Six Degrees of Separation
Could you describe your relationship to Nottingham?
We, that is the English contingent of Gob Squad, all studied at Nottingham Polytechnic. They’re formative years aren’t they? Sarah and Sean fell in love and Berit and Johanna visited from Giessen and they all fell in love and Alex and Liane and Simon fell in love so Gob Squad was a love child born in Nottingham. Nottingham was a place where we had our minds blown by experimental art and music and performance and far out cultural theories. We broke hearts and got them broken and did expressive dancing at all night parties. Nottingham is LSD down by the river and running naked for a dare through the graveyard and danger night at Goose Fair and jazz breakfasts at the Old Angel.
What do you remember of the artist-led activity of Nottingham? Who were the active proponents? Is there a group / project / event / exhibition
that was memorable?
The Expo Festival was a really important festival for us, and nationally. Expo was Gob Squad’s first professional gig. It was a fantastic platform for new, young artists.
It took risks and invited artists to take risks, taking a gamble on a great idea or process, and being less concerned about product. It’s a different world now. Simon Will was the active proponent. He ran the festival for 6 or 7 years (before joining Gob Squad). So much great work came through Nottingham because of that festival, early works by Lisa Wesley, Joshua Sofar, Clare Shilito, YumLoo, Caroline Locke, Nancy Reilly, Miles Chalcraft, Max Factory, Lone Twin, Sophie Fishwick… and so many more.
Nottingham became a hot bed for new work because of Expo. We saw bigger things too at Powerhouse and the Playhouse. Doug Elkins, Bobby Baker, Forced Entertainment…
Nottingham woke us up to all this.
It often feels with your projects you are actively attempting induce some action from your audience, action which is not necessarily tokens of participation but that they are written in to the unfurling narrative somehow. What are the most important materials for you in taking your audience with you in this way?
Much of Gob Squad’s work attempts to frame reality, to show what is exquisite in the everyday. We use the tropes of popular culture, of film and music and fashion to try to highlight the beautiful uniqueness of people and moments. So it’s not that we want to provoke a certain kind of action from someone, we just want to make an ordinary moment extraordinary. The aim is to build frames around situations so they can exist more-or-less as they are.
We practice and discuss a lot about the way we approach people. In terms of ‘materials’, a sense of humor is good, humility, good ears and a genuine interest in people all help if you want to talk to strangers.
Some people are more open to meetings, either on the street or in a theatre, and it’s good to take time to read this, to see if someone returns your gaze or casts their eyes down, whether they smile and look interested or not. These are simple things, it just takes a little time and care. Often having a camera helps – there is something about this mediation. In a theatre, the use of a camera and a screen can both magnify a moment and create a special intimacy, a closeness occurs behind the privacy of a screen (see Kitchen). In the street, if you’re carrying a camera it’s easier to approach people.
The camera helps people to not think we are crazies, and helps us, I can use it, talk into a camera rather than talking into thin air. A camera, or a costume, or both, act as signifiers. They say ‘I’m in another reality’ and then there is an invitation to step, for a moment, into another situation, one with slightly different rules.
You’ve been together for a long time now. I’m curious about your process for devising new work?
We try to do chunks of working periods, say, three weeks in a studio then time off for reflection and also for touring, then three weeks back in a studio. Maybe there are twelve weeks working time altogether over about 12 months. We discuss at length the kind of direction we want to go in. There are seven members and it’s a collective that wants to work by consensus. We discuss where we are in our lives, artistically,
privately etc, and try to find a common ground from which a new project can start to grow.
What are you currently reading fiction and / or non-fiction?
We are all reading Infinite Jest by David Foster-Wallace as well as I am Red by Orhan Pamuk, Pip Pip by Jay Griffiths, A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, Schoßgebete by Charlotte Roche, One Day by David Nicholls, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative by Judith Butler and the autobiography
of Werner Schroeter.
What are you currently working on?
We are working on a new project, which at the moment we’re calling Dancing About. There’s dancing in it. Dancing for the love of it, like amateurs, from the Latin Amare, to love… to do something for the love of it. We’re in the first phase of rehearsals so we’re giving everything a try. The dances are framed by confessions, stories of shame, humiliation and addictions. We are trying to use dancing as a way of stepping forward and standing up for things. It’s brilliant because we spend all day dancing and telling each other our most embarrassing stories. Dance begins to serve as a subtext, our idiosyncratic, untrained bodies tell so much towards and against the stories we speak.
