‘Truth’, Technology and Transmedial Theatre in Europe

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 is the consideration of 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,”’ how do the relationships between performers and spectator-participants differ from those forged through the public manifestations of populist politics? (Canovan, 1999) 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? In 2000, the late German artist Christoph Schlingensief created an international controversy with his performance event Please Love Austria–first European coalition week! in which a group of asylum-seekers were transported to a container located in the centre of Vienna where they would reside for seven days. Via a dedicated internet 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. In 2010, Tallinn-based theatre company, Theatre NO99, began a 44-day-long project with a press conference announcing a new political party called ‘Unified Estonia.’ Resonances with United Russia went beyond the title: Theatre NO99’s performance as a party emulated the nationalist, populist, ‘catch-all’ public image of the Russian Federation’s ruling party. Although Unified Estonia incorporated obvious satire, its infiltration of real news media led to real polls indicating that it would take 25% of the national vote. These projects drew on ‘diverse popular cultures and digital media,’ and this ‘transmediality’ significantly amplified their scale and reach. This article critically reassesses such transmedial strategies from a postdigital perspective informed by current understandings of populism and post-truth politics.