Super Night Shot

Super Night Shot is a multi-screen visual media happening complete with a live-sound mix, which is filmed the very hour before the audience arrives. In true guerrilla auteur style, UK/Germany theatre-making collective Gob Squad sync their watches, pick up their video cameras and take to the streets of Northbridge – Perth’s ‘nightlife’ district – just one hour before start time, to make the show. The film contains no cuts and is produced with four video cameras by four performers. In a search for romance and action, and featuring a man dressed as a rabbit, Super Night Shot makes Perth the location of a new big-screen hit made every night.

Gob Squad declare their aim is to explore the point where theatre meets art, media and real life. Declaring a 'war on anonymity' this tightly synchronised group capture chance encounters in the heart of urban life to create a magical journey in which they and their unwitting co-stars on the street are the heroes. A poem in the program notes declares this ethos openly:

I want to feel important.
Just for a moment I want to be the one who is special.
I don’t want to blend into the crowd – I want to stand out.
I want to be noticed.

Gob Squad’s driving manifesto to be noticed taps into our own need to be a part of something, to be elevated beyond our ordinariness to something like the manufactured appeal of a big-screen adventure: where each banal moment of life can be raised to a meaningful state with a contrived approach, a complete fantasy brought to us with the right angle, the right soundtrack, and a slow-motion tracking shot. The pedestrian becomes the sublime: normally we see Perth and its people as utterly ordinary; however, filtered through a lens, re-contexualised by genre conventions and presented with soft lighting, the ordinary is transformed and transcended by the qualities of myth and grand narrative.

An exciting buzz surrounds the immediacy of the show, where time is crushed and stretched yet also instant. On my way to the theatre, with ten minutes to go before the ‘curtain’ was due to go up, I walked past performer Eric Pold filming his chatter with punters at the open-windowed sill at the Grapeskin Bar. I caught a snippet of this conversation, which had something to do with Tina Turner in Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome. That brief moment was then played back to the audience on a screen half an hour later and the immediacy of the film’s content is quite breathtaking. This is, literally, up-to-the-minute contemporary art.

The splendour of Gob Squad’s approach is their highly organised, template based approach: their work is choreographed precisely, with only small windows of the unknown in their formula. It is a precise and controlled environment with small, serendipitous, moments found with the people on the street.

Such a moment occurs when performer Simon Wells – who is driven to answer the Hero’s call to adventure in this particular night’s creation – is likened to Walter Mitty by a perceptive patron dining at the Bivouac Bar.

A fictional character in James Thurber's short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Mitty is an ordinary, unsuccessful man who indulges in fantastic daydreams of personal triumphs. In the brief glimpses of reality that interrupt Mitty's fantasies the reader meets well-meaning strangers who unconsciously rob Mitty of his remaining dignity. Leaving the man at Bivouac behind, it is not long before several incidences unfold for Wells in this very manner.

Losing himself further and further in his fantasy, Wells transforms into the archetypal Trickster figure, who is often depicted as a Rabbit. Nattily dressed in a white suit and rabbit mask, he takes us further down the figurative rabbit hole into a world where he plays tricks or challenges normal rules and conventional behaviour in his attempt to emerge from the narrative as a heroic figure. Wells is regularly foiled in these attempts, most memorably when his desire to be thrown out of a bar is thwarted by the very fact that he is not allowed in.

The way in which the performers uncover cultural insecurities on Perth’s streets is fascinating. They seemingly tune into our Western, white, middle-class cultural phobias unconsciously, and then reflect it back to us to either acknowledge, or bury in laughter if we are uncomfortable to admit to the portrayal. In random encounters on this night the performers uncover the internal milieu of a populace that continues to struggle with its concepts of masculine identity; of still feeling susceptible to the judgement of the British gentry viewing Australians as mere colonial subjects; and the perceived on-going threat of the indigenous population to its white, middle-class values. It is here where Super Night Shot really packs a punch: sure, it’s funny and clever, but to expose the discomforting truth of many Australians’ feelings beneath the surface is transformative art that agitates and inspires.

The structure of Super Night Shot creates something of a paradox for the audience. After its brief enactment of a scene which welcomes ‘home’ the heroes/performers, it enters a studio space to watch four screens for an hour, watching work that was created in real-time yet viewed via a medium that can manipulate all sense of time. We understand that the content has just been created in the past hour and yet it could have happened weeks, months or years ago by the time we view it due to the very nature of film’s ability to re-shape time. There is also an inherent passivity of the role of an audience that engages with a filmic piece, which is perhaps at odds with Gob Squad’s desire to have the audience step beyond their traditional role as passive spectators. Despite this, Super Night Shot is entertaining, clever and amusing. Its social and cultural excavations are captivating and the experience is full of moments of sheer absurdity and nonsense.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Gob Squad at the Perth International Arts Festival present
Super Night Shot
Concept by & devised by Gob Squad Performers: Mat Hand, Erik Pold, Sarah Thom, Simon Will
Live Sound Mix: Jeff McGrory
Sound Design: Sebastian Bark, Jeff McGrory
Production Management: Eva Hartmann
Touring Management: Mat Hand

Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre WA
10–13 February
Information & bookings: www.perthfestival.com.au

Below: Super Night Shot filmed and 'performed' in Bangalore, India, December 2011.