‘Truth’, technology and transmedial theatre in Europe

Abstract

Recent scholarship has expanded upon the concept of populism as performance to include a focus on how it employs digital technologies (Baldwin-Philippi 2018). However, a relatively unexplored dimension of such discussion is the relationship between political and ‘artistic’ or theatrical performances of populism. If the latter appropriate right-wing populist discourse to potentially parody how it frames its nationalist rhetoric as an ‘appeal to “the people”’ (Canovan 1999, 3), then how do the relationships between performers and spectator-participants differ from those forged through public manifestations of populist politics? How have artists who engage with populism employed technology to increase the reach and interactivity of their performances, and how does this seek to undermine, and/or generate a troubling ‘belief’ in, the supposed ‘reality’ of such projects? This article examines two selected performances, from Austria and Estonia, that sought to engage subversively with the rise of far-right populism through arts practice developed across multiple media: Christoph Schlingensief’s Please Love Austria – first European coalition week! (2000) and Theatre NO99’s Unified Estonia (2010). These two events were exemplary in their respective engagements with increasingly technologized media to interrogate right-wing populisms in performances that drew widespread public attention, nationally and internationally. Schlingensief created an international controversy with his performance event Please Love Austria! in which a group of asylum-seekers were transported to a temporary site consisting of shipping containers located in the centre of Vienna where they would reside for 7 days. Via a dedicated website, Austrians were invited to vote out the foreigner they wished to see ‘deported’ the most. This public action, which sought to mirror the anti-immigration policies of Jörg Haider’s populist, far-right Freedom Party Austria (FPÖ), was reported worldwide to the detriment of Austria’s preferred centre-right, bourgeois national image. Ten years later, in Estonia (known for its technological advancement), Tallinn-based theatre company NO99 held a press conference announcing their largest show to date which would culminate in a public convention for an audience of 7200. This 44-day-long project involved NO99