I think that Gob Squad sound pretty cool. They only did one piece in Tramway- the big party in a tent piece Say It Like You Mean It. There is a video of the performance on-line: it looks like a disco with occasional outbursts of obscure ritual.
Apparently, it is set at the end of the world, and the six actors are stuck in a forest with limited resources, trying to decide what to do next. There is a beautifully concise description of the show in their archives. It was probably written to explain the idea to promoters.
Say It Like You Mean It creates a make-believe environment in a tent set deep in an imaginary forest. Gob Squad announce the end of the world and ask the remaining survivors to build a new future out of sellotape and cardboard. Protective clothing, new schools, a transport system and the internet are made. Gob Squad make rousing speeches throughout the evening and people are invited to ‘let go’ in order to be 'in the moment'. Some people make guns, while others make an incubator for a baby which will be born imminently. At the same time, participants are invited to step out and view the situation from outside the marquee through special eyeholes while listening to a commentary on the event. Finally a commemorative ceremony is held to celebrate the first day of the new world. The evening is re-played back to them from the start in digital images.
Sellotape and cardboard- for a company based in Germany, they can be very Blue Peter. All of the classic features of avant-garde theatre are present: the audience gets involved, the company’s name sounds a bit punk, the atmosphere is somewhere between threatening and celebratory and multi-media is alleged. They would go on to tackle reality television, but it looks as if they were already exploring some sort of reality theatre back in 2001.
The press release is delightful.
“Say It Like You Mean It builds on the twentieth century live art tradition of the Happening from Dada, the artists of Fluxus, Richard Schenechner and Hermann Nietsch (sic), but it also draws on wider cultural forms like the party or the family reunion.”
I love the combination of innocence- the party- and academic justifications: together they sound like a six year old birthday girl suddenly busting out a series of epistemological meditations. And so much Live Art is in that mood- child-like, charming but sincere and demanding.
The release goes on to admit that they are being deliberately childlike. The piece can never hope to really achieve its aim- to persuade the eighty audience members to come up with a plan for a new society in under two hours. What they are interested in, however, is how far they can go. They claim that they’d gently mock religion and politics, and thereby ‘wipe the slate clean’.
More than this, though, it seems that Say It repositioned the performers as facilitators. The audience gets to make up their own new song- out of bits of remembered pop songs- build the first building (from a B and Q kit) and eat the first meal. It’s a bit like a playgroup for adults. The final picture of the group creates a false nostalgia for an event that is totally artificial.
I wonder. I wonder how I would have enjoyed it. As an introvert, I hate it when the performers ask me to shout at them. This time, they’d want me to act like I was having fun at the end of the world.