Politico

Politico was a production that was also conceived and performed in anticipation of the Swedish general election in September 2014. Ola Johansson conceptualised and wrote the script, whilst artistic director of die Buhne, Birte Niederhaus, directed the show. It was performed as an interactive promenade theatre in a subterranean hangar outside Gothenburg, Sweden, called Aeroseum, which protected the Swedish air force during the cold war. The performance was a citizenship test and investigated how a democratic process could lead to anti-democratic results with the help of a tacit spectatorial agreement and manipulative tactics such as abuse of (spectators’) personal data, hidden surveillance cameras, vote rigging, infiltrated actors in the audience, ethnic discrimination, and so forth. Towards the end of the performance it becomes increasingly clear to the spectators that they are subject to an experimental fascist coup d'État, which led audiences to take collective action and organize different kinds of interventions and thus endings to Politico from night to night. The interventions served as a performative critique of liberal and representational democracy in the form of radical and direct democratic counteractions. In subsequent research the spectatorial direct action is analysed in terms of prefigurative activism.
Politico rendered a fair amount of national and regional media coverage as well as academic attention in terms of invitations to seminars and panel debates on current political theatre. The production received about £40 000 from Kulturbryggan, The city of Gothenburg and The region of Västra Götaland.