Forget ten years in the making and a team of crack editors, at Super Night Shot your film is freshly sliced and spliced -arriving on the screen only one hour after the cameras start rolling. In their whirlwind improv adventure of a film making expedition, Gob Squad dispatches four camera wielding players out into the city to fulfil their individual missions. Working with whatever Perth throws at them, the masked four have an hour to collect their material and bring it back to the waiting audience where side by side the four perspectives are screened with an accompanying live mix by a most dexterous sound engineer.
Originally from Nottingham, Gob Squad are a Berlin-based performance collective. Since claiming the accolade of the ‘best show of 2003’, their show, Super Night Shot, has toured the world, allowing the ebb and flow of new cities and cultures to permeate the flexible structure.
According to Gob Squad founder, Bastian Trost ‘the skeleton of the project is so strong that reality can give it flesh’ however shooting an improvised film dressed in underpants and an animal mask can provide some interesting challenges – such as the run-in with the surprising ‘no underpants in public’ law in Brazil that required the cast to make a quick change into state-sanctioned bikinis.
The significance of being at the theatre of being part of the now, and the experience is critical to Super Night Shot. Because people, according to Trost, ‘want to see the realness of it and Gob Squad is really giving it to them by taking these unique moments involving audience members or involving the passers-by where you really see this is only happening tonight, that this is not repeatable.’
‘So it’s a little Polaroid of the moment, of the city; you witness four performers trying to fight this war against anonymity – giving the city, Perth in this case, a moment of passion and liberation. That’s our aim, you know we always have these big aims… and then you see us fail….’
Super Night Shot runs from 10-13th February 2012. See www.perthfestival.com.au for details.
Writer Zoe Carter, image by Prudence Upton
