Every Action Matters: Alexander Devriendt on Participation and Politics
Founded in 1994 in Ghent, the Flemish theater company Ontroerend Goed (a pun that roughly translates as “Feel Estate”) produces self-devised work grounded in the here and now, inviting audiences to participate as well as observe. Known for works that explore the relationships between individuals and societies, Ontroerend Goed first staged Fight Night, a work that unfolds as a series of voting rounds done by the audience, in 2013.
This year, they are remounting Fight Night,, because, as they have put it, “A decade later, we and the world have changed.” In the run-up to the presentation of Fight Night, at the Walker, Ontroerend Goed’s artistic director, Alexander Devriendt, sat down with Philip Bither, McGuire Director and Senior Curator, Performing Arts, to discuss theater, politics, and participation.
Philip Bither
Why did you and the company feel it was important to remount Fight Night and tour it right now? Does it have special significance to tour it right now in the USA?
Alexander Devriendt
It’s a huge year on so many different levels. You had the European election, French election, British election, Dutch election, and the Belgian election. Then, of course, the biggest one, the US election that will decide the course of the world for years and years. A geologist made this black humor joke, “Maybe this election will be visible in the ground a thousand years later.” It’s a joke, but it’s also true. We are deciding the course of nations.
To be honest, maybe I’m naive, but I was thinking that by remounting this work we might make a couple of people care about their votes. That matters. Especially in America, where sometimes a thousand votes can swing the election. Take the election where Al Gore lost by so few votes. It is hallucinatory how a couple of people can decide the course of the vote.
Naively we decided to remount the show, because it felt still relevant. The work was made pre-Trump, and a lot of things in the world have changed since Trump. He is a metaphor for a lot of things, but he’s also a real entity. It felt like a moment to restage or revisit this work and these topics.
More recently, I was interested in the question of how you can trust the people next to you. Fight Night felt like the right project to explore those questions through. Trust your neighbor. You don’t have to agree with them. We don’t have to battle each other.
PB
It is just a few weeks before this consequential election. What would you say to people who are consumed by it and may feel this is not the time to enjoy theater?
AD
Elections are the only thing they’re talking about on every daily show and program. There seems to be no room for anything else. As artists, we can help shift this. To put things into perspective. With elections every four years, it can feel like it never stops. It is time-consuming and mind-consuming. People get fed up with it. As an artist, you can provide escapism. You can say, “Let’s go out and do something else. Be free of all this.”
I like to be in between. You can look at something like elections as a game show. It is an invitation to look at the topic from a different perspective. It’s an invitation to look beyond how you’ve been seeing it up to now. For instance, Fight Night is not about issues. It’s not about what you think about education or gun ownership. Fight Night is about giving you another perspective, out-of-the-box thinking or looking at it from a different angle in order to make sense of it.
PB
When I saw Fight Night for the first time, almost a decade ago, what seemed so shocking was how quickly my snap judgments, based on the barest surface things, came into play. The other thing that struck me was how people tended to be so tribal, myself included. With Fight Night are you aiming to have people reflect on how each of us thinks we are on the right side of things?
AD
Yes. For me, I don’t even question that anymore. For instance, when Obama was elected president for the first time, I cried. Now, I ask myself, “Why did I care?” What kind of projections did I place on that person? How much do you idolize or reject a figure? I’m not saying you should look at it from the right or the left.
There is a beauty that you can be represented by somebody who you see yourself in. What is the essence of that? How much people’s choices when voting is based on just liking the person, and how much should be about issues? Fight Night doesn’t give you a clear answer. It is an exercise in what guides you.
PB
The other thing that strikes me about the experience of seeing Fight Night is witnessing how easily people vote against their interests. What’s your sense of why people vote against their interests?
AD
I’m not a political artist, I’m a theater maker. If had answers, I wouldn’t have made this work. However, there are things that come up in Fight Night The idea of an underdog and the idea of a winner, for instance. What does it even mean when somebody says, “Trump is the underdog,” or “Harris won the debate?”
Who is winning something like a debate is a concept that everybody just accepts. It’s meaningless. How can you win a debate? If you had points in a debate, then you could win it. It would be a sport or a game. A debate should be about listening to people talk about their politics and what they will do.
Today, it is so much about winning and about dreams. If Trump can make it from rags to riches, then I can too. He didn’t come from rags to riches, but he sells that image. Obama, as a symbol, projected that a person of color can finally become a president. The old limits were gone.
I want to understand what does the person stand for and how much do I have to accept that? The fallacy of democracy is in our emotions. The more one can realize how emotions are used in elections, the more each of us can decide what we want to do, who we want to vote for, instead of going off my emotions, which is the foundation of rallies.
It is also very different in Belgium. We also have a very difficult system, but the good thing about us is that, for now, it’s obligatory to vote.
PB
What happens if you don’t vote?
AD
You get a fine.
PB
Wow. America’s percentages are pretty dismal. This year’s election is expected to be a very high turnout rate for voting, but it’ll be barely 50 percent of the population.
AD
That is the thing. When Trump won the election, he hadn’t won by 51 percent of the country. He got voted in by 26 percent of the 50 percent that voted.
PB
America also has the Electoral College, where someone can lose the popular vote and still become president.
AD
In Belgium when you vote, even if you vote for even the far left or far right parties, your vote will be represented in government. There will be somebody who represents you. That is beautiful because your voice is there. However, the difficulties of finding compromises between four or six parties can be immense. You can feel, “Oh, what a mess. I want a powerful person to believe in and not always compromise.”
PB
That sense of forging alliances between parties, between philosophies, is built into the Fight Night. Right now, that doesn’t exist as much in the US, where it feels like we only have stark differences. Are you curious about how people who are used to the American system will see the work?
AD
In a way the show was made to see both systems. It goes from multiple candidates to just two. The round with five candidates is a bit more based on Flemish government, while the ones with two candidates is basically based on the debate system and is French or American. I watched more Romney and Obama debates and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump debates as inspiration for Fight Night than I watched my own government. My window is the theatrical nature of it all.
PB
There have been some changes in this iteration of Fight Night from the first version. Were those related to the political battle lines that now exist in our societies?
AD
No. When we were setting out to write, we realized that ideas of stolen elections, things being called fake, and of distrusting the system were already imbedded in the topic now. Instead, we looked a lot at the birth of democracy as an inspiration. The idea of somebody pretending to be “one of the people” is as old as the democratic system itself. You can find a Trump figure in ancient Greece, someone who is from a really high income but who pretended to be one of the worker class.
There were some things that changed. Originally, we started the show by having each audience member say if they were a man or a woman. Back then, we didn’t understand that is not a good way to divide an audience. Now the first question is, “Did you pay for your ticket or not?”
PB
I was curious about the structure of your company, Ontroerend Goed, that has been in existence for 20 years. Does everyone participate in the creation of the works?
AD
We try to see ourselves as a performance theater collective. What I like about it is, although I’m the artistic director, we take more a writers’ room approach. Everybody is throwing in ideas, and one person is responsible for distilling those ideas down in a final form. That’s a bit of my role. I have this bad metaphor where I’m the coffee filter. Everybody can throw in stuff and I distill it.
For example, the group is touring in America and my voice is not needed. It’s their shows, their calls, and their artistic decisions. If they need to change stuff, they do. This creates a sense of ownership that we try to share. We are collective and we try to make sure that everybody feels it’s their show, whether you’re the actor, producer, or the one who does finance. Some companies with an artistic director wait until that person makes a decision. We don’t work that way.
PB
Would you extend that sense of everyone having stake in it to the audience as well?
AD
Absolutely. We all have a stake in this.
PB
For years, you’ve been described as a leader in participatory theater. In certain circles, participatory theater has gotten kind of a bad name as it’s become more commercialized or just more surface oriented. Do you still feel that term is accurate in describing the company’s work?
AD
I’m just making theater. For me, theater is inherently interactive, and it just matters how you push that interaction. That is the beauty of theater. Theater is a horrible medium to reach lots of people. If I made movies, I would reach more people. But there is something in the here and now in theater that no other medium can achieve. Even when I watch stand-up comedians on Netflix, I will never laugh as hard as I will when I see that person live.
There is something beautiful about being physically there. It doesn’t have to be old-fashioned, and if you put that at the core of your work, theater can achieve something that no other medium can.
I remember having had a discussion with young students about the form of theater and how to change it. What came out of that conversation that stayed with me is if you question how theater should be, you can mess with it. You can change it. That can extend past theater. I think for some solutions we need to question what we are not questioning.
PB
It also conveniently sidesteps the censors in a certain way, because it is more about a process of thinking and being critically minded than it is about focusing on specific issues.
AD
Exactly. That is why we have been able to perform in Putin’s Russia. It looks like a game show, but no one is questioning democracy. Sometimes in the free world we ask, “What can theater even achieve? We reach so few people like that.” But theater and art are the first things that Putin tried to censor. There is something really paradoxical about not feeling the power, but the ones in power are afraid of its power. All the people we worked with in pre-Putin’s Russia are gone. Two people who wrote a play are now in prison. Why do some people work to ban books? Even if we don’t believe in the power of books, they certainly do.
When we first made Fight Night, the president of the European Union came to the show and gave us a standing ovation. He was like, “You decide.” He was really empowered, but I think a lot of us are empowered too. Whether I’m a high-ranking political leader or a young person going to a voting booth and making a decision. I do believe we have power. Of course, someone like Elon Musk has more power than most, which can make one feel like it doesn’t matter. But like I said earlier, a couple of thousand votes decide the course of a nation and the world. Every action matters. ▪︎
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