The political becomes personal in Theatre Conspiracy’s Foreign Radical

Theatre Conspiracy’s Foreign Radical prompts 20 audience members to question their views on privacy and cyberspace

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      The questions start simply enough—“How many people have made an online purchase within the last week?”—but the hard left turn into personal territory is whiplash-fast. “How many people have surfed porn in the last 24 hours?” Before the production is over, Theatre Conspiracy will have queried its 20 audience members/participants about where they stand on everything from violating a loved one’s privacy to racial profiling to bombing Syria. In Foreign Radical, the political is personal and firmly a part of the show.

      This is a Saturday-afternoon rehearsal, a week before opening night. Foreign Radical is staged as an elaborate multimedia game that explores cyberspace, security, and a host of other vital, contemporary issues. Based on those aforementioned questions, the audience will be directed through the curtained-off quadrants of the Cultch’s Culture Lab. There are no seats, and there’s no opting out. Tim Carlson, Theatre Conspiracy’s artistic director and the writer of Foreign Radical, guarantees no two shows will be alike.

      “The idea of social media—sharing, competing, collaborating—we wanted to use that,” Carlson says. “There are a lot of reasons why people are polarized, divided, ghettoized, and it’s nice to have an audience face to face, creating the discoveries.”

      The work is also meant to sound some alarm bells about the civil liberties we’re taking for granted. Facebook rants and hashtag activism seem innocuous—until they’re not, warns sound and music designer David Mesiha.

      “In the Arab Spring, there were many examples across multiple countries where people had said things and posted things that were not illegal when they posted them,” Mesiha says. “But governments realized, ‘Okay, we need to target these guys. What’s common between them? Look at the data and find something common, make it illegal. And because the country’s in a state of upheaval, go back and target them.’ For the average Canadian, things like that sound far-fetched and paranoid, but the countries didn’t overnight become like that. It’s complacency over long periods of time that erodes democracy, personal rights, and makes us more and more vulnerable to fascist systems. That’s the biggest danger, as a Canadian—to see the complacency.”

      That complacency has also changed the direction of the show. Originally, Foreign Radical was to focus on cybersurveillance, a topic Carlson discussed at length while interviewing academics, security experts, and old-school hackers two years ago at the Cyber Dialogue conference in Toronto.

      “Then the Edward Snowden story broke two months later,” Carlson recalls. “After that, the focus of the show widened into larger political issues.…Two years ago you would have been paranoid for thinking that the government has been spying on you and your data has been collected. Now, former prime ministers are worried about Bill C-51.”

      The bill gives 17 government agencies access to citizens’ personal data—everything from financial history to sexual orientation—and effectively turns CSIS into a secret police force.

      “There are moments when you’re watching the news and all of these speeches by Stephen Harper and all of these people in the West, you can see fundamentalism in all sides,” says Cande Andrade, the video designer who will bring Foreign Radical’s spooky surveillance/documentary-like multimedia elements to life. “You realize how much hate speech is out there and how much they just want to sell you something.”

      Throughout the “game”, there are snapshots of a man of Middle Eastern descent. The audience is provided some background pieces of information, and a few questions are asked in large flashes of text written in Farsi or Arabic. But it’s what each person brings with them—all of their preconceptions, prejudices (subtle or explicit), and fears—that truly determines Foreign Radical’s final outcome.

      “I am a Mexican-Canadian artist who, every time he steps off the airplane coming back from Mexico, gets hassled,” Andrade says. “I’m not a foreign radical, but I feel like the show talks in many levels in that sense. It’s not just about the state of the world as it is right now or how the media tells us it is in terms of fundamentalism here and there, and religions. But it’s also about being strange in the context of being different, so that was really interesting.”

      “I’m Egyptian and I remember that soon after September 11, even within Canada itself—I had never really experienced racism per se—but you can see prejudice,” Mesiha says. “You can see when you start talking to somebody and people will look at you a certain way. That was really tangible after September 11th and in the last few years as well, with everything that’s going on in the Middle East. But in my personal experience, about 90 percent of the time it’s about misconceptions and stereotypes. Somebody looking at me and because of what they’re hearing in the media, making assumptions about me.…We can’t get away from stereotypes, but what we can do is be aware of what creates stereotypes and be as informed as possible.”

      Hence the title Foreign Radical, which engages the public before anybody even steps inside the theatre. If you think you know what the play is about based on the title alone, well, good. It’s already doing its job, telling you things about yourself based on how you interpret that phrase.

      Mesiha explains the word radical goes right to the heart of these themes. “The word radical, if we apply it in a very conservative environment, then it could be somebody who is forward-thinking and brave in many ways, or it can be an extremist. That’s kind of the beauty of it.”

      Theatre Conspiracy’s Foreign Radical runs at the Cultch’s Culture Lab from Friday to next Saturday (April 17 to 25).

      Comments

      1 Comments

      Frank668

      Apr 19, 2015 at 11:42am

      I just saw it last night and it is very thought provoking, well written and well acted. It deserves a wide audience.