Super Night Shot is a jaw-dropping synthesis of theatre, cinema, sound design and video art. The concept — conceived in 2003 by Germany/UK-based collective the Gob Squad, premiered in Berlin and since staged in several cities — is brilliant: four performers, each armed with a video camera, film an improvised ‘story’ on the city streets in the hour before the opening of the show; the material is then immediately presented, with neither cuts nor edits, via four screens in a theatre auditorium. The result is an hour-long rollercoaster ride of spontaneous street encounters and fantastical performances, woven coherently together at the venue by a skilfully crafted live audio mix-down.

Having already blazed a trail across Europe with the project, the Gob Squad decided to take Super Night Shot to sunnier climes last year, training up actors, storytellers and sound artists in Brazil for Portuguese language shows in both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Last month I caught the final night of the recent São Paulo run, and have been kicking myself ever since for missing all the performances that took place during the preceding weeks.

 

The show started with a nice touch, beginning not actually in the auditorium of the venue (São Paulo’s SESC Paulista) but the foyer, when four whooping, wide-eyed cameramen and women (the cast: a hero, a casting agent, a promoter and a location scout) burst through the venue doors in their underwear, to much applause and throwing of paper streamers from the evening’s audience. Within just a few minutes, the crew's video sources were synchronised and then projected on to adjacently placed screens at the front of the auditorium, cued at the point where, one hour previously, our performers had each set a stopwatch.

Audience seated, the footage commenced with military precision, the quartet using well-rehearsed camera trickery to make their introductions before heading out into the night to declare a ‘War On Anonymity’. With unpredicted events unfolding at each turn, the storyline was merely a loose roleplaying framework for the performers to work within: the ‘casting agent’ roamed the pavements looking for an unsuspecting co-star to join with the hero in a romantic screen kiss; the ‘promoter’ toured the cafes and bars of Avenida Paulista, heaping pictures of our 'hero' onto bottle-crowded tables, stickering cars at traffic lights, flyposting and generally making a nuisance of herself; the ‘location scout’, searching for the perfect setting for a beautiful Hollywood ending, busied herself with lying about in flowerbeds and doorways, and filling her video tape with peculiar shots of architecture and urban furniture; while our hero, or rather heroine, seemed to spend much of her hour frantically rushing from stranger to stranger, cracking jokes about scoring dope (at least I think she did — my Portuguese can be lousy at times), which made the audience roar with laughter.

While the success of the end result relied on the evening's encounters and the performers’ skills of improvisation, not quite everything was left to chance out on the streets. Often the footage was punctuated with flashes of cunningly pre-choreographed performance, such as dream-like sequences, psychoactive use of camera effects and, of particular note, a razor-sharp rapping routine, to magic up a deft sense of interplay between the four video sources. To remain so in step with their co-stars while at the same time forging fleeting (and often very funny) friendships on the fly with random passers-by was the most impressive aspect of the show — these were performers who could keep their cool with litres of adrenalin coursing through their veins.

 

That so much could go wrong added greatly to the sense of thrill. Timing issues aside, pulling off such a piece is a technical minefield; one weak link in the equipment chain could be catastrophic — such as the faulty projector back at the auditorium, that more than once threatened to cut our heroine short during playback. Thankfully we were able to see the leading lady fulfil her role, engaging in a passionate embrace with her freshly recruited leading man, in a slow-motion scene evocative of Donnie Darko meets Alice in Wonderland on the dark streets of São Paulo.

The ending was perhaps the most surreal part of all, as we watched ourselves, the welcoming party, being filmed as the team returned triumphant to the venue. After a raucous standing ovation, the evening’s performers took to the stage to thank the audience and production crew. It was only then that we caught a glimpse of the cast's guardian angels for the night: four heavyweight security guards, seated towards the back of the room — a sprinkle of behind-the-scenes realism to conclude our offbeat journey.

If you're anywhere near wherever Super Night Shot next surfaces, I cannot urge you strongly enough to go and check it out. If the performance is half as good as the closing night in São Paulo, you’re in for a treat. Super Night Shot is not only a unique theatrical celebration of cities and their residents; it is a huge shot of adrenalin in the heart of video art.

 

 Photo credit: David Baltzer