Gob Squad: Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good). 27.05.2017. HAU 1, Berlin.
How to reconstruct an artwork: it’s framing, lighting, and sound, its atmosphere, its tensions, its norms, and its values? Gob Squad, the seven-member Berlin-based collective, ponders these themes in Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good), in which they reenact for camera a series of Andy Warhol films. At first it’s all goofing off and jokes: recreation is challenging, fraught with disagreements, and generally hilarious. But as the team convinces audience members to take their place, it’s clear that recreation means reinvention, and that generations both social and artistic must seed newer forms. A forced moment with one of the audience members-come-actors is disturbing: in the spirit of reinvention, should not a hug be substituted for a kiss despite the name of the originary film? This unsettling misjudgement lasts throughout the end of the piece, distracting from the otherwise superbly structured and artfully handled work of interactive theatre.
Review by Sasha Amaya for Viereinhalb Sätze.
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