FESTIVAL THEATRE | Coni rmation HEARTS AND
‘Everybody thinks they’re right to the same extent’
Yasmin Sulaiman chats to Fringe First-winners Rachel Chavkin and Chris Thorpe about their fi rst collaboration, a provocative examination of confi rmation bias
S eparately, Rachel Chavkin and Chris Thorpe have been behind some of the most exciting Fringe shows of the past decade. As artistic director of New York’s the TEAM, Chavkin has impressed audiences and critics alike with genre-bending triumphs like Architecting (2008) and Mission Drift (2011). Thorpe’s The Oh Fuck Moment (co-written with Hannah-Jane Walker) won a Fringe First in 2011, and last year’s There Has Possibly Been an Incident received plaudits too. But this year, they’re teaming up for the i rst time on Coni rmation – a complex show that’s the result of rigorous research on coni rmation bias.
For the uninitiated, coni rmation bias is the impulse that human beings have towards favouring information that coni rms the beliefs they already hold. Thorpe, who writes and performs the solo show, was inspired by ‘a fascination with the psychological processes that we use to receive information’, and in Coni rmation, he hopes to ignite a conversation with the audience about his i ndings.
76 THE LIST FESTIVAL 31 Jul–7 Aug 2014
Thorpe and Chavkin – who became friends through their involvement in the National Student Drama Festival – embarked on a wide research process. Thorpe spent time working with academics at the University of Warwick and both were strongly inl uenced by Daniel Kahneman’s bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow and Jonathan Haidt’s acclaimed book The Righteous Mind. But Thorpe also spent part of the research period with a white supremacist in order to test his own liberal coni rmation bias. ‘Part of it was trying to interact with what I would consider to be extreme viewpoints,’ he explains, ‘an attempt to have a specii c conversation with a person who held views that I absolutely disagreed with but was actually quite similar to me in a lot of respects. Socially, economically – on the surface there wouldn’t appear to be so much between us given our experiences and our backgrounds, yet we’ve ended up so far apart. So it was necessary to have what I’m characterising as “honourable dialogue” with someone, an open series of
conversations.’
However, both Thorpe and Chavkin are well aware of the dangers of giving an extreme viewpoint a platform. ‘We talked a lot about the responsibilities of doing this,’ says Chavkin, who directs the piece. ‘I think Chris was even more sensitive to it than I was, because America has slid so far in terms of really heinous viewpoints being given not just airspace but often equal airspace.’
‘So it was something I pushed on because I wasn’t sure whether it was, as a liberal, about seeking to have your own bias about the right coni rmed. Finding someone who’s going to say the worst things possible – now, that is almost a line in the show. Talking about how to approach these ideas ended up really shaping the dialectic that Chris has in the piece, as he argues with himself about what he’s doing and unpacks it.’ The experience has helped Thorpe escape the knee-jerk reaction of “Everyone would think like me if they were as well-informed as I am” - and that’s bullshit actually,’ he says. ‘You quickly