Gob Squad was founded when Sarah Thom and Sean Patten, then students at Nottingham Trent University – along with Berit Stumpf and Johanna Freiburg, visiting art students from Gießen – wanted to get into Glastonbury for free.
They chose their name, originally ‘The Gob Squad’, as a bit of a lark, figuring they could always change it. The pair didn’t realise that it’d be the collective’s name – minus the ‘the’, which people were dropping anyway – for the next 30 years. They have since expanded to a core collective of seven with the addition of Sharon Smith, Bastian Trost and Simon Will, traded in the UK for Berlin in 1999, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale this past summer, and been canonised by academics among the era’s postdramatic theatre.
I think we really embrace the multi-perspectivity of being a collective.
Gob Squad celebrated its anniversary in December with a special performance at HAU. Are You With Us?, which originally premiered in 2009, eschews traditional plot for their trademark scriptless, task-based performance, often called ‘postdramatic’. Over four hours, the members don the costumes of various crews (cleaning, flight, medical, party people), inhabit tableau vivants and interrogate each other about the group dynamic, offering both a kind of reality show – complete with close-up video monologues – and a kind of group therapy.
Two of its founding members, Patten and Stumpf, talked with The Berliner about the collective’s journey, guiding ethos and, in the shadow of the slashed culture budget, the outlook for the future of performance in Berlin.
When you won the Silver Lion at the Biennale this summer, you declared “We are all the boss”, alluding to how you’re all directors, actors, dramaturgs. Is this collective, egalitarian process also reflected in the content too – the depersonalisation, the postdramatic theatre that you’ve become known for?
Sean Patten: I think we really embrace the multi-perspectivity of being a collective. You said depersonalisation, but actually in our projects, I’m always Sean and Berit is always Berit, and Sarah is always Sarah. We bring a lot of ourselves to the work. It’s funny, this term ‘postdramatic theatre’, because yes, I can see the point, but I’m more interested in just making projects. I don’t really mind what other people call them, but what we’re trying to do in our work is to invent social structures in which we as performers, as people, can engage with the topic and engage with the audience.
And they’re often game- or task-based things, rather than playing a character or a role. This gives us a lot of space to put a lot of personal thoughts, feelings and ideas into the work. And it also makes every evening a little bit different. So sometimes I’ll do something my way and Berit will do something her way. And it all can exist in this complex, constructed thing that we’ve made that exists around a set of rules.
Berit Stumpf: What’s also important to say is that even though we are, as Sean says, going on stage as ourselves, we are all replaceable. Basically, we are sharing parts, which are often task based. Together we developed a suitcase of these parts. And then we fulfil them in our individual way. Sometimes I play that part, sometimes Sean, sometimes Simon. It goes away from, “It’s only me who can perform it.” We’re all replaceable, apart from, to a certain extent, in Are You With Us, where the whole group is just themselves. It’s really about us individually within this collective, and how this collective works together.
Was it because of how Are You With Us? illuminated how the collective functioned that you chose it as part of your 30th anniversary celebration?
BS: We originally made the piece for our 15th anniversary. And it was almost like a present to ourselves. We wanted to play with certain elements of therapy, or the idea of therapy within art. The idea was to look at our collaboration, how we work together as a group to put that on stage. We knew each other inside out by that time already, all our triggers and weak points, and how we managed to work through stuff and stay together over all those years. We thought at the time we would probably only do it once, for that birthday.
But then it turned out that a lot of people could really relate to it. It was much more universal than we thought. This idea of having to deal with certain issues when you know each other so well in a certain constellation was transferable – that’s why we are still performing it, but we try to save it for special occasions. It’s not a touring piece, because [performing] it really takes it out of you. We have four hours of full-on doing it and giving everything to it. And of course the material grows as we get older. That’s why the piece is still feels fresh, even though it’s 15 years old. It’s kind of scary and new every time we do it.
SP: It’s a little bit like going to a family Christmas party, where maybe some people have had a bit too much to drink, and there’s a bit of tension built up, and people are going to spill some truths that maybe they shouldn’t. So we’re playing with all of that. Of course, there are tensions in any group, and I think this is what makes it relatable. This tension becomes the drama of the piece, which we’ll playfully tease out.
When you look out across Berlin’s cultural scene, do you see a world that would enable a collective similar to yours to exist today – and persist across 30 years?
BS: It’s much harder these days to start something like we did in the 90s here in Berlin, because of all the obvious funding cuts and threats that culture and art has to struggle with at the moment. Well, it still has more funding than in England, for example. But it’s definitely under threat with the Senate’s announced cuts of 10% for the 2025 season and onwards. The federal money is under threat of being cut by up to 50% – specifically for the Freie Szene.
This scene, which already has the smallest part within the culture world and is at the same time the experimental soil for it, is under massive threat now. And on top of that comes the fact that it’s much harder to find space in Berlin – which was really great in the 90s, because there was lots of space to take over temporarily. You didn’t need to have the big plan of how you make your money. You could improvise and get through somehow. Now that landscape is completely different, and I think it’s much harder for beginners. We were so lucky when we came in 1999 and made Berlin our home.
What we’re trying to do in our work is to invent social structures in which we as performers, as people, can engage with the topic.
We got offered a residency in Podewil, which was run at the time by three women, who did a festival there called reich & berühmt. It was Aenne Quiñones, who is still one of our main producers, Kathrin Tiedemann, who is now at [performing arts centre] FFT Düsseldorf, and Carena Schlewitt, now at Festspielhaus Hellerau. These are still some of our main co-producers, but, at the time, they invited us to their festival and gave us an office in the building for free. We got a massive space for a year that was extended. So that was a perfect way to get started right in the middle of the city and just try things out.
SP: It’s a bit ironic, because on the one hand, through the growth of all these performance art and contemporary performance university courses, there are definitely more performing artists on the scene. And there’s this incredibly rich and diverse culture in Berlin, but it’s also really hard. Everyone’s got to pay their rent. So it’s a burgeoning scene which is very much under financial difficulties, and it was such a bombshell this summer when these big cuts were announced. The whole scene is really trying to work out how that’s going to land. It’s a scary time.
BS: It’s scary, but at the same time this petition was started straight away within the Freie Szene, and it had more than 36,000 signatures within a matter of weeks. In the middle of summer, when everybody was away, it was still possible to unify and come together and really make noise. And it’s still happening. I do feel that within the scene, there is a strong sense of solidarity, and there is this feeling that we’re fighting together here, so let’s not try and be pushed into division or any kind of–
SP: –dog-eat-dog.
What do the next 30 years of Gob Squad look like – or at least the near future?
SP: One reason why we’ve existed for 30 years is that we keep challenging ourselves with new projects and new directions. And that’s what keeps it very exciting. Our next project, News From Beyond, comes out in February at HAU. It’s one of the few projects where we’re not working with video. And this is a really exciting challenge, because we are going out onto the streets, and we’re working with audio and voice messages to create some theatre and magic for the audience listening indoors. So that’s our immediate next thing. But we have a variety of projects, big and small, to do with building on neighbourhood relationships around Kreuzberg – and that’s what’s going to keep it fresh for the next 30 years.
BS: And then afterwards, we are planning a piece called Turn, which will probably come out at the end of 2025 at the Volksbühne. It will premiere in Vienna as part of the Strauss year, 200 years of—
SP: —the birth of Johann Strauss II, he of The Blue Danube and all of those waltzes.
BS: We are looking into ballroom dancing, but specifically the waltz as an idea of change. And the turning inherent in the waltz itself as the symbol and motor of change and renewal. So the piece is called Turn. We’re interested in how 200 years ago people started dancing together in new ways. They were physically close, and they were people from different social classes dancing together. It was a move into a new era, new time. After 200 years of capitalism, where are we now and where can we go from here?
- News From Beyond (February 5 – 8), HAU 1, Stresemannstr. 29, Kreuzberg, details.
