Behaviour
Western Society, CCA, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
FOUR STARS
How do we know we exist? Our selfies tell us so. How do we know we have friends? Our social media networks are a constant on-line affirmation. How do we know we have family? Little voice-mail messages on our mobile phones remind us that maybe we could call them, sometime? So many hi-tech ways we can connect to people and yet, as Gob Squad demonstrate in Western Society - the opening salvo in the Arches Behaviour 15 festival - we seem oddly isolated by that same technology from real-time closeness with other people. An endearingly gung-ho cast of four - Damian Rebgetz, Tatiana Saphir, Sarah Thom and Simon Will - throw a party or rather, they recreate one. They've found a largely ignored three-minute YouTube video of a Californian family having a party: there's cake, karaoke, and an odd sense of everyone - even the old lady dancing hectically - being cocooned in their own world. This, it seems, is 21st century Western Society.
How did it come to this? (The whole show majors on questions, from the oft-repeated "what are we doing here?" to either/or choices of an increasingly graphic nature.) Well, we fast-forwarded across eons: from the blonde-bewigged foursome being naked to their getting swagged up in bling, and recruiting seven audience members to re-enact the original video while they stepped outside the scene. Like the audience, they stayed engaged - but at a distance. Even so, a personal note crept in. Real memories were projected onto the fake family on-stage - but then, how much easier is it to pretend a stranger is your dad than to engage with him in real life? Western Society - messy, sprawling, ludicrous... and insidiously unnerving. Maybe phone home?
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