I AM LGB by Loo Zihan and Ray Langenbach

“I am LGB”

Reviewer: Kei Franklin
Performance: 20 August 2016

“Index number 21 please go to the podium you have 90 seconds to justify why you should be the next LGB.” I walk to the podium entirely uncertain as to what I will do next. I stand at the podium, looking down upon my fellow final contenders. A hesitant ‘hmmm’ escapes my mouth, I fall silent, ‘hmmm’…’hmmm’ again, the buzzer sounds.

I am LGB is a performance/game show/social experiment. It tests our confidence/knowledge on what is real, what is deliberate, and what role we play in all of it. It is immersive, frightening, intimate, curious, and unpredictable. It demands a sort of playful investment from the audience – an active creativity commanded by indifferent facilitators in lab coats.

Throughout the experience, there is an omnipresent droning of intellectual musings (on Zhuangzi, Plato, the Turing machine, distorted memories, and peripheral vision) recited by the facilitators atop a colossal podium in the centre of the space. Meanwhile, we are broken into color-coded groups and guided through challenges. We are asked to draw a window, then another window then another. We are asked to dance ballet, then the foxtrot, then ‘yellow’, then ‘3.84’. We are asked to choose an object that proves we are collectively dreaming. All too quickly, I find myself utterly invested, intrigued, and full of anticipation.

Throughout the experience, there is the impending threat of ‘liberation’ – an ambiguous process of elimination where audience members are required to leave the chamber and never return. It is never clear whether liberation is better than continued existence within the chamber; my mind moves to Buddhist philosophy and the Matrix.

When a person is liberated, the facilitators applaud a bit too forcefully, and I find myself (and everyone else) clapping along. There are layers and layers of the unsaid, and unknowingly we begin to abide by a new status quo imposed by latent authority figures from the moment we enter the room.

We do not question, but simply follow – afraid of the consequences of social rebellion.

I am LGB is fresh, offbeat, political, and inventive. It brings strangers together in a sort of intimate yet desperate struggle for victory towards who-knows-what. It exposes the inner-workings of our minds: our tendency to judge, delineate, and categorize. It ties up the existential and the absurd, posing questions like “do you belong here?” and “have you ever really felt at home?”

‘hmmm….’