With TM, Belgium's Ontroerend Goed prompts audiences to question their fear of "the other"
The one-on-one online theatre piece slyly reframes conspiracy theorists and the “polarized world”
Interviewers from a mysterious organization named TM ask viewers, one-on-one, about their opinions.
The Cultch presents TM as part of its RE/PLAY online series, from February 2 to 13
EARLY IN PANDEMIC lockdown, Alexander Devriendt, the artistic director of one of Europe’s most renowned experimental theatre companies, felt a strong resistance to creating online performances.
His company, Belgium’s Ontroerend Goed, has made its name turning audience members into highly active players in its radically innovative works. In £￥€$ (Lies), tables of spectators traded on global markets with poker chips; in Fight Night, which visited The Cultch in 2016, the audience took part in an elaborate electronic voting system for five candidates vying to win “the game”.
“The problem is it didn't matter that people were watching it,” the amiable Devriendt tells Stir over Zoom, from his Ghent home, speaking of the streamed theatre he was watching. “I became so frustrated with so many Zoom shows. Then finally I thought, ‘There must be ways to make it two-way. And I want every theatre show to be that way! The strength of theatre is that your consequences, your questions, your laughter has an influence on the show. For me, theatre is a conversation.”
At the same time, Devriendt felt himself sucked into the negative news cycle about everything from the storming of the American Capitol Building to #MeToo and climate change.
“On the one hand I’m a news addict and I want to be a knowledgeable person who's up on the world, but I was also wary of my dependence on the news. It was always tricky,” he relates. “And in the pandemic it was my only source to the outside world. It started to feel like, ‘Wait a minute! This polarized world: how true is it?’
“All those anti-vaxxers, all those conspiracy theorists: it felt like I'm the only one left alive,” he adds. “I read more articles about how to talk to a conspiracy theorist than I had meetings with people that believe in conspiracy theories.”
The news cycle was built on negativity and fear. The moderate majority never got coverage, he suspected, and so our fears of the “other” were being overemphasized—especially when we couldn’t escape our homes, towns, or cities to see what was actually going on in the world. That idea still speaks directly to what’s going on right now in fifth-wave-pandemic Canada: amid all the headlines, just how many people do the truckers protesting in Ottawa represent, for instance? And how much do we need to fear them?
Concerns about the ways that negative news is shaping our world led to the building of Ontroerend Goed’s first online show, TM—a mostly one-on-one online experience that asks us to question the way we perceive the world.
The audience member is introduced to a vaguely cult-like organization named TM and then asked by an interviewer-actor to answer a series of personality-test-like questions to see if they might qualify for the group. If you’re like most, you’ll go into it with your defences up, likely right from your first read of TM’s motto: “We are many. We are global. We are TM.”
“This sort of negative-prejudice thing: I wanted to use it from the start,” reveals Devriendt, who took a bit of inspiration from Scientology and from HBO’s The Vow documentary series on NXIVM. “My view of these movements is wary. And I wanted to provoke right from the beginning that feeling that ‘This is not gonna be for me; I don't want to be part of this already’, to highlight this principle that we are not ready to trust ‘the other.’”
We’ll leave the rest of the unexpectedly fun and touching experience of TM to your surprise—but we can tell you that Ontroerend Goed pulls off what, in these bleak days, might qualify as a revolutionary act of theatre: it gives us hope and uplift.
What makes Devriendt most pleased, perhaps, is that in creating the show, he’s also built a kind of positive, world-changing little movement all its own. When the online production had its world premiere last year, it featured actors from as far away as Moscow, Brazil, and Singapore. Vancouver viewers who tune into the show here will meet some of that rotating roster of performers who play the intake interviewers; in addition, they may see others from the U.S. in the virtual “waiting room” before their interview, as The Cultch copresents this rendition with Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Richard Jordan Productions.
“So I guess I'm the cult leader,” Devriendt says with a laugh, “and I’m already starting this movement! And not for a bad thing!”
And so as negatively as the theatre innovator was feeling at the beginning of this mess, he now finds himself in a more positive frame of mind—and he’s quite possibly making others feel that way too.
“That is what art should do: break your world view and try to reach out,” Devriendt emphasizes. “My world view is more negative than reality and I think we’re sometimes afraid to accept that because we think it would make us too complacent.
“But I don't know if you need to be frightened to do something,” he continues. “I sometimes think it would feel more invigorated to feel like something is possible. I’m always thinking, ‘Do you always have to instigate a negative in order to have action?’” In true two-way-theatre fashion, he’ll be looking to you, dear viewer, for the answer.
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