[ssba]
Gob Squad: Super Night Shot
Reviewed by Paul Birchall
REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater)
Closed (other Gob Squad productions continuing)
Gob Squad, the several-person artistic collective quartered in both Berlin and Nottingham, brings their brand of Monty Python-esque subversive sensibility to Los Angeles in a series of four different performances at REDCAT. For their first effort, the four person ensemble presents what appears to be one of their classic routines – a made-to-order video installation that they’ve been doing since 1999.
About an hour before the audience arrives for the show, the four Gob Squadders set out from the Los Angeles Theatre Center downtown, each member armed with his or her own video camera. Each performer films his or her 60-minute odyssey through the downtown LA streets.
For us, the members of the audience, the show starts even before we enter the theater, as the usher stands everyone in a line, hands out noisemakers and confetti and trains us to cheer as the four performers arrive at REDCAT, as they film us with their cameras. When they arrive, filming us as the last moments in the video that they’ve been making in the street, they’re in their underwear. Why? We can’t help but wonder. The answer, of course, is given as we file into the theater and watch the now completed film projected onto the screen.
Each of the four films is shown simultaneously in split-screen, in the style of Mike Figgis’s seminal split-screen drama Timecode, and each has been carefully synchronized to the second with all of the others.
In one film, beautiful performer Johanna Freiburg wanders the area around Fifth and Spring streets, searching for people whose lives she can improve.
In another, outgoing, but increasingly desperate Berit Stumpf interviews passers-by on the streets, hoping to find one who will be willing to give Johanna a kiss that will prove the worthiness of humanity.
Sean Patten, a cheerful, mustachioed fellow with the persona of a Hippie, sneaks his camera around the town, putting up pictures of Johanna, whom he seems to want to turn into a Goddess to be worshipped by all Angelinos.
Bewhiskered Mat Hand dons a terrifying mask and wanders around the downtown area doing a dance – it’s a wonder he isn’t shot dead before he can get two blocks.
The video installation is not without charm, particularly since the ease of its presentation belies the simply terrifying amounts of precision and pre-show storyboarding to ensure that all four performers are in just the right place at the right second. However, the films ultimately rely on variables that can’t be predicted — the reactions of the folks on the street, who, in true improv style, are sometimes so dismaying that the performer often seems taken aback by how to react to them.
Of course, in this city of the Hollywood Dream, we are very familiar with the idea of taking cameras to the street and interviewing passers-by. However, downtown LA on a sweltering Saturday evening might not provide the best canvas for such interviews, and the performers often seem forced to interact with parking attendants, security guards, and milling drunks, who either respond to the Gobbers’ approaches with disdain, direct rebuff, or schizophrenic non sequiturs.
It’s also a problem that the show’s basic concept now feels strangely dated in this era of 12-year-olds on Youtube doing similar antics in more interesting locales. As a work of art, the films are actually at their most involving not during the scenes in which the actors desperately try to interview LA folks, but during the more surreal moments: A sequence in which all four actors simultaneously stop wherever they are and dance around to some oddly celestial music while the LA traffic whirls around them is powerful, for instance; as is another in which all four abruptly succumb to some sort of existential despair that forces each to sit on the curb wherever they are. In these moments, the video achieves an indefinable beauty that is definitely evocative.
Otherwise, though, the piece comes across as being a little tired – but we must be aware that this might be the result of the night, the crowd, and, indeed, of the sometimes intimidating attitude of Los Angeles itself.
REDCAT, 631 West 1st Street, Los Angeles. CLOSED (Other Gob Squad productions continue over the next weeks.) (213) 237-2800, redcat.org
