Review: Gob Squad jesters reel in REDCAT audience with mixed results

The one thing you can count on with Gob Squad, the always-surprising European performance collective now at REDCAT, is that the audience won’t be excluded from the multimedia act.

Screens are integral to Gob Squad’s aesthetic, but there’s hardly an impregnable divide between those creating the work and those viewing it. These performers are friendly experimentalists, eager to demystify their avant-garde antics by making spectators privy to the process of creation.

For the company’s production of “Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good),” a homage-collage of Andy Warhol films presented at REDCAT in 2012, the audience was given a tour of the set before the performance began and a chosen few were cast in roles.

For “Super Night Shot,” which concluded its run of four performances last weekend, theatergoers were asked to line up on both sides of the lobby to offer a hero’s welcome to ensemble members as they entered REDCAT after shooting videos for the last hour of random encounters with strangers in downtown L.A. The films were then presented simultaneously for artists and audiences alike inside the theater, with the sound mixed live to shape a narrative out of the material.

And for the U.S. premiere of “Western Society,” which runs through Saturday, stuffed animals were thrown into the audience and the lucky (or unlucky, depending on your nature) recipients were invited to join the performers in their re-creation of a home video that may be “the least watched” offering on YouTube. Set in Santa Barbara, which sounds to this British-German troupe like the westernmost part of the world, the home video shows a group of anonymous people gathered around a karaoke machine. “California Dreamin’” figures prominently in this heavily annotated reenactment.

“Super Night Shot” and “Western Society” are more about the process of making performance works, the elaboration of an idea through improvisational strategies and the collaborative encounter with unique communities, than the presentation of finished products. Each time one of these works is performed it is being created anew for a distinct audience. The sense of “liveness” is of paramount importance.

With “Super Night Shot,” the performers carefully synchronize their 60 minutes of filming to end with their grand entrance initiating “the show.” With “Western Society,” the audience is reminded of the exact date of the performance, suggesting that today’s rendering will be significantly different from tomorrow’s.

The narrative “content” of both pieces has a loopy charm, though it wears thin. The “story” in both scenarios never really gets going. It isn’t supposed to. The mode is exploratory, self-referential and spontaneous within structured parameters. What’s more, the company has a penchant for cul de sacs requiring awkward reversals.

Boredom, especially with “Western Society,” which stretches close to the two-hour mark without intermission, becomes preponderant. This may be only natural for a company that prizes the way banality throws into relief the remarkable, but tedium is tedium. The last 45 minutes of “Western Society,” scattershot, self-indulgent and belaboring, felt like a trial. The few fleeting remarkable moments would have been more remarkable with some editing.

Slighter but more successful, “Super Night Shot” involves Gob Squad on an urban rescue mission to save everyday Angelenos from the cruel fate of anonymity. Berit Stumpf, Mat Hand, Sean Patten, and Johanna Freiburg set out on the gritty streets between the Los Angeles Theatre Center and REDCAT to make a collective movie. Searching for a hero and a perfect locale for a big finale involving romance and cutesy animal masks, the performers chat one on one with homeless people, religious zealots, weary local residents and tourists looking for kicks.

What made these encounters fascinating to watch wasn’t so much the reaction of bewildered strangers but the uneasy overtures of the artists, who not only don’t look like professional actors but often appear hesitant, embarrassed and not sure how to move their aimless movie forward. The affectionate awkwardness of “Super Night Shot” redeploys the self-effacing courtesy that’s demanded by city life. In trying to momentarily alleviate the alienation of urban invisibility, they expose the naked vulnerability of our social condition.

“Western Society,” co-presented with Center Theatre Group, begins with numbers on a screen counting down the years from a million before marching upward to the present. Company members, styled like glam rock stars in heels, wigs and eventually (they start off in the nude) clothes, introduce us to a home video that on the surface would seem to carry no special significance or public interest.

But from this dull social gathering Gob Squad extracts a kind of history of Western civilization. The identities of these figures are imagined and reimagined. Audience members are asked to stand in certain spots on stage to help flesh out the original scene. Roles are assigned and reassigned. In between, performers ask each other either/or questions (coffee maker or children? Al Qaeda or ISIS?) that presumably attempt to uncover something about our decadent development as a species.

The organized informality of these proceedings is humorous at first but increasingly the audience is put in the position of having to humor the artists. Watching audience volunteers handle their onstage tasks is entertaining for only so long. Prolonged riffs in the last half hour give the sense of a company casting about desperately for higher meaning.

Gob Squad is notable for producing highly conceptual performance work that is warm, fun and accessible. There’s nothing coldly avant-garde about this group, which seems to skip amicably into projects. A bit more formal discipline, however, would provide a more agreeable showcase for its refreshing heart.

Twitter: @charlesmcnulty