Manchester Premiere
Each of us is just one in a million,
easy to replace and easy to forget
in a city that doesn’t really need us.
But don’t worry.
We’re going to change all that.
We’ve got a plan.
This city will need us and this film will be our witness.
Super Night Shot begins exactly one hour before you arrive at the theatre when Gob Squad take to the streets. Their cause? The war on anonymity. Their choice of weapon? Video cameras. Their mission? To produce a moment of pure emotion and passion.
As cigarette butts, graffiti, cars and buildings become props and facades the local people become extras, potential friends, lovers or liberators. Anything is possible. Gob Squad seek out the hero in each of us and show us how possible it really is to live out your dreams. Every show is as totally unique as the city in which it is filmed and the people who inhabit it. Everyone who appears on screen plays their part. ‘Real life’ is seen in the widescreen format of the latest Hollywood blockbuster as the shiny, artificial surfaces of the digital world come to convey powerful emotions of longing and desire.
Gob Squad’s work playfully looks at the construction of contemporary identity and the need for fantasy and spectacle in making sense of everyday life. Super Night Shot is a completely unpredictable show that elevates the every day into the epic and plays with your perceptions of the familiar. Anything can happen, and usually does.
A multi-screen video event filmed one hour before the audience arrives, containing no cuts or edits and produced with four video cameras by four performers. Starting off at base camp (greenroom), all cameras are synchronized to record at the same time. Then in a military style brief, the performers declare ‘A War On Anonymity’ before taking to the city streets on a set of magical adventures that celebrate unplanned meetings with strangers.
After its highly acclaimed premiere in Berlin, Super Night Shot was one of the top ten best shows and continues to wage its war in various cities all over the world.
Gob Squad are a collective of international artists who have been working with performance, installation and media since 1994. Based in Nottingham, Hamburg and Berlin, the company have produced live art in urban sites such as offices, houses, shops, railway stations and hotels as well as galleries and theatres.
With an international reputation for making culturally savvy, sharply ironic performance characterised by a desire to place the beautiful in the mundane, Gob Squad often site home made magic and spectacle next to the banality of everyday life. Often bringing together a dizzying range of high and low brow sources with a diverse range of artistic skills resulting in an eclectic means of expression that can take the form of radio soundscape, internet projects, video installation, party events, live film or theatre shows.
Their quoting of popular culture is both celebratory and ambivalent, highlighting a failure to fulfil the desires that culture fuels. They thematically examine the interplay between irony and sincerity, truth and forgery, art and reality with a sense of humour that aims to entertain as well as provoke, and their work can be seen as a playful examination of identity and the need for fantasy in making sense of contemporary urban existence.
At the heart of any project is a performance aesthetic and an attempt to create a live experience that directly engages and often interacts with audiences and public on a number of levels. Rather than passively consuming, Gob Squad audiences often take on active roles that create special relationships to the art works.
For more information about Gob Squad go to: www.gobsquad.com
