Beyond the Zero-Sum Game: Participation and the Optics of Opting

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Notes

1. This quotation is from an unpaginated performance script provided by the company. Subsequent references are to the published version of the script, which summarises some of the Host’s speeches but is more fully annotated with stage directions and critical context: Ontroerend Goed, All Work and No Plays: Blueprints for Nine Performances (London: Oberon, 2014).

2. Fight Night was created and produced as a collaboration between Ontroerend Goed and The Border Project, an Adelaide-based ensemble who have established a partnership with the Belgian company.

3. For most of the time since 1923, Australia has been governed by a coalition of non-Labour parties, today known as the Liberal and National Parties. Since 1970, government in Belgium has been atomised in several respects, not only regionally but (as one round of voting in Fight Night alludes to) by having candidates offer messages in Dutch, in the splitting of political parties into Flemish (Dutch-speaking) and French-speaking branches.

4. The transferability of the piece is evidenced by the fact that, following tense local elections in March 2014, a version of the piece was performed in Istanbul in Turkish, by DOT Theatre. It ran for several months.

5. Darryn King, ‘The Hot Seat’, The Australian, 8 January 2015 <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/the-hot-seat/story-fn9n8gph-1226847141304> [accessed 11 November 2014].

6. In an interview with Jana Perković, Alexander Devriendt reflects that, with Audience and Internal, ‘the point he was trying to make was sometimes overshadowed by the reactions’. Jana Perković, ‘Ontroerend Goed’s Fight Night: The Audience Gets Its Revenge’, Guardian, 12 March 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2014/mar/12/ontroerend-goeds-fight-night-the-audience-gets-its-revenge> [accessed 12 October 2014].

7. Ibid.

8. Ontroerend Goed, All Work and No Plays, p. 460.

9. Ontroerend Goed, All Work and No Plays, p. 463.

10. Ibid., p. 470.

11. Ibid., p. 502.

12. This quote is from the unpaginated performance script cited in footnote 1.

13. Ibid.

14. Sonia Sodha, ‘Slick Marketing and Hi-tech Politics Are Leaving Voters Feeling Cold’, Guardian, 17 August 2013 <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/17/politics-trust-2015-election-strategy> [accessed 8 January 2015].

15. These quotations are from Maxwell’s analysis of the word ‘optics’, which appears in the ‘Brave New Words’ section of the Macmillan Dictionary website: <http://www.macmillandictionary.com/buzzword/entries/optics> [accessed 15 January 2015]. An updated definition of ‘optics’ in the Oxford English Dictionary quotes several examples of usage. One credits Republicans who ‘understood one thing very well and that was that the optics of legislation are important’; the other suggests that ‘the issue itself is secondary to the optics of the Democrats opposing this administration in a high-profile way’.

16. Stephen Coleman, How Voters Feel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 87.

17. Ganaele Langlois, ‘Meaning, Semiotechnologies and Participatory Media’, Culture Machine, 12 (2011) <http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/437/467> [accessed 17 November 2014].

18. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press 2002), pp. 39–41.

19. Oliver Burkeman, ‘The Science of Happiness’, Guardian, 7 May 2011 <http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/may/07/science-of-happiness-oliver-burkeman> [accessed 10 October 2014].

20. Ibid.

21. Lisa Nakamura, ‘Prospects for a Materialist Informatics: An Interview with Donna Haraway’, Electronic Book Review, 30 July 2003 <http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/interview> [accessed 17 January 2015].

22. Ontroerend Goed, All Work and No Plays, p. 486.

23. Cited in Perković, ‘Ontroerend Goed’s Fight Night’.

24. Ontroerend Goed, All Work and No Plays, p. 456.

25. Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

26. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006).

27. Machon, Immersive Theatres, p. 26.

28. Coleman, How Voters Feel, p. 87.

29. Ibid., p. 193.

30. Privacy, dir. by Josie Rourke, Donmar Warehouse, London, first performed 10 April 2014.

31. Dancing Brick, Perle, dir. by Valentina Ceschi, Soho Theatre, London, first performed 22 October 2013.

32. See, for instance, Piotr Spyra, The Epistemological Perspective of the Pearl-Poet (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 71.

33. Ontroerend Goed, All Work and No Plays, p. 461.

34. John Tierney, ‘Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?’ New York Times Magazine, 21 August 2011, p.33.

35. Adam Alston, ‘Audience Participation and Neoliberal Value: Risk, Agency and Responsibility in Immersive Theatre’, Performance Research, 18.2 (2013), 128–38.

36. Geraldine Harris, ‘Differences in Degree or Kind? Ockham’s Razor’s Not Until We Are Lost and Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable’ in Framing Immersive Theatre and Performance: The Politics of Participation, ed. by James Frieze (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan).

37. Ethan J. Leib, ‘Why Not Dial-In Democracy Too?’, Washington Post, 28 May 2006 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/26> [accessed 16 October 2014].