Written for Culture WarsTeenage Riot is a magic eye. / It’s a two-tone tie. / It’s a line-drawn bunny that seems like a duck. / It’s a rotating advertisement perfectly stuck.
Teenage Riot is two shows in one. What you see depends entirely on your angle of approach. It’s no surprise, then, that it has split opinion and been both vigorously championed and violently condemned. Look at it one way and you have a crass, confused, aggressive and illogical piece of fierce teenage rhetoric and anti-adult agit-prop. Look at it another and you have a poignant expression of the failure and impossibility entailed by the teenage existence and experience. The first sees a tantrum thrown; the second sees a tantrum shown.
What we see is a white box in the middle of an empty stage, into which eight teenagers retreat and shut themselves away. As they enter one by one, each throws us a look that’s half accusatory and half apologetic. It’s a look that seems to say, “It’s come to this. Shame.”
The cube functions as a literal den: the sort of teenage bedroom that has ‘Adults F**k Off’ scratched on the door. But it also recalls the absolute insolubility between generations in terms of culture and communication. All that we see of the interior, its contents and inhabitants, is delivered to us in a mediatised form: filmed and project onto the front of the box. The film cleverly welded together such that the divide between live action and pre-recorded events is almost inconspicuous. Sometimes you know, sometimes you can’t be sure, sometimes you’re duped with clever stageplay.
Now, it strikes me that Teenage Riot was (in part, at least) born out of a particular discussion that surrounded Ontroerend Goed’s previous show performed by teenagers, Once and For All We’re Going to Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen, namely that the teenage performers were not speaking for themselves. In other words, the version of adolescence that they were acting out and referring to was actually imposed upon them by the older creative team. To a certain degree, it’s a fair cop: Once and For All... thrives on a certain nostalgia, but, personally, I never felt it a problem. It was a play. It had a process, like many plays. The teenagers were performing it. I recognised my teenage experience within it, as did others, as did – I believe – the cast themselves. I believed in it. They believed in it.
Here, the cast have control of what we see. Quite literally, they control they way in which they project themselves. The staging also serves as a neat device that throws up the mediatisation of the 2.0 world and user-generated content. Early on, one says: “We’re going to do whatever we want to.” No one, they insist repeatedly and vociferously, is putting words into their mouths or shaping their actions.
How one responds to Teenage Riot largely depends on whether one accepts that statement or not. The first time I watched Teenage Riot – in a room hot with anticipation and performances that probably rose to meet it – I didn’t buy it.
Mainly, I think, because the piece seemed to have forgotten the ambiguity and multiplicity of onstage reality. It seemed to have forgotten our predisposition to doubt. By setting out so consciously and deliberately to be authentic, it only raised the question of its own authenticity. Onstage, “This is real” cannot but become “Is this real?” So, the more that Teenage Riot insisted on its veracity, the more I doubted it. Little wonder that when the piece says “we’re going to do whatever we want to” (or, to put it more poetically, “I don’t got to do shit”), we become aware of the artificiality of the situation. After all, we know that their actions are preset and rehearsed, that this – live though it is – has been constructed, that it is not solely a product of this moment. We know that the camera has a set path. They can do whatever they want only within the context of a set text. They can show us what they want only insofar as they stick to what they have previously decided to show. We see the presence of an undisclosed process, about which we know nothing. We do not know how this material originated. We have no way of verifying their claim to total authorship. In fact, we start to suspect otherwise. We doubt.
Teenage Riot is two shows in one. What you see depends entirely on your angle of approach. It’s no surprise, then, that it has split opinion and been both vigorously championed and violently condemned. Look at it one way and you have a crass, confused, aggressive and illogical piece of fierce teenage rhetoric and anti-adult agit-prop. Look at it another and you have a poignant expression of the failure and impossibility entailed by the teenage existence and experience. The first sees a tantrum thrown; the second sees a tantrum shown.
What we see is a white box in the middle of an empty stage, into which eight teenagers retreat and shut themselves away. As they enter one by one, each throws us a look that’s half accusatory and half apologetic. It’s a look that seems to say, “It’s come to this. Shame.”
The cube functions as a literal den: the sort of teenage bedroom that has ‘Adults F**k Off’ scratched on the door. But it also recalls the absolute insolubility between generations in terms of culture and communication. All that we see of the interior, its contents and inhabitants, is delivered to us in a mediatised form: filmed and project onto the front of the box. The film cleverly welded together such that the divide between live action and pre-recorded events is almost inconspicuous. Sometimes you know, sometimes you can’t be sure, sometimes you’re duped with clever stageplay.
Now, it strikes me that Teenage Riot was (in part, at least) born out of a particular discussion that surrounded Ontroerend Goed’s previous show performed by teenagers, Once and For All We’re Going to Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen, namely that the teenage performers were not speaking for themselves. In other words, the version of adolescence that they were acting out and referring to was actually imposed upon them by the older creative team. To a certain degree, it’s a fair cop: Once and For All... thrives on a certain nostalgia, but, personally, I never felt it a problem. It was a play. It had a process, like many plays. The teenagers were performing it. I recognised my teenage experience within it, as did others, as did – I believe – the cast themselves. I believed in it. They believed in it.
Here, the cast have control of what we see. Quite literally, they control they way in which they project themselves. The staging also serves as a neat device that throws up the mediatisation of the 2.0 world and user-generated content. Early on, one says: “We’re going to do whatever we want to.” No one, they insist repeatedly and vociferously, is putting words into their mouths or shaping their actions.
How one responds to Teenage Riot largely depends on whether one accepts that statement or not. The first time I watched Teenage Riot – in a room hot with anticipation and performances that probably rose to meet it – I didn’t buy it.
Mainly, I think, because the piece seemed to have forgotten the ambiguity and multiplicity of onstage reality. It seemed to have forgotten our predisposition to doubt. By setting out so consciously and deliberately to be authentic, it only raised the question of its own authenticity. Onstage, “This is real” cannot but become “Is this real?” So, the more that Teenage Riot insisted on its veracity, the more I doubted it. Little wonder that when the piece says “we’re going to do whatever we want to” (or, to put it more poetically, “I don’t got to do shit”), we become aware of the artificiality of the situation. After all, we know that their actions are preset and rehearsed, that this – live though it is – has been constructed, that it is not solely a product of this moment. We know that the camera has a set path. They can do whatever they want only within the context of a set text. They can show us what they want only insofar as they stick to what they have previously decided to show. We see the presence of an undisclosed process, about which we know nothing. We do not know how this material originated. We have no way of verifying their claim to total authorship. In fact, we start to suspect otherwise. We doubt.
Therefore, when the cast stand onstage and accuse the audience of all manner of sins – incidentally tarring us with a single brush in precisely the way that they reject our singular projection of the archetypal teenager onto each of them – I reacted against it. “You are not an example,” they say, having pelted the images of certain audience members with tomatoes, “You are a warning.” “It’s not your problem,” one of them says. “How dare they?” I thought, “How dare they assume, not only that I don’t share some of these problems as a twenty-five year old, but that I’m actually responsible for them.” In fact, given my cynicism about the authorship of the piece, it felt to me as if the adults behind the piece were delivering a smug and sanctimonious set of accusations that implied their own superiority. (Rather hotheadly, I tweeted as much immediately afterwards.) “We work with teenagers. We make theatre,” it seemed to say, “What do you do?” I left seething.
After my tweet, I was asked to see the show again by Ontroerend Goed’s director Alexander Devriendt and to take the teens at their word by accepting that they had control over the piece’s content. Watching in this way second time around, in a calmer auditorium that drew more level-headed performances, Teenage Riot became less about its riot and more about its teenagers. What the teenagers said, shouted and did sat behind the way in which they spoke, shouted and behaved. Rather than heeding their polemic and reacting against it on the basis of its flaws, I began to see its shortcomings as the focal point. In other words, rather than watching the show from or by the teenagers, I was watching the show about them: the tantrum shown, rather than the tantrum thrown.
After all, what hope of constructing a piercing social critique when, as one of the song lyrics runs, “I want almost everything.” Besides, as one of the boys says to camera with his back towards us, “what comes out of my mouth never seems to be what I think.”
What emerges is a picture of adolescent frustration that rings true. It is not so much what they try to provoke as that they try to provoke; not such much about understanding their inarticulate formation, as appreciating its inarticulacy. Their Teenage Riot is always pitched at the highest volume, it is all taken to excess. They rail against so much – the way in which teenagers are seen; the identities thrust upon them; the world in which they exist with its various pressures of appearance, sex and behaviour; the world that was created before they arrived, over which they had no say; their own state of ‘not a girl, not yet a women’ inadequacy – that their piece of theatre is inevitably toppled by its own scattergun density. It fails to communicate as a result of (to quote soundtrack’s the final song) “the fury in your head.” This is not a provocation, but a testimony to the teenage need to provoke and the impossibility of doing so.
Essentially, Belgian collective Ontroerend Goed have done a Duchamp. They have framed a piece of theatre and presented it as a living artefact. Unlike Duchamp’s Fontaine, however, the thing presented remains in the same context. There is no signification about its status. Presenting a piece of theatre – warts and all – in a theatre is like showing us a urinal on the wall of the Gents. How are we supposed to know to look differently?
Teenage Riot’s failure comes in not revealing the quotation marks that sit around the whole. There are two frames here. The first exists around the piece made by the teenagers, which, by existing on a stage, can be watched like any other piece of theatre, by seeking meaning in the same way. The second exists around this first frame, and it means that every action on stage carries a second layer of meaning: it matters more as an example of a statement, than as a statement in its own right. However, the outer frame does not enforce its presence and so it’s quite possible to watch Teenage Riot in accordance with the usual rules, the single-frame format, of conventional theatre. To do so, however, is to see Teenage Riot as I did first time around.
This begs a slightly different question of Ontroerend Goed. While it avoids accusations of manipulation, it perhaps raises the question of exploitation. After all, the company are using the actions and words of their teenage cast in a different way than the teenagers intend them. For those words and actions to function, the teenagers must believe that they are genuinely accusing the audience, when in fact they are testifying to themselves and their peers. Everything the cast are driving at seems undermined by its existence in inverted commas.
However, the picture is not quite as clean cut as all that. The boundaries are blurred. After all, the adult members of the company must be quite happy with (some of, if not all) the accusations being made, just as the teenagers must be quite happy to stand as examples of their own frustration. The cast let us know, quite frequently throughout the piece, how hard being a teenager today can be. That difficulty reflects rather badly on the world created by their elders. In those terms, the piece as much an accusation against the adults of Ontroerend Goed as it is the audience. We are all pilloried and vilified, but it is an easy argument to escape and counter. Teenage Riot is as much in the mind as it is outside of their control. The combination is combustible.
Perhaps that’s where the poignancy of their final split exists. After blaming and humiliating us, presenting some of our number onscreen and pelting their images with tomatoes, the teenagers split. Half return to the box, half enter the auditorium. They are each caught for a moment, some more indecisive than others: not wanting to lose the righteousness that senses the problems with the world, but wanting to escape the fury in their heads. As one girl suggests, even as an adult “I’ll say I’m as angry as a fourteen year old.” The tragedy is that we can’t have a happy medium. Either we exist in the box, struggling with our own frustrations, or we come to accept the wrongs for the sake of a quiet life.
Either we throw a tantrum or else we throw a towel.
After my tweet, I was asked to see the show again by Ontroerend Goed’s director Alexander Devriendt and to take the teens at their word by accepting that they had control over the piece’s content. Watching in this way second time around, in a calmer auditorium that drew more level-headed performances, Teenage Riot became less about its riot and more about its teenagers. What the teenagers said, shouted and did sat behind the way in which they spoke, shouted and behaved. Rather than heeding their polemic and reacting against it on the basis of its flaws, I began to see its shortcomings as the focal point. In other words, rather than watching the show from or by the teenagers, I was watching the show about them: the tantrum shown, rather than the tantrum thrown.
After all, what hope of constructing a piercing social critique when, as one of the song lyrics runs, “I want almost everything.” Besides, as one of the boys says to camera with his back towards us, “what comes out of my mouth never seems to be what I think.”
What emerges is a picture of adolescent frustration that rings true. It is not so much what they try to provoke as that they try to provoke; not such much about understanding their inarticulate formation, as appreciating its inarticulacy. Their Teenage Riot is always pitched at the highest volume, it is all taken to excess. They rail against so much – the way in which teenagers are seen; the identities thrust upon them; the world in which they exist with its various pressures of appearance, sex and behaviour; the world that was created before they arrived, over which they had no say; their own state of ‘not a girl, not yet a women’ inadequacy – that their piece of theatre is inevitably toppled by its own scattergun density. It fails to communicate as a result of (to quote soundtrack’s the final song) “the fury in your head.” This is not a provocation, but a testimony to the teenage need to provoke and the impossibility of doing so.
Essentially, Belgian collective Ontroerend Goed have done a Duchamp. They have framed a piece of theatre and presented it as a living artefact. Unlike Duchamp’s Fontaine, however, the thing presented remains in the same context. There is no signification about its status. Presenting a piece of theatre – warts and all – in a theatre is like showing us a urinal on the wall of the Gents. How are we supposed to know to look differently?
Teenage Riot’s failure comes in not revealing the quotation marks that sit around the whole. There are two frames here. The first exists around the piece made by the teenagers, which, by existing on a stage, can be watched like any other piece of theatre, by seeking meaning in the same way. The second exists around this first frame, and it means that every action on stage carries a second layer of meaning: it matters more as an example of a statement, than as a statement in its own right. However, the outer frame does not enforce its presence and so it’s quite possible to watch Teenage Riot in accordance with the usual rules, the single-frame format, of conventional theatre. To do so, however, is to see Teenage Riot as I did first time around.
This begs a slightly different question of Ontroerend Goed. While it avoids accusations of manipulation, it perhaps raises the question of exploitation. After all, the company are using the actions and words of their teenage cast in a different way than the teenagers intend them. For those words and actions to function, the teenagers must believe that they are genuinely accusing the audience, when in fact they are testifying to themselves and their peers. Everything the cast are driving at seems undermined by its existence in inverted commas.
However, the picture is not quite as clean cut as all that. The boundaries are blurred. After all, the adult members of the company must be quite happy with (some of, if not all) the accusations being made, just as the teenagers must be quite happy to stand as examples of their own frustration. The cast let us know, quite frequently throughout the piece, how hard being a teenager today can be. That difficulty reflects rather badly on the world created by their elders. In those terms, the piece as much an accusation against the adults of Ontroerend Goed as it is the audience. We are all pilloried and vilified, but it is an easy argument to escape and counter. Teenage Riot is as much in the mind as it is outside of their control. The combination is combustible.
Perhaps that’s where the poignancy of their final split exists. After blaming and humiliating us, presenting some of our number onscreen and pelting their images with tomatoes, the teenagers split. Half return to the box, half enter the auditorium. They are each caught for a moment, some more indecisive than others: not wanting to lose the righteousness that senses the problems with the world, but wanting to escape the fury in their heads. As one girl suggests, even as an adult “I’ll say I’m as angry as a fourteen year old.” The tragedy is that we can’t have a happy medium. Either we exist in the box, struggling with our own frustrations, or we come to accept the wrongs for the sake of a quiet life.
Either we throw a tantrum or else we throw a towel.
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