Art jesters Gob Squad make theater from ‘the most boring’ YouTube video

“It’s the most boring video you can imagine,” says Johanna Freiburg of the European arts collective Gob Squad. “Somebody shot it in their living room. It’s like three minutes long and nothing really happens in it.”

The video she is describing is like countless other videos on YouTube: barely watched video snapshots of some family gathering, which are only of interest to the people involved.

But in this home movie, Gob Squad, a flamboyantly funny group of British and German performance artists, has found art. In fact, they’ve found a whole play. The group has taken this random piece of tedious family-gathering footage and used it as a point of inspiration for a 90-minute play-performance titled “Western Society,” on view at Redcat in downtown Los Angeles starting Wednesday.

The piece examines the bits of themselves that humans put online — and what those images reveal about our relationship to technology. The video that inspired the work, says Freiburg, was filmed by a family somewhere in the vicinity of Santa Barbara. (Gob Squad was reluctant to share the link.)

“It looks like it was shot at some sort of celebration,” she says. “Someone sings karaoke while other people stuff themselves with cake. Some people look at their phones. Hardly anyone is talking to each other. And it’s hard to know if they’re not talking because they know each other so well, or because they’re all alienated.”

“Western Society,” the group’s hybrid play/performance-art piece, imagines what could have happened before, after and during that three-minute scenario — and they do it in wildly fantastical ways. (Think: audience participation and gold lamé shorts.)

“We’re fascinated by the video because it represents everything about how we live life today,” says Freiburg. “The way we communicate and don’t communicate. The use of technology and the alienation that comes with it. We’ve staged the piece in Europe and we showed it in Bogota [Colombia] quite recently, and people really relate to it.”

The show comes on the heels of another series of performances by Gob Squad at Redcat called “Super Night Shot.” For that show, the group hit the streets of Los Angeles every evening for four days and recorded interviews with random people they met on the street. They then mixed the footage live before an audience.

“We’d film our encounters and then come back to the Redcat theater and do a live playback of the films,” Freiburg says. “We’d mix the sound live, score it with music and it becomes this multi-perspective film. It’s very immediate, because the final scene of the movie is us arriving at Redcat and the audience giving us a welcome.”

“It’s a bit like a Polaroid,” she adds, “in that you take it and you can see it developing right before your eyes.”

Freiburg says the exercise led to some interesting encounters, including a moving conversation with a homeless man named Ken in downtown.

“He will wake up tomorrow and everything will probably be the same for him,” says Freiburg. “But he made a fantastic speech about his situation. And for a little time, I was able to give him a public voice.”

“Western Society” is on view from Wednesday through Saturday at Redcat, 631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles. redcat.org.