I sat in Astor Place with a friend before attending Super Night Shot, as part of this year’s Under the Radar festival, and every once and awhile we would look up curiously, wondering if we would see these folks from Gob Squad wandering the streets filming for the night’s performance. We didn’t, and walked timely into the Public Theater’s crowded lobby. Nothing very different, nothing very expected, just another show. This one featuring video filmed an hour before, by the four members of Gob Squad, then presented to a live audience.
Then the performance, or video rather. Four screens, each one giving us a view from each of the four actors as they left the Public Theater at around 8pm, gearing to be back by 9pm to present what they’d be shot. And so we sit with anticipation, wondering, grinning, somewhat dubious about what they will be able to capture in an hour.
And while it was intriguing to watch in a voyeuristic sense, I kept wondering what it was they were leading to. And slowly, this theme, if you will, began to emerge. I don’t know if it was just our night in particular, or if it is something they pursue with each adventure. But it was there.
CUT TO:
I bid farewell my friend, and head off to the West Village by foot to meet another friend at Johnny’s Bar. However, now something was different. The streets, forgive the sentimentality, were a bit more lonely. Disappointing. And while that subsided as my walk turned into regular, I remember it distinctly upon leaving Astor Place.
As during the performance, I had sat watching the four members of Gob Squad do the simplest thing in this our city of New York. They attempted, and succeeded, in connecting people. Themselves to the people they encountered with their video cameras on the street, then those people and themselves to us in the theater watching.
Several times during the performance, the four “performers” would synchronize in a musical number, often with people walking by in the background, looking at them strangely, as they danced awkwardly. However, what was most engaging was that the people they approached, the strangers they engaged with all smiled upon being spoken to or filmed. There was an open’ness that Gob Squad created in the city that I couldn’t help but feel romantic over. And as Super Night Shot continued, a warm’ness came over me. That feeling you get when somebody impossibly positive does something to pull you from your cynicism and makes you think their worldview is less naive and more wise.
At one point one of the four, Sarah Thom, pointed her camera to a nearby apartment building and wondered what stories were being told in each of the lighted or unlit rooms. Were people crying, or were they happy. She panned her camera around the Village and spoke about how none of us are anonymous, but rather crucial, in our own life story.
CUT TO:
Walking from east to west in the Village. I felt as though the streets the Gob Squad had been adventuring on were more what I wanted to be walking through. I felt like I had just left the romance or magic of a Woody Allen film (hint, hint) and was now going back to my regular life. The everyday of the city. And I wanted that connection to exist in real life as I walked past and through strangers. And it does. But maybe without an actual effort (likely with a video camera and seemingly interesting project) it remains buried by our own walls and neuroses.
The performers referred to Super Night Shot as a ‘War on Anonymity’, and towards the close one of the members summed up what I wanted to walk away with and keep: “If there was no banal, there would be no remarkable.”
Super Night Shot
concept by Gob Squad
performed by Johanna Freiburg, Mat Hand, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost.
produced by Under the Radar
Thru February 5.
For more information: http://publictheater.org/component/option,com_shows/task,view/Itemid,141/id,1046.
Matthew Paul Olmos was recently selected by Sam Shepard as the inaugural awardee of La MaMa ETC’s Ellen Stewart Emerging Playwright Award; he is a Sundance Institute Fellow, two-time Resident Artist at Mabou Mines/Suite, lifetime member at Ensemble Studio Theatre, terraNOVA Groundbreaker Playwright and current Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange where he is developing his absurdist comedy MONKEY, to be presented in April 2012. He is currently writing a 3-play cycle on the U.S/México drug wars entitled “SO GO THE GHOSTS OF MÉXICO. And will present a new work at La MaMa ETC in spring 2013. www.matthewpaulolmos.com.
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