Fringe 2025 reflections #2: we’re all content creators now

Ontroerend Goed arrived at the Fringe this year with Thanks for Being Here - a show that makes the act of simply being present its focus. With a few cameras, some pre-recorded material, and a projector screen, we found ourselves watching ourselves watching ourselves. Strangely, it was moving. If I’m honest, maybe I didn’t want to enjoy it, but I found myself very much on board.

Why, you might ask, did I not want to enjoy it? Well, because it raises an uncomfortable question: what is the work of an artist? And, if we slip into a transactional model for a moment, what exactly is the experience we’re exchanging our time for?

I’ve always been suspicious of the idea that audiences are ‘passive’. During my MA I was introduced to Jacques Rancière’s ‘The Emancipated Spectator’. His point is that watching is active, not passive. As you spectate, your brain is always working – processing, evaluating, resisting, drifting…he even suggests that the mistaken idea of a ‘passive audience’ was what pushed theatre-makers like Brecht to create forms such as epic theatre.

Photo: Carla Keen. My friends and colleagues Mark and Erica in our show A Bluffer's Guide to Being Human

If we go by the Cambridge Dictionary’s definition, to be passive is ‘not to acting to influence or change a situation; allowing others to be in control’. By that measure, watching Thanks for Being Here, we were passive. We were present, but our presence altered nothing. The show unfolded as it had each previous time without any intervention from us. And yet, arguably unlike traditional theatre, we were necessary: the show could not exist without us as its subjects. So have we, in this show, been commodified - repackaged and resold to ourselves as content? And what does that say about a world where we are already sharing ourselves online every day?

It also makes me wonder about the fundamentals of what we expect from an experience. Take one of my other favourite topics: board games. You buy one, open the box, and grumble at how little you get for the price. Then you play it, and it’s brilliant. Does the lack of ‘stuff’ matter if the experience is great? Flip it around: what if the box is full of elaborate pieces and complex rules, but the game itself is boring? Which feels more valuable? Maybe the real question is whether we value the visible labour that went into something, or whether value is found only in the experience it gives us.

Is Thanks for Being Here less performance and more provocation? What happens when the ‘content’ is us? Do we feel cheated - or strangely satisfied? The uncomfortable truth is that we’ve already accepted this deal everywhere else: on Instagram, on TikTok, in the endless churn of self-as-content. I think Ontroerend Goed just had the audacity to put it on stage.