival we set a performative installation by the main entrance to Riga Circus – the venue of the festival. We were preparing material – painting potatoes for our show – and promoting the performance that was about to take place later that night. We greeted and welcomed anyone who walked in, talked to them about the festival and our work, and invited them to paint a potato or two. This action stemmed from a frustration in regards to the bad marketing of the festival.

Concluding thoughts and reflections

In this writing we have reflected on how humor can be thought as a choreographic, political, affectual and queer possibility that resides in the core of our performance making. We have also brought forth performance and performance production methods that possibly generate humor within a performance situation and reflected on how laughter can expose hierarchical or political tensions in the performance space. Contemporary performance making never exists outside its legacies and thus we also discussed various performance artists and their works that come from diverse socio-political contexts. 

In the near future we will continue to educate ourselves around humor, by attending humor related conceptual courses and movement workshops. We will continue digging into references from art history that resonate with our Skomorokh research. In addition we keep exploring, experimenting and finding ways to create more performance works.

To conclude our thinking around humor and Skomorokh as a performance method we bring forth a more poetic manifesto-style writing of what we consider contemporary Skomorokh could look like. 

Skomorokh breaks and ruptures.

Skomorokh is what brings the relief of laughter and heaviness of silence together.

Skomorokh tears apart genres, seriousness and statements, either conceptual or bodily ones. 

Contemporary Skomorokh is like this – a total believer one minute and a total disbeliever a minute after. 

Skomorokh is sincere.

Skomorokh exposes their vulnerability. 

Skomorokh is serious.

Skomorokh is a momentum. Skomorokh listens. Skomorokh breathes. Skomorokh has shiny eyes. Skomorokh listens. Skomorokh bursts. Skomorokh listens. A laughter. 

Skomorokh just makes shit no matter what, they like to be rewarded for it but also they could care less if they are not.

We are Skomorokhs. 

We do not keep our skills and jokes to ourselves. 

We entertain our audience. 

References

¹Assigned female at birth

²See for example article by Andrew W. White ‘’The Jester as Historian: On the Remarkable Career of the Russian Skomoroh in Russian Theatre Past and Present 2000 (1) 135-151.

³Persecution of a Skomorokh is portrayed, for example in the film Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky from the year 1966.

⁴Skomorokhs are also depicted in frescos from the early 11th century in the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, Ukraine. These frescos portray Skomorokhs with their instruments and surrounded by an audience

⁵See for example articles by Georgy Manaev ‘’The first musicians to get banned in Russia’’ in Russia Beyond online publication 2020 (2/22).

⁶The Subversive Spirit of Comedy: Alenka Zupančič in Conversation with Rosie Goldsmith https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzwkONbdlFA&t=1253s

⁷Laughter is Vital: article about Henri Bergsons philosophy on laughter https://aeon.co/essays/for-henri-bergson-laughter-is-what-keeps-us-elastic-and-free

⁸Jack Halberstam. Queer Art of Failure Duke University Press 2011.

⁹William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America. Mit Press 2002.

¹⁰https://www.e-flux.com/film/384606/how-not-to-be-seen-a-fucking-didactic-educational-mov-file/

Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is a choreographic entity founded in the year 2019 by Dash Che and Suvi Tuominen. They have created performances for different dance and performance art institutions such as Zodiak – Center for New Dance, Tanzhaus Zürich residency, Contemporary Art Space Kutomo Turku, Santo Tirso museum of Contemporary Sculpture, and festivals such as New Performance Turku biennale, Riga Performance Art festival, MIR – performance festival Athens and Pas Si Fragile – performance festival Brussels. Between 2023-2025 MTBF works with the support of the Kone Foundation. MTBF works at the intersection of dance, performance art and conceptual art. MTBF creates works that bring humor, provocation and physicality together.

Both Suvi and Dash have graduated from the Live Art and Performance Studies from the University of the Arts Helsinki. Suvi also has a master’s degree in archaeology, a vocational degree in contemporary dance from North Karelia college Outokumpu and a long professional international practice in bellydancing. She did a 3-month exchange in choreography master’s program at the Danish National School of Performing Arts. Dash has a BA in both performance and social sciences studies from UC Berkeley. Additionally, they come from DIY queer activism experience from the United States and Russia. Dash completed a 6-month Outokumpu intensive professional dance program.