Bang Bang Club – 2005

About This Project

Bang Bang Club is a club for therapeutic experiments, a meeting point for the materialization of states of mind, where the need to see and be seen entices the participants to expose lie. By membership in Bang-Bang Club you will be offered a playpen for challenge of solitude. Here compete even performance with charity, lust with deception.

Bang Bang Club was originally a group of South African photographers who exposed the apartheid regime’s brutality. As continuous witnesses to human tragedy they were driven out of the dilemma; “When will you stop reflecting reality, and instead engage in it?”

Bang Bang Club is a performance inspired by the Swedish anthology Freeze – the successful freezing of Mr. Moro. (Ed. Roy Anderson) Documentary material is mixed with fiction, film and theater in a performance that is at the intersection between theater, performance and visual art. The small private history reflected in the global.

The Bang Bang Club puts questions: Is it possible to compare the pain? When will the political conversation just turn into a vehicle for promoting personal excellence? Is our so-called moral conscience only individualistic cheating and empty boasting?

Bang Bang Club was the surprise performance at Black Box Theatre’s 20-year anniversary party. This was written in Black Box Theatre’s season program for fall 2005: “What a concept we give away? It’s a secret. The only thing we would say is that we believe it is one of the best Norwegian productions we have presented after we opened new locals at Rodeløkka.”

The lyrics in the show are prepared by the group itself, as well as material from Eugène Ionesco and Flu Hartberg / Dongery.

PRESS REVIEWS:

– A funny and sad experience. With Bang Bang Club, De Utvalgte provide another amazing experience during this year’s theater festival. The show is hilarious, incredibly sad, harrowing, thought-provoking and outrageously well played … One of the best performances at this year’s theater festival.
Anki Gerhardsen
Lofotposten

– Bang Bang Club by De Utvalgte was one of the highlights of the festival, and a personal favorite … It’s all about the difficult space between the public and the private, the authentic and enacted, between watching and partaking, but Bang Bang Club evolves into a much more complex and strong performance than anyone could expect.
Therese Bjørneboe
The Norwegian Shakespeare and Theatre Journal