Recently, Jochem van den Berg saw for the first time how the public of The pin looks like live. Until then, it had mainly been “numbers on a dashboard”, now the numbers were people and he was in between during De Speld theater show in De Kleine Komedie in Amsterdam. “They all looked really good.”
Van den Berg is editor-in-chief of the satirical news platform De Speld and instigator of the theater show of the same name that will travel through the country until the summer. The official kick-off is on April 12 in Utrecht. Van den Berg is not too nervous about the reactions yet: “We will notice how sensitive I am to the reactions when the harsh reviews roll in.”
De Speld became known for quick satire, concise bits in which a suggestive headline is a main ingredient. The aim of the theater show was to take a trip to longer arches and more depth without losing the spirit of De Speld, says Van den Berg. “With all its consequences.” There were those consequences. Van den Berg speaks of a ‘long and instructive’ process: „I have been working on it for about three years now, an absurdly long period for me. I’m used to coming up with something in the morning and sending it out into the world in the afternoon.”
volatile consumption
While the pieces by De Speld are partly a reaction to a media landscape in which fleeting news consumption is the trump card, Van den Berg did not think it would be very interesting to translate this concept directly to the theatre. “Media criticism has been ubiquitous for some time now, not least at De Speld. It was therefore thought that it would be better to try to translate the spirit of De Speld to the stage. The starting point for the performance was ‘reliable news of tomorrow’, as a variation on the De Speld motto ‘reliable news of today’. The research of the book published in 2019 The future: the book was used for further embroidery.
Leopold Witte (known from Orkater and as a member of De Verleiders, ed.) was recruited as a director and Van den Berg and a group of fellow writers plunged into the writing process. “We were encouraged to write a story first, then the jokes and satire would come naturally. It took us the greatest effort to write a plot.” When it was finished, a lecture followed with the actors: “There was a long silence and then one of the actors said: why did you write a story? The bad thing was that I knew he was right.”
The idea of a performance about the future remained intact, but the written plot disappeared in the trash. Meanwhile, Van den Berg had been ‘tinkering’ with the algorithm GPT3, a huge language file capable of generating fiction and even poetry. The idea arose to have the performance co-written by the algorithm. Getting the algorithm to write the entire performance was difficult given her bloodthirsty nature: “Sometimes brilliant things come out, but it also quickly becomes murderous because that algorithm has read too much crime news.” It was eventually conceived to have GPT3 write the main lines of the scenes, it became the dramaturgical framework of the performance. Subsequently, the writers of De Speld continued with this basis and a lot was also changed on the floor by the actors. Van den Berg: “It’s Dutch theater culture, isn’t it, then the text is never sacred.”
female seed
It resulted in hundreds of scenes and sketches about a world of tomorrow that is still in the making. Stigers that may never come off, but can be seen in ‘the most reliable performance ever’. So we see a scene about female sperm, men have become redundant here in producing offspring. The national government has also set up a new ‘Ministry of Security’. Each evening, the algorithm determines which of the hundreds of scenes the actors should play, says Van den Berg. “The actors are led by the algorithm.”
Van den Berg is happy with the end result: “On the one hand, we wanted to give the audience recognizable De Speld elements, but also an original and daring performance that makes you think about it a little longer and which at the same time entertains. We went through the mud for a long time about how to do this, but in the end result I see all the starting points.” And did he recommend partially outsourcing the writing process to an algorithm? “If you want to write with some kind of genius lunatic with no worldview or morals, I can wholeheartedly recommend it.”
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