Fight Night

Fight Night is a political and fun exploration in immersion. The show places five actors in the position of competing "candidates" in order to gain sympathy and, finally, the vote of the spectators. Only one of them will survive the relentless succession of eliminations. All tactics and possible strategies will be implemented to win the victory.

The competition, which takes place on a platform reminiscent of a boxing ring, does not appeal to fists, but to words and looks. The public, equipped with a voting box, decides who can stay and who must leave, but gradually gets stuck in a complex and confusing system of rules and manipulation. As in a media-tized political campaign, opinion polls, electoral forecasts, debates and other offensives of charm undermine the loyalty and the good sense of the voters, and their notion of free will.

If Fight Night is a resolutely political show, it is never explicit. The candidates do not express any particular ideology and do not deal with any social or economic reality. Removing any identifiable political message of the speech, the show draws attention to the reasons and motivations voters to vote in a certain way. This is about how the concept of "sovereignty of the people" is put into practice in our democratic societies Contemporary. Fight Night shows us how certain ideas become relevant only by being statistically displayed and allow access to power thanks to the weight of the numbers.

As in Audience (Ontroerend Goed, 2011), spectators are installed in the heart of dramaturgy. While in Audience, they were "white-hot" to form a mass that confronted with the beauty and the danger of the collective behavior, in Fight Night they become voters possessing unprecedented power over the unfolding of the show allowing them to fight a way through the random and the irrational, the attention and the conscience–and thus to accede to the majority.

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