Times Quotidian

Gob Squad and the Slow Vogue

November 3, 2018 | by Guy Zimmerman | Filed Under: Theater

Watching The Gob Squad’s Creation (Pictures for Dorian) at REDCAT brought home to me the fact that you can get away with saying anything so long as you say it with a British accent. I’ll go even further—you can, in fact, do anything and seem up to the task and on top of things, so long as you drop a few word along the way in a British accent. Brits will get naked too, I learned at REDCAT, even when they’re older, and they’ll stand there, revolving slowly on an art-model dias, the flesh rippling around them, and manage to achieve a kind of elegance, a grace even, amidst the pillowing wreckage. I also learned how very, very avant-garde they are, the Brits—when they wake up each day all they’re thinking about is how to pierce the boundary between art and life. They get up and have their crumpets and tea, looking out the window at a cat scaling the brick wall of their garden in Kensington or Brighton or Leeds or someplace British like that—an orange tabby scaling the wall under a slate grey British sky—and then they get right to it. It’s art/life, art/life, art/life oscillating all day long for the Brits, like Faye Dunaway slapped back and forth by Jack Nicholson in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown crying out “sister!”, “daughter!”, “sister!”, “daughter!” and then, after a shocked silence, “now do you understand?” With their British stamina and their imperial fortitude, they never complain, the Gob Squad. Oh, yes, and one of these Gob Squad Brits is German (Bastion Trost) and soulful, which might be confusing if you didn’t know that today’s Brit is also totally, 100 per cent Continental.