“You have been told what to do every moment of the day, for years on end. The voice in your headphones has understood who you are and gives instructions which mirror what you’d be doing anyway. A life free of dither and uncertainty! In your job, this voice is a career-saver… but the day has come when you need to come ‘off the headphones’. You need help.”
This is the setting for a new production at London-based Camden’s People’s Theatre: GuruGuru. Created by Ant Hampton, who is a member of artistic collective Rotozaza, in collaboration with film-maker Joji Koyama and electronic composer Isambard Khroustaliov, GuruGuru, which means ’round and round’ in Japanese, takes a mischievous and surreal look at focus groups, self-help culture and the consumer mindset.
Only performed for/with five people each time, the five theatre goers will enter a brightly lit room where five chairs are positioned around a TV. A session begins, and as each audience member follows different instructions via headphones, they begin to understand ‘who they are’.
Proceedings are led by an on-screen, animated character whose twin roles of marketing and spiritual guru are confused by his reliance on untested and accident-prone technologies.
The production hopes to unsettle our dependency on self help books and consumerism: “The overproduced, digital sheen of our focus-group world cracks open into a colourful volcano of boiling absurdity. A hilarious chaos develops, exposing today’s consumer-mad inability to distinguish between what we want, and what we need.”
Rotozaza: ‘GuruGuru’ at the Camden People’s Theatre
58-60 Hampstead Road, NW1 2PY
Price: £10 (£6 concs)
Dates and Times:
11, 12, 15, 16 & 19 - 28t March
6.30pm & 9.15pm
