Gob Squad: Western Society

Gob Squad's Western Society can cause some issues for a reviewer wanting to give a comprehensive, rounded commentary on the performance. Especially if that reviewer was presented with a cuddly tiger about a quarter of the way through and then spent the rest of the show dancing on stage wearing giant headphones or drinking champagne. With this in mind, here's a dual review from me, as an unknowing participant performer, and Ollie Smith as the audience. Gotta love that audience participation.

 

Ollie: Gareth Morgan, original LeftLion reviewer for Gob Squad’s Western Society, approached me after the show: “You’re gonna have to help me with this review, mate.”  Fair enough.  The guy had been on stage dancing like a granny for most of the performance.  And as much as I’d now like to write a few hundred words critiquing the shapes Gareth was throwing, I’ll behave.

 

In typical Gob Squad style, Western Society is a technological feast of live camera projections and secret stage directions whispered, radio-mic-to-headset, to randomly selected members of the audience. Staged similarly to Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) the piece takes place in another re-imaged domestic setting: this time, a living room.  Special-mention kudos to the unsung techie heroes who quietly orchestrate all the AV alchemy.

 

After a quick recap of the last 1,000,000 years of humanity, from coarse prehistory to our even worse modern day, we’re introduced to “the least watched video on YouTube”: about three minutes of a family karaoke party, in which seven anonymous revellers behave in the most painfully normal way.  (A quintessential embodiment of what life in the West has become.)  As the audience, we’re not permitted to view the video itself: lawyers have warned that the invasion of privacy could have complicated legal ramifications.  What is allowed, however, is a complex, repeated re-enactment of the clip by any combination of company members or “lucky winners” (Gareth) who are invited up on stage – or screen – and immersed in a hyperreal, Groundhog Day-esque loop.

 

Western Society is an enormously entertaining visual exploration of the seam between the real and the fake.  Or maybe between the real and the imitation.  Or simulation.  Or re-presented representation.  Or authentic fake – which, by turn, is actually real.  Or something. 

 

Part-film remake, part-confessional faux family history, this piece manages to be a biting societal critique that simultaneously tugs heartstrings with poignantly intimate personal revelations: macro and micro at once.  Charismatically performed and stylishly executed, this is trashy, glitzy, poppy performance for a modern era which is constantly drawing on the past for identity, yet striving forward for a seemingly unattainable utopia future.  The catchphrase refrain, “What are we doing here?” can be read in literal terms, (i.e. what are the performers doing), or in more quasi-existential terms.

 

But I risk making the show sound dry and overly intellectual.  It isn’t.  It’s fun, funny and smart – if a little long.  Perhaps trimming the opening would pack a tighter snowball. Regardless, Western Society is another victory of bold and exciting programming from the NEAT14 festival team. More like this please.  But without Gareth dancing.

 

Gareth: Not long after the introduction of the YouTube video, I was thrown a cuddly toy and invited onto stage. Me and six others were given golden headphones which pumped our instructions into our ears. The idea was simple, recreate the video through diligently and compliantly follow the instructions. If you do, you get champagne ("not the cheap stuff") and Ferrero Rocher. One of the questions asked of the performers, before I was plucked from the seating, was 'on a scale of one to ten how much are you part of the problem?' - In helping recreate a copy was I assisting the problem of inauthenticity? In my dancing, eating of cake or miming of changing the track on the karaoke machine, which I was being ordered to do via the headphones, did I not relinquish me? Did I become just a part of the copy?

 

No, I didn't, I don't think - I had a real experience in the re-enactment with the others from the audience. Our grannies, or remote control guys, or cake ladies (the characters that we played) became imprinted with as much of us as with the 'part' we tried to recreate. Equally, what I missed in the performance was recompensed in receiving a different speech from the headphones and being part of the spectacle. My experience was different from Ollie's but no less a show that I watched unfold, but from a different, and in some ways more privileged, vantage point.  This was Gob Squad's real success: to create two shows for two different audiences who came in as one; this only working due to their warmth as performers, the precise technical elements and the skill and cleverness contained in the concept. It was two hours which made me think, made me question and made me dance with my arms outstretched like an aeroplane with absolute strangers. I don't do that for just anybody - Gob Squad are special. 

Western Society was on at Nottingham Contemporary as part of NEAT14 on Sunday 25 May 2014.

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