Source: Teatro Nacional São João, CC BY-NC-SA - Some Rights Reserved

Western Society

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We welcome 2020 with Western Society, a homely odyssey, where 21st-century civilization fits completely into a living room. It's a must-see opportunity for Teatro Nacional de São João’s audience to meet the Gob Squad, an artist’s collective founded in the 1990s in Nottingham, England, but currently operating from Berlin, Germany. They inhabit a territory where banality coexists with utopia and where one’s physical presence is amplified by digital technologies, tools that they have optimized to bring the real world of everyday life into the artificial world of theatre. In Western Society, they reenact on stage a home video of a family reunion. This device, which calls on the active participation of spectators, reveals the most luminous and obscene corners of contemporary culture. Yes: loneliness, consumerism, the search for alienated forms of intimacy, the charm of pop songs, the obscenity of reality shows, the Internet as heaven and hell. Western Society is a dysphoric series of windows that open and close, from the theatre stage to a smartphone screen, from the largest to the smallest. Has the world shrunk? Is this happiness?