Last night a couple of my friends met me after work for drinks and dancing at Berlin. Amidst a crowd of young sweaty hipster gay boys, my friend and I turned to see a mutual friend of ours standing still, hands over eyes - sobbing. The degree of contrast between his emotive stillness and the thrashing of hands and heads to some cheesy house beats was so visually arresting. It reminded me of this video piece I fell in love with called: Where do you want to go to die? by Gob Squad, the European performance collective.I'm not sure if it was the cheap wine we had been drinking that skewed my perception of time, but things were moving in extreme slow motion. Perhaps it was the doubleness and the in-betweenness of the spectacle of the dancing crowd and the private, wearing physicality of our friend that made my reception of his breakdown feel so extrasensorial. The drama about a lover and his lack of commitment was disclosed later - but it wasn't nearly as dramatic as that fleeting moment on the dance floor. These are the moments Gob Squad is after; small, painfully familiar and of the everyday:
"Gob Squad often place home-made magic and spectacle next to the banality of everyday life, setting theatre and the “real world” on a collision course and capturing the results on video." (from their online artist statement)
No comments:
Post a Comment