A Lecture Performance all about Authenticity, Truth, Fiction and the Collective Identity, followed by a film screening of Gob Squad’s Live Long And Prosper.

“Just be yourself, be true to yourself, follow your dreams and reach for the stars”. This is the mantra of a generation that prizes individuality as the ultimate expression of freedom. But who is this “self” that you think you are? How did you come to be what you think you are? What makes you you? And what happens when we venture outside the concept of the “unique self”?

Using text, video archive and soundtrack, this performance-lecture takes the audience through a telling of the collective processes, big ideas and vivid memories shared by Gob Squad throughout more than 30 years of working together. The group lifts the lid on their participatory performances – where the boundaries between audience and performers often disappear completely.

Soon after the lecture begins, Gob Squad leave the authority of the lectern behind and audience members take their place. The physical identity of Gob Squad shifts amongst audience members who collude in the re-telling and re-construction of stories, interviews and scenes. Identities shift as their bodies stand in for other bodies.

The collective identity unfolds via a playful, experiential perspective as more and more people get involved. Using a technique Gob Squad call ‘remote acting’, what begins as a straightforward lecture ends up as a moving meditation on the nature of the self. The ‘remote actors’ move in the paradoxical terrain between surrender and self-determination, loss of control and the desire to rule. It’s an experience poised between curiosity, courage, readiness to take a chance, and the charged relationship between infantile freedom and a shared responsibility for everything taking place.

The performance is followed by a screening of Gob Squad’s two-screen film Live Long and Prosper (20 min). Seven film sequences are restaged by seven performers across the city of Berlin. Shown on two screens, the original scenes and Gob Squad’s re-enactments become a cinematic game of “spot the difference” as the company explores themes of death and dying. The screening is included in the evening’s programme. Read more about the film here: https://www.gobsquad.com/projects/live-long-and-prosper/

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