At the top of their game: Ontroerend Goed's Summit
A conversation about the Belgian experimental theatre company.
Because I was in London last week I wasn’t able to make it to Ghent to see Summit, the latest show from Ontroerend Goed, but my friend, the critic and dramaturg Duška Radosavljević was there and what follows is a conversation about the work of a company we’ve both followed closely over the years (though I still haven’t figured out how to correctly pronounce their name).
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Duška Radosavljević: Hey, Tasha, thank you for inviting me to talk about Ontroerend Goed’s new show Summit, however, I am facing a bit of a conundrum here as I actually signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement during the course of the show! We were told it was a ‘legally binding document’, but also that it was an ‘act of theatre’, and that all responsibility for our actions was our own.
The actors told us that in the process of making the show they consulted a judge about whether the fact we were in the theatre made any difference to the legal nature of the document, and the judge said: ‘That depends on what you call theatre. I can take any empty space and call it a stage. A man walks through this empty space while someone else watches him, and that’s all it takes for a theatrical act to take place’. As I take it this esteemed judge was only Peter Brook, I will proceed accordingly.
Natasha Tripney: In that case maybe I will open with something that was put to me by NT Gent, where Ontroerend Goed are currently resident artists. They suggested that Summit might be the most political play ever made by the company. Do you feel this to be the case?
Duška Radosavljević: That’s an interesting proposition. I would say the piece is less overtly political than I would have expected given the title - and it is certainly less political than Fight Night from 2012 - but it becomes political once you start thinking about it. I was there with a group of colleagues with whom I’m working on a research project on Dramaturgies of Democracy and we had the advantage of being able to peek behind the scenes and have a chat with Ontroerend Goed’s artistic director Alexander Devriendt and a couple of actors involved in making the piece. (I wrote a bit about this here). It seems the original intention was indeed a more overtly political work in the form of an assembly but the severity of global political events unfolding in the meantime appears to have brought into question everything around the agency of art and theatre and theatre audience itself under such circumstances. The result is a witty piece of metatheatre whose main political intervention is to prompt individual contemplation of issues concerning imagination, agency, resistance, belief, responsibility.
Natasha Tripney: One of the things I find most exciting about Ontroerend Goed is the way their work has mutated over the years, the way it constantly evolves. I first encountered their work via The Smile Off Your Face, their breakthrough show in which audience members were blindfolded, tied up and moved around a space in a wheelchair having words whispered in their ear and squares of chocolate placed on their tongue. It was an exercise in trust and intimacy that contained one of the most audacious reveal I’ve ever experienced – I still remember vividly the moment when the blindfold was finally lifted. While I’ve seen these techniques replicated since then (I was once accidentally walked into a door frame during another, far less careful and competent blindfold show), I don’t think I have ever seen them bettered.
Alongside A Game of You and Internal, it was part of Ontroerend Goed’s early Personal Trilogy. The latter show caused something of a commotion at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe, which is when we both saw/experienced it, right Duška? The scrabble for tickets was insane, with many people desperate to see the show for a second time. Designed for an audience of five, each attendee was assigned a partner, who they then went on a ‘date’ with during which they were plied with wine and asked personal questions about themselves. Often things went further. My date showed me some naked Polaroids of himself, the 2009 equivalent of a dick pic. Other people got flashed, if I remember rightly. The show concluded with a kind of sharing session in which the performers revealed all the intimacies and confessions that took place during the’ date’. Looking back it seems kind of ethically questionable and the emotional fallout from this show for some people was considerable, but it remains one of the more memorable experiences from my years of fringe-going and underlined how much the company was willing to push boundaries and expand/disrupt our ideas of what theatre could be.
This kind of formal invention is something I associate with the company and is something you could argue was present in even their less explosive shows, like Every Word Was Once An Animal, a piece which ostensibly tried to recapture a show that had been stalled by Covid, to imagine what might have been, and ended up capturing the stasis and boredom of lockdown in a way that was almost too accurate (there was a lot of footage of different living room windows).
Their most recent pieces Thanks for Being Here and Handle with Care were both about the communal aspect of theatregoing, about sharing a space with other people and the audience as an entity. Is Summit a continuation of this? Where does it sit in relation to their wider body of work?
Duška Radosavljević: While I was in Ghent, I found myself wanting to do a lot of framing and contextualising for my six companions most of whom had not seen Ontroerend Goed’s work before. You might be surprised to hear that at one point in our post-show discussion Alexander Devriendt, the director, said ‘I don’t like participatory theatre!’
I was confused by this remark especially given everything we know about the Personal Trilogy and the rest of their early work. Then he also explained their show Audience from 2011 which was prompted by this dislike of confrontational audience participation but which in Ontroerend Goed’s hands became a show about crowd behaviour. I happened to see Audience in Ghent where the audience was indeed a lot more friendly, but do you remember, that was the show in which in Edinburgh somebody threw a shoe at an actor, and somebody else threatened to sue them? (These two instances are incidentally referenced in Summit as reasons why we need to sign the NDA at the start.)
Alexander was trying to make the point that they were unprepared for the severity of the Edinburgh reaction to the fact that their show asked a random audience member (initially, before a plant was introduced) to open her legs for a camera in an act famously inspired at the time by outrageous customary provocativeness of stand up comedians. But then I thought it was also important to note to my companions that this was a show made in 2011, when the company was still very young, and well before the #Metoo movement emerged.
I reckon they grew up very quickly after that experience and their subsequent work - Sirens, Fight Night, LIES, Are We Not Drawn Onward To New Era, World Without Us - did so much to retrospectively justify in full the formal risks taken with the early work as a reflection of their deep dramaturgical consideration of each piece. They made this principle that the form and content in their work are inextricably determined by each other completely inimitable as you suggest above. So for example Internal, being a show, as they explained at the time, that was prompted by the question ‘How quickly can you establish a meaningful connection with a stranger?’ naturally had to have the form of a speed date. Are We Not Drawn Onward To New Era - a show that examines the civilisational contribution of humankind to climate crisis - ingeniously has the form of a palindrome: not only in its title which can be read both ways but actually in the structure of the performance itself where processes of construction and deconstruction (of the mise-en-scene) are also accompanied by contemplative exploration of intelligibility of human speech (the first half of the show is quite amazingly spoken backwards, the second forwards).
I think Ontroerend Goed’s work is ultimately characterised by this constant interest in self-reflexivity, and as of more recently, a certain sense of growing wisdom. Funeral in the aftermath of Covid - where we mindfully sing together and shake hands with each other possibly for the first time in years - was such a balm for the soul. Handle With Care - a show that comes from the question ‘how can we tour theatre more sustainably?’ and therefore comes in a box that can be posted to any theatre in the world for local audience to interact with, is another feat of emotional intelligence. And also Thanks for Being Here which you mentioned earlier is a completely new meditation on audience behaviour - where they crowdsource verbatim testimonies from each new lot of audience to build into the show - which shows very clearly just how far they have come since Audience in 2011.
Summit - which tackles the question ‘why does theatre still matter?’ - belongs to this new phase of wisdom in the company’s body of work, I think. But it also reflects a degree of honest helplessness of the theatre artists faced with the current state of the world. It is a deeply candid show at the end of the day, even though its immediate appearance is very witty throughout.
Natasha Tripney: I like your description of the way the company’s work has evolved over the years to reach this ‘new phase of wisdom.’ The thoughtfulness about form, ritual, and the nature of the connection between performer and audience was there from the beginning, if more sensitively expressed in their later work. Their 2023 show Funeral is arguably one of their more careful shows and yet it was one I personally had conflicted feelings about – I completely get why people found it intensely moving and also why it provoked reactions like this. Personally, I fell in the middle. I didn’t resent it, but I felt weirdly cold about a piece which attempted to create space for reflection and remembrance amid the fever dream of the fringe. Maybe it was because someone I was friendly with had recently passed away and I was trying to figure out where to put those feelings while watching four shows a day, or maybe part of me, somewhat perversely, misses the period when they were a little less wise, a little more willing to push things to the line and maybe stray over it. I guess I went in needing something from the show that it didn’t give me.
Aside from Funeral, I don’t think I’ve ever walked out of one of their shows without having some kind of intense reaction – whether it’s an admiration of their chutzpah or a sense of deep frustration. Either way, their work invariably sparks the kind of conversation about theatre I most enjoy having and I love that they (still) have the capacity to make people angry (a bunch of people walked out of Thanks for Being Here when I saw it and reading some of the old reviews of Teenage Riot has been fascinating, if only for a reminder of what online theatre talk looked like in 2010) as well as exhilarated, sometimes simultaneously.
Duška Radosavljević: It is interesting that the early phase of Ontroerend Goed’s work - let’s call it ‘Youth’ - was really defined by a) working with teenagers and b) exploring and redefining the basic conventions of theatre-making (I’m thinking here of The Smile Off Your Face which they made, as they told me at the time, in order to subvert every one of the basic conventions of the audience having to sit quietly in the theatre, watch throughout and then clap at the end; so they put us in wheelchairs, blindfolded us, and then sucked us out of the space at the most profoundly moving moment without any chance to applaud in the usual way). The characteristic punk sentiment you allude to - where they never leave you cold - really emerges from this phase too. But it is never punk for punk’s sake - there is always an element of reflection, self-reflection, and re-invention.
Then there was the phase of growing ‘Maturity’ in which they engage with worldly issues in such a way where their approach to form matures too - the punk ethos is no longer in the foreground, but they have fully integrated it and are still living and working according to it. I suppose what we have here is potentially a moment in a life of a theatre company that might be equivalent to a ‘Mid-Life Crisis’. We can see elements of wisdom on the horizon but they are never going to turn into patronising, boring, old gits - they are going to be wise in a completely authentic Ontroerend Goed way. They are trying to ensure this happens by constantly questioning themselves and submitting their own work to scrutiny too - keeping hold of old familiar names and faces among their collaborators, but also receiving younger and more diverse company members into their fold. In a post-show discussion we had with the company members, we initially talked to the actors without the director and they told us that in Handle with Care Alexander consciously tried to let go of all control in making that show in favour of the ensemble decision-making, which was then a prompt for wanting to make a show about theatre and democracy. They also talked about the significance of Alexander’s love of games and gaming for their way of working, which I think is interesting for understanding their overt concern with dramaturgy and dramaturgical reinvention.
I did not know there was a negative review of Funeral, thanks for bringing it to my attention. I suppose you can absolutely read that show the way Darker Neon read it too. I suspect it can happen when your expectations are overly shaped by what you imagine a show about grief might be. I expected to see a show in which Ontroerend Goed were dealing with post-Covid grief, so for me there was only an element of expecting to see an interesting new dramaturgical take on it. I bought it at the point when they made us shake hands with each other on the way in (every audience member with every other audience member) - an act that belongs in a funeral as a form of ritual but acquires a completely new meaning in a post-Covid moment.
Natasha Tripney: We’ve both seen a lot of their work over the years and have watched them grow as a company, which invariably frames how we approach a new OG show. But how did your companions who didn’t know their work respond to Summit?
Duška Radosavljević: Oh that’s an interesting question. I suppose it’s important to say that the group consisted mostly of dramaturgs! In a completely unplanned way, we divided into two groups on our way from the theatre back to the hotel. And interestingly, one group, who diligently went home straight after the show for an early night, seemed to reach quite a positive consensus about it mostly on the strength of the show’s overt dramaturgical considerations. The other group that I walked with after a quick drink at the bar was more caught up in the conversation about disappointed expectations. And in this conversation I found myself wanting to do a lot of retrospective dramaturgical framing. ‘But in this earlier show, about this topic, they did this, which was amazing’ etc. I suppose we as a complete group ended up with a typical response to an Ontroerend Goed show that you describe above: one half discovered the pleasure of a post hoc intellectual response to the work, while the other half was caught up in disappointed expectations. But what is also significant and very symptomatic to say is: we had an amazing breakfast discussion the following morning, when, I think, we all moved closer to the pleasure of intellectual (dis)closure.
This, I must stress, was not the only pleasure to be had, especially if you look at the response of the local audience. There were no walk-outs this time, but there was a sense of eager enthusiasm to participate, explore, and even be ‘insulted’ on demand. And that’s all that I can get away with reporting without giving away any spoilers!
If you enjoyed our conversation and want more of Duška’s thoughts on dramaturgy then check out this recent piece on Exeunt.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
The Rape of Lucrece: A casting - Chilean director Lola Arias’ latest piece is an(other) exploration of power dynamics in theatre, the way we depict sexual violence and the relationship between what happens on stage and what happens backstage. Arias’ research-based process sees her drawing on conversations with victims of violence as well as actors, intimacy co-ordinators and philosophers to pose the question: How can we talk about sexual violence? It premieres at Theater Basel on 14 March.
Cock, Cock…Who’s There? - The Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris presents a double bill of documentary pieces by Samira Elagoz, winner of the Silver Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. The first, an urgent piece about sexual violence, runs from 12-15 March. This is followed by Seek Bromance, Elagoz and Cade Moga’s collaborative piece about gender norms and their desire to defy them, filmed during the Covid-19 pandemic. It runs from 18-22 March.
Iron Fantasy - She Goat, the company composed of Shamira Turner and Eugénie Pastor, both associate artists of award-winning Little Bulb Theatre, present a new show about what it means to feel strong, which promises an intriguing cocktail of sweat and autoharp. The show runs until 21 March at Soho Theatre Upstairs.
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com
I'd never heard of this company but what a full and delightful conversation about them. Thank you for reminding me that people are doing some wild and wonderful things out there and that there are people having glorious conversations about them.