Community participation has come out of the political side of the work, meaning I don’t think of theatre as this isolated personal output from my brain. It’s communal. Theatre was born with democracy, it’s based on assembly halls. It’s based on people coming together and talking about things that have to do with everyone there. Theatre is politics. Theatre was built out of politics. Participation is expanding this idea and getting stories from communities, and getting communities involved.
For Alexander Raptotasios, interactivity in theatre can powerfully tie his work to its political purpose. His new production, Antigone [on strike] utilises this approach to interactivity, as the audience take on the role of the court of public opinion, as classical tragedy meets a modern political dilemma. Alexander talks to the Voidspace about the influences and history of his work, and why immersive theatre can be so effective as a vehicle for engagement and connection.
Voidspace:
Alexander, welcome to the Voidspace. I’m really happy that you could join us here today. Thank you for being here.
Alexander Raptotasios:
Thank you as well. I’ve been doing a bit of work in London for the last 15 years and going in this direction – making immersive or interactive work – so I’m glad there’s a more specific place for this field for this field of work.
Voidspace:
Wonderful. So first of all, please give me a high-level overview of who you are in this field and what you do. As you say, you’ve been doing a lot in London.
Alexander Raptotasios:
I’m a theatre director and writer. A producer as well. I’ve been working in London for the last 16 years, more or less, making theatre work, both new writing and adapting old pieces. It started with a collective of artists from 12 different countries living in London. We came together from different disciplines, and we started making work in given spaces – like an abandoned courtroom or offices in Oxford Street, or anything we could find, really. And slowly from this interdisciplinary community, the work naturally became a bit more of a mix of different art forms. As it has grown in the last few years, we have been directed mostly towards performance and theatre, but the work has been focusing more on the idea of community, either in the research of my work or in the actual performance of the work. It involves community, or, as I say, trying to create a community with the audience, live.
The work usually has something political to it. It’s things I’m concerned about or that the people I work with are concerned about. So that’s always in there. But I also like comedy and pop culture, which also finds its way into the pieces I do.
voidspace:
You say that when you started with your collective or over the years, you started from whatever spaces you could find, like the space. Did the space come first and the work from it, initially?
Alexander Raptotasios:
Yeah. There were lots of us meeting in my tiny studio, and then trying to figure out how to start a company. And the second we got the space, all the creativity came out and felt it’s about space always. If you have the space, then people can do amazing things. We were lucky because we had free space. This organisation initially helped us and gave us some abandoned courtrooms. Then we started our first exhibitions, performance shows, immersive shows, different things.
The space was on the Thames, actually. It was Blackfriars. It was one of the buildings that was in between development phases. So for one year, it was given to different companies. And people used it for rehearsal rooms, but we were not produced by anyone. So it had to be everything. We were even thinking of living there, but they didn’t let us. So we cleaned it up and tried to use every room, every part of the furniture, the courtrooms, the yard, the basements, trying to create mini cabarets, performance art, anything you write, anything could happen. It was a gift because London is very expensive.
Voidspace:
Finding free space in London is, I think, the ultimate prize, isn’t it? Tell me a little more about your take on community in this work.
Alexander Raptotasios:
Yeah, I think it’s all labelling. It’s all boxing, putting things in a box and labelling it, and I think it’s silly. It’s helpful sometimes, but I don’t know, fine art and performance and video and dance and movement and social work and therapy are all interconnected. We use them all in different ways. And I think it’s silly to put this boundary and say, “Oh, that’s my discipline, and that’s the other one” especially in collaborative work. So, yeah, a sense of community has come out of it.
Community participation has come out of the political side of the work, meaning I don’t think of theatre as this isolated personal output from my brain. It’s communal. Theatre was born with democracy, it’s based on assembly halls. It’s based on people coming together and talking about things that have to do with everyone there. Theatre is politics. Theatre was built out of politics. Participation is expanding this idea and getting stories from communities, and getting communities involved.
We want output that benefits people who take part in the creation or the participation. Participation a social act. It’s a social practise. It has to do with the impact. You can’t just make things for yourself. And the immersive element is part of it because it’s about coming closer together, creating this sense of communion, of church without religion, of coming together. And I think immersive theatre is greatly connected to that.
Immersive theatre has something democratic about it, meaning things are less or more fluid, boundaries are blurrier in terms of interaction, of who is what. The roles are a bit more…you can play with it more. In terms of who is whom and what the audience is supposed to do. And I think it has two important things. One is that it activates the audience as an audience, as a participator, but essentially as a citizen, meaning you’re responsible for what you do and what you think, and you’re not there just to consume something we give you and then go away. I guess lots of immersive theatre is also that because it’s very commercial and very much based on the Disneyland model. But I think there are other ways to do that.
I think the immersive elements in my work came from going in that direction. Asking: How can we engage people? How can we get them together in a political way? And the other side, of course, immersive theatre or things that use different senses apart from just text and speech and logic, it has the potential of getting through to you more directly, without your brain trying to make sense and filter everything. It can hit you hard. It can hit you. It can access you. It can penetrate your defences. If you are trying to tell a story to people through smell, through touch, through movement, through lights, it activates people’s memories. It brings things to people’s minds, and it makes connections, and sparks their imagination. Text can do that too, but in a more limited way – it’s more intellectual. Immersive is more visceral.
Voidspace:
You were talking about how one of the fun things is the roles that the audience can play and the slightly blurry boundaries of what their role is in the space. What’s the approach that you take to that dynamic in your work? Has it changed over the years?
Alexander Raptotasios:
It has evolved. It has evolved because there are more tools available, or you think about it in a different way, it changes depending on the project. Every project is different. It depends on the story you want to tell, or the relationship you want to have with the audience. So I think the audience has to be involved in a way that helps them, helps with the storytelling, and that dramaturgically has to make sense. And we have to give them something through that immersion that we can’t give them in any other way, if we can.
Voidspace:
How do you utilise the role of the audience, dramaturgically speaking?
Alexander Raptotasios:
I recently worked with Tim Crouch in some workshops, and he’s great about writing his plays in a way that are always about making the audience conscious of themselves as audiences. Meaning that you are going to the theatre, and his plays make you aware of your choices. You don’t have to sit there and take it. You’re responsible for what you go and see. It’s not just the artist for what they put on. You’re responsible for what you consume and what you spend your money and your time and your eyes on. We are not in this innocent phase. It is naive to believe that.
I think we’re coming out of that because of the internet as well. The idea of avatars and the idea of our online presence as being something not real, virtual and with no consequences, is slowly coming to an end. There’s legal consequences, real harm, a real impact on reality. But lots of people and older generations think, oh, it’s online, it’s not real. But it has a real effect. You’re not a spectator there. You are taking part. This is part of your civil actions being online.
Whatever you do has an impact. We don’t just give you a role for fun, we give you a context and we give you something to fill, a space to fill with specific rules. But then it’s up to you how you use that. You’re responsible for your actions. I remember being a kid. We were 11, 12. I remember going with some girls, some friends of mine from school. We would go to Internet cafés, going into these chat rooms to chat as a joke. We pretended with fake pictures to be young, beautiful girls, and we chatted with all guys, and we were like a group laughing. And then we went away and forgot about it. It was like a game. And now I think about it and think “Oh my god! What the hell were we doing?”
It was a new world appearing of these anonymous interactions, and you could do whatever you wanted. It’s like the first video games that came out, where you could harm people with no consequences.
voidspace:
I suppose a lot of people’s first instinct in that scenario is “Let’s kill everyone!”
Alexander Raptotasios:
Let’s do abuse. Let’s do what we’re not allowed to. It’s not real. But now we’re coming to realise that this cannot be how we behave. So I think I want to use my work to realise the same: no matter you are who you are, no matter the context, you have a responsibility for your actions.
Voidspace:
It’s interesting how some other immersive practitioners work on a model of almost doing the opposite, trying to detach you from your sense of responsibility in normal life. That impulse to anonymise, and to detach people from the consequences of their actions.
Alexander Raptotasios:
I agree. I want this direction because that’s what concerns me politically, being more aware, being aware of our agency and of our power, because the more we are made to feel we’re powerless, or that things are too big for us to handle, the more we give up our power to others.
I’ve tried different versions of it in my work. I’ve done The White Plague, which was an immersive show, and it was guiding people through a pandemic of blindness, and asking people to lock down in a quarantine hospital. The audience meets in a space, and then they’re all made blind with special masks. And then they’re made to go and sit in that hospital while the show is happening around them. But the main thing I wanted for them to focus was on smells, on touch, on sound. We made different layers of sound for that. But also the idea that you’re split from your group, you are, of course, sitting next to strangers. You’re touching, or sitting next to, strangers, and you have things that are really tough happening around you, and you have to rely or hold on to a stranger.
This idea of, is it solidarity or is it cruelty that is going to come out of a crisis? Or out of a disaster, like a pandemic. We did that show just before the pandemic hit, then we had to stop it. It was tough doing it at the same time with the pandemic. It was too much.
Another show one I did in Athens, and then New York, is Apocalypse. It was about getting people in a rave, in a party, in a club, and then getting them to prepare for the end of the world. But at the same time, they’re going to go and be escapist. “Yay! Whatever! Lose everything! Destroy everything!” But slowly, they realise all the rituals they’re going through are actually to prepare them to go out and affect the change they want to see in the world. So it was tricking them – in a fun way.
Voidspace:
That sounds great. That sounds so empowering. Another area of interest for me is facilitation. For me, facilitation and audience safety is about how you guide the audience through possibly making challenging choices or having challenging experiences, but still being safe enough, emotionally speaking, to really absorb the impact of that in a positive way.
Alexander Raptotasios:
For me, it’s there from the start. I want impact and I want some tangible effect and reaction from the audience. So, I need to think of the show from their perspective from the beginning. The performers have a tough job in my shows, because they become the facilitators of the audience as well, and they need to safeguard and also perform. It’s tough, but it also keeps them on edge, because everything is different each time. The audience, they react differently. The performers have to adapt. And this is part of the show. I think you always have to take care of that. Ask, warn, and give breaks or stop when you’ve made your point. I think there’s no intention to abuse anyone. Just by shocking someone again, again, again, not stopping, it’s not going to make it the show better.
You’re still making fucking art. It still has to be playful and it has to be safe. It’s all play in the end. It doesn’t need to be a boot camp of some sort. And you need to have people to be aware, not comfortable always, but in a way that they will open up and go with you. You need to win them over. You need to help them absorb the show, or be told the story or take part. I grew up loving haunted houses. But it’s not what I wanted to do.
Voidspace:
You’re not running a scare attraction here.
Alexander Raptotasios:
That would be fun, but no.
Voidspace:
I would love to ask you now about Antigone [on strike], which is the production that you’re going to be bringing to London from the very end of January.
Alexander Raptotasios:
I had this idea to combine Antigone, the ancient Greek tragedy, and to write a new version of it inspired by all these cases of racist riots in the UK and Europe. Inspired by these questions, these cases brought up in these governments in these countries, questions about nationality, citizenship, human rights, the right of banishment for a government to have, which is a mediaeval thing. But it seemed to me, my impression was, that in all these countries, if it was just a legal issue, it would have been very clear-cut. All these women and men would be brought back, put on trial, deradicalized, whatever. It’s a process. They are citizens of the European countries. They’re not citizens of Syria.
But for political reasons, many politicians decided, no, we want to evoke really strong hate from the people, make it very sensational, and use that public opinion turning against those people as an excuse to not actually follow law, international law and constitutional law. And I found it very interesting, because it was a case of public opinion affecting a government to actually go against the laws to satisfy this blood thirst for punishment and revenge.
It’s the same as capital punishment, in a way. If you can make any crowd shout.”Yeah! kill them!” for someone who did something horrible. But it is not the job of the government to put it to public opinion – mob rule – for everything that happens. Of course, there’s going to be an emotional reaction, but that’s not what the government is supposed to be doing, following emotional reactions. I thought there were lots of interesting things there, so we started making a play.
We worked with kids from the schools that had these cases around East London, where I used to live at the time. And that’s where the interactive part came in, because we asked them to manually simulate social media reactions to the scenes we’re putting in front of them, by taking notes. About comments they would write if they would watch that thing on a video on YouTube. Lots of things came from there.
Mostly what came from there was the admission, from these 10, 12-year-old kids, that they have two or three accounts on every social media platform. A public one, a school one, a family one, and a secret one. Every kid has different identities on every platform. They have all this close interaction, different personas interacting with the media. None of them will watch the video. They’ll listen to what they say, they’ll run instantly to the comment section and read it, which is a terrible thing to do in any scenario. You go down a rabbit hole. No one goes away from the comment section. And so that’s how people interact.
We started thinking: How can we simulate that for the audience? And these two things developed in the parallel way, the play and the interaction. The play was similar to Antigone; someone fighting for the rights of someone who is considered an enemy of state, and in the process dies because of it. And it’s about individual law, family law against government, and the good of the many as it’s presented. Then at the same time, you have these audiences who are watching that story, and we ask them to vote between every scene, initially.
I don’t want to give away the play, but the idea is that they keep getting different questions, and they’re treated like an audience of a TV studio in a way, where everything is a poll. We will give them these keypads, and they will be responding to these questions, which will go into a system, and the audience results to that question will come up online instantly in graphics because the whole thing is video mapped and there’s video mapping on the set. So the actors are playing within the video mapping, and the gravitas of the voting comes on stage as the play progresses. The audience is slowly seeing their own profile, their own ideological makeup.
And the parts start moving according to what they vote. I can’t give a lot of details because that’s part of the story as well.
If you see it, you get it. If you see it, that’s what you’re trying to do. But the idea is that to have the audience, the child, give the audience a chance to change their minds, ask questions, get repeated, but also get asked some cold political questions, and then slowly can get more detailed, more personal, more emotional, or more sensational, and closer to a social media interaction.
And the idea is to ask them different questions after different degrees of informing them. I send them lots of messy, confused information, get their opinion immediately, give them more information on one side, get their opinion again, give both sides, and play with what you think.
So the play came out of that. We think public opinion has power, but online is not necessarily the same as voting or as going on the street. They’re all different kinds of interacting with your city, with your country, with your community, your world. But what has impact and what you may believe has impact is different. And of course, most of the stuff you do online is not impactful, but your data is valuable and is harvested and sold.
So, when you’re interacting, the more you think you’re affecting democracy, the more you’re being used. So it’s blurry. It’s a difficult issue. And a lot of people don’t understand. I don’t understand it because the technology evolves, and we don’t know what’s happening. Legislation hasn’t caught up with all these things. I’ve seen this documentary, The Great Hack on Netflix, stuff like that, which makes you doubt your perception of reality if you only fed what fits your profile and what’s going to make you interact more and monetize your input inside your own little echo chamber.
There’s a story, but the story is also… the second part of the story is how you interact with the story. That’s another story.
Voidspace:
Can you tell me more about the creation process?
We workshopped it first with the actors and we did do some workshops with the kids of those schools from Oakland, specifically in the area. And that was very useful to shape the play. And then I did more workshops with the actors at Hoxton Hall in East London. And then over the last couple of years, as we were going through funding applications, I reshaped it again, again, again. I worked on it in a way I know how to, an interdisciplinary and multicultural international way that I learned at university, and being in London. And that’s what I love about London. What I loved London for. And so it has been created by actors who are from Iran, Turkey, England, and me.
The text has been shaped by me. I’m from Greece. I have this connection to the original play. I’m not religious, but also from another dramaturg I have, who’s from Israel. Another advisor I have who’s from Pakistan and lives in Khaim is Hafash Aneela Bashir, who has also designed a whole educational workshop programme around this project. So now we’re doing the show.
We’re also running workshops with young people, mostly, about using art and activism as a way to engage with politics, on how you can combine art and activism and engage with news and politics without feeling afraid that it’s not for you or too big a subject.
That’s something that’s really important to me. We need more people who are putting their creativity into the things they worry and care about rather than trying to satisfy the audience all the time by thinking what sells.
Voidspace:
What have you learned from that iterative process of development?
Alexander Raptotasios:
Writing takes a lot of time. Getting people from different backgrounds in a room solves lots of problems very quickly about the work. You put the material in, and you have it cross-examined and interacted with by many people, and you see instantly what works, what doesn’t, what is to be done. It’s a great way to develop work, I think. Less insular, less stuck in your own head. It helps.
And about the interactive and immersive parts of it, I think I learned that it needs to be just enough, just as much as you need it to be, no more than the play or the work demands. You don’t let elements take over that don’t have to. Decorative things doesn’t add to it. So you need to focus. I could add random things to it. I could add smells and all that stuff, but it won’t help with anything. It’s not the right show for that. So there’s no one format for immersive things. It has to do with the story of it. Does it help the audience experience the points of the story in a way that’s not just by talking to them?
I think that’s the way, especially with political theatre, which is difficult to do, because if you just talk about an issue, it just becomes a debate or a lecture. And these things have been proven not to work, and they don’t convert anyone to what you think they should be converted to. People usually come that already agree with you. And it’s not really having an impact. It’s satisfying you and the choir you’re preaching to. And that’s it. So you have to find different ways.
I brought up Tim Crouch because his team is a great example of that. His plays are about really big subjects and difficult things. But most of the times when he told us in the workshop what the play, or you figure out what the play is actually talking about, none of that is actually the story of the play. But it’s what’s underneath, the dynamic. He made a play called Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation. It’s all about a cult, and a mother and daughter. And it started from an impulse to write about Trump without wanting to write about Trump. And he ended up writing about the concept of blindly following something and the idea of the author and the idea of hegemony in theatre, but also in cults. And in a way, he did talk about Trump, but he was never talked about. It was about how we follow rather than making a play about Trump.
Voidspace:
What advice do you have for people at the start of this journey?
Alexander Raptotasios:
It’s going to be tough, but it has to be about expression and self-satisfaction in a way and about what you want to do in your life or with others. So that’s what will do it. The rest doesn’t always come. But that should be the minimum that comes out of that.
Let your imagination run wild. Don’t try to think of the logistics in the beginning. Really try to think of feelings you have as a kid in your dreams, things that no one else is doing, things that you want to suddenly grab someone and throw them in there. Imagine you have one audience member and you can do whatever you want. Try to create this crazy thing around them and see how you can make this into a show or see how you can use that, see how that makes sense for a story.
And keep the sense of excitement. Sometimes it’s not about the work itself. Sometimes it’s about putting the audience in a childlike position and then enabling their imagination to go and explore and think, to really commit to the world and create something themselves.
Antigone [on strike] plays at the Park Theatre from 30 January to 22 February 2025