SUPER NIGHT SHOT

Street Squad

Super Night Shot is showing at Studio Underground at the State Theatre Centre of WA from Thursday, February 9, ’til Monday, February 13. Bookings can be made via BOCS.

Part performance art, part documentary, Super Night Shot is a raw and honest encounter with the streets of Northbridge and the people who populate them. For five consecutive nights European film collective Gob Squad will wage a guerilla attack on anonymity in Perth, using nothing but their cameras and a smile to break down the boundaries between themselves and the strangers around them.

Every night, an hour before each show is about to begin, four filmmakers will take to the streets, talking to strangers and listening to their stories. Their results form the basis of that evening’s performance: a candid and honest examination of the streets of Northbridge. Accompanying the films is a soundtrack designed by Sebastian Bark and Jeff McGrory; giving the documentaries a fantastical sense of dramaturgy and Hollywood surrealism.

Gob Squad member Sarah Thom describes Super Night Shot as an opportunity to step outside the comfort zone that is built by existing without encountering the unknown. “We’re prepared to embrace the stranger in that time, and by embracing the stranger we hope to break down the barriers that humans can create,” she says.

“We’ve got two audiences – one out in the street, that we encounter by chance, and the other is the audience who come to watch in the theatre, who are sort of witnesses to what we have found.”

This is not the first time the Gob Squad collective have taken to the streets of Australia. Super Night Shot has been performed in Melbourne, Sydney as a part of the Sydney Festival, and at Brisbane’s World Theatre Festival. Each of these performances has celebrated the streets of the city it is in, and each of them has been completely different from every other performance.

“Each city brings so much that’s completely new to the piece, that every time we do it it feels like an entirely new piece,” says Thom. “For example a Friday night, and everyone’s out drinking, and it’s a hot sunny day, that can be completely different to a Sunday night and it’s raining.”

Super Night Shot is a celebration of its surroundings, and of the people that it encounters. In a sense, the people who have paid for the tickets are watching a show that has already happened: a documentary of fleeting encounters between strangers as they move beyond the awkwardness of social conventions to have a true connection.

“We recognise that we were kind of going over a lot of what you could call fake boundaries, as you were, and we were stepping outside our comfort zone by approaching strangers on the street,” says Thom. “But what we found by doing that, we encountered things that we’d never usually encounter, and that they were really amazing conversations.”

_LEAH BLANKENDAAL