“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.
Bang Bang Club is a club for therapeutic experiments, a meeting place for the materialization of states of mind, where the need to see and be seen entices participants to expose themselves. Through a membership in the Bang-Bang Club you will be offered a playpen to challenge your loneliness. Here narcissism competes with compassion, lust with deception.
The 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 by the dilemma; “When will you stop reflecting reality, and instead intervene in it?”
Bang Bang Club is a performance inspired by the Swedish anthology FRYS – 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 story is reflected in the global.
With Bang Bang Club, De Utvalgte pose the question: Is it possible to compare pain? When does the political discourse merely become 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 the Black Box Theatre’s 20-year anniversary. This is how Black Box Theatre’s season program for fall 2005 described it: “Which play are we giving away? It’s a secret. All we can say is that we believe it is one of the best Norwegian-produced plays we have presented after we opened our new stage at Rodeløkka. “