The Passing of Time

Lyn Gardner reflects on Festival story ‘The Passing of Time’ and how it relates to Gob Squad as they return with their seminal show Super Night Shot fifteen years later.

Gob Squad’s homecoming to Norwich with Super Night Shot, one of the AngloGerman company’s most popular and widely travelled shows, is poignant in many ways. For a start, the company very seldom return to make the show twice over in the same city. But doing so offers an opportunity to ref lect on how Norwich has transformed since they were here in 2005, how the world has shifted, and how they themselves have changed with the passing years. When Gob Squad first made Super Night Shot in Norwich they were in their midthirties, now most of the company is pushing 50. More of their lives are behind them than in front of them. Inevitably that impacts on the show. While they may still describe themselves as “provocative fools” going out into the city to “wage a war against anonymity”, intervening in its life and making connections with and between its inhabitants, they no longer have the swagger of youth. There are losses in that, but perhaps also gains.

“We often think of the piece as putting an ornate frame around a slice of reality.”

As founder Gob Squad member Sean Patten says: “Maybe we listen better. Maybe we are better at cutting through the noise of the city and finding what’s under it.” But if Gob Squad has grown older, a process that they have continually charted through their work over the last quarter of a century, time and cultural shifts also impact on the context in which they now make Super Night Shot. In Norwich in 2005 there would have been no selfie-sticks and no smart phones. Now everyone films themselves all the time, more

suspicious of being approached in the street, more aware of an image’s commercial and cultural value. That can make Gob Squad’s job more difficult but also more necessary. Super Night Shot lets us glimpse the heroic in the everyday, in the people and corners of the city that we never notice as we hurry on by self-absorbed in our own busy lives with eyes glued to screens and ear pods in. It is a piece that brings people together in many different ways: on the streets; in the act of watching it together as an audience. “We often think of the piece as putting an ornate frame around a slice of reality. So, what we are doing is putting a frame around 60 minutes of Norwich so we can look at it in all its complexity, warts and all,” explains Patten. “Our mission is to bring people together. Gob Squad is and always has been about trying to find a social connection. With Super Night Shot we intervene in people’s lives and you never know what the consequences are after we have left the city.”

Fifteen years ago, while filming Super Night Shot in Norwich, they encountered a man who had just moved to the city and had no friends. So, the company did some instant social engineering, finding two other people, also strangers, and bringing the three together and encouraging them to talk together. Who knows? Maybe they all became firm friends. Maybe the trio will be sitting together in the audience at the show. Read more online at nnfestival.org.uk

Find out more

Gob Squad

Super Night Shot

p36

More work telling the story of The Passing of Time

Qua rtet fo r the End of Time

p8

Re qua rdt & Rosenbe rg

Future Cargo p23 Fest ival at 250 p26 Ian Bost ridge p33 I FAGIOl iNI LEONARDO 500 p37 Arrivals and Departures

and Dav ina Drummond Ya ra El She rbin i

Al i Smith Summer p45 Rich Kids p39

Javaad Al ipoo r

p51

Above: Gob Squad