GOSS, or being stupid and ambitious

By Lizzy Tan

Lizzy Tan’s text on Sam Burket’s show GOSS shapeshifts and experiments with form just as much as its subject does. Sam’s piece is defined by taking risks and venturing into the unknown — into unexpected depths. It is no linear show that the audience simply watches. Instead, they are watched by Sam, as Sam serves up observations that reveal tragicomic truths about us — about society. Tan writes in Sam’s rhythm — quick, sharp, alive — finding philosophy in the pauses, wit in precision. The form of her text keeps shifting, carrying a pulse as vibrant and restless as GOSS itself. 

GOSS opens with this image: a silent, shimmering tower of red fringe, lurking in the audience. Expanding into the space as it rises (prompting dread? delight?) and grasps the walls of the Pleasance Theatre’s black box, gastropod-like. Then, interrupting this pilgrimage and throwing off the glittering red mass, Sam Burket begins the show, topless and bare-legged.

It’s bold. It’s unserious. It’s just enough to carry the range and weight of ‘performance’ and ridiculous enough to intrigue. This titillation drives the show — not a sensualising one, but the resulting charge where curiosity collides with the absolutely unexpected. This tension hangs over GOSS, drawing the audience closer in, even as we brace against what might come next.

It is hard to describe what happens in GOSS’ 45 minute run. Audience secrets are revealed; movement interludes punctuate emotional beats. Burkett muses on our revelations, offering social commentary to acerbic riposte. We are asked to be vulnerable, and the very show depends on how much we are willing to give up to a room of strangers. The format is entirely improvisational, non-linear and non-narrative. Form emerges from content: directional shifts in the conversation are mirrored by Burkett’s movement. They pivot, swoop and pause, refracting the emotional current of the room through their body. Burkett’s hosting becomes choreographic, steering the conversation and composing it spatially.

This way of dancemaking demonstrates the malleability of performance (when is something a performance anyway?) but further still, raises the question of what makes something feel like a show?

According to Burkett:

1. Telling people you have a show (lies)
2. Something (anything) that is called ‘evening-length’ and nothing shorter (delusion)
3. ‘Volume. People love stuff.’ (illusions)
   
   

Telling people you have a show.

Burkett tells me they’ve been using the phrase ‘stupid and ambitious’ to embolden their pursuits: ‘I just started saying I have a solo show.’ The structure of GOSS emerged from solo improvisations and the question of how to make artistic work sustainable. Through these explorations and conversations with close friends, Burkett began experimenting with the lens of gossip as a way to frame stories and emotional space.

‘The only thing that I’m going to do is to get a fresh piece of gossip.’

There’s a certain lifecycle to many performance projects. Reflecting on their own work, Burkett mused that many projects had been performed, reviewed and developed in different stages but never felt ‘complete.’ They compared this to the expectations of dancemaking from their training:

‘I think so much of the struggle with making any sort of experimental performance is wanting to take a risk and kind of having the confidence that it won’t be bad, or at least it’ll be bad enough that you want to go see why it’s so bad.’

That’s where ‘stupid and ambitious’ comes in: Say it’s a show. Rise to the commitment. It’ll be just fine.

Something (anything) that is called ‘evening-length’ and nothing shorter.

GOSS is ‘evening-length’ because Burkett says so. That’s part of the joke. It’s also part of the point. The length gives the show legitimacy. The delusion makes space for something magical. What emerges is a meta-performance about performance itself. GOSS is finished in form, borrowing elements from Burkett’s experiences in previous work, but not codified.

‘In order for me to have that sensation of like, that completeness, I need to be able to fit into slots that exist. And what is that slot? In the evening, for an hour.’

In this way, GOSS resists the myth that commercially viable art must feel mass produced. It originates from experimental dancemaking, but resists the extractive tempo and timelines of production. In a landscape of ‘immersive’ installations which often lack genuine stakes, GOSS asks us for real attention, presence and risk. By creating an aura of legitimacy around an experimental format, audiences are invited to trust Burkett as a performer and take time to deeply engage with their work.

‘Volume. People love stuff.’

Burkett also detailed the process of sampling from their own body of work, e.g., performing in underwear, creating costume pieces from their own wardrobe, identifying bold visual moments that could fit into GOSS. We talked about playing with the audience’s feelings of waste, being conspicuous yet anonymous and borrowing aesthetics from standup. This dramaturgy, emerging from their own understanding of what makes a show feel exciting, revealed a sharp sense of the hidden ironies and anxieties embedded in images. Cleverly (and perhaps this is intuition rather than dramaturgy) the referencing Burkett uses in GOSS creates a visual language of illusion/allusion. As the images Burkett creates (the excess of the red cloak being discarded; the semi-nudity of the host; the flinging of the mic cord visually filling the stage) pass through the registers of the peculiar and the absurd, they demonstrate the interplay of what is seen (or denoted) and what it conjures (a connotation). What Barthes argues in Rhetoric of the Image and S/Z are present here: that there are no ‘pure’ movement images, and that every visual moment generates a dramatic reference (i.e., that something is signified). These illusions are sufficient enough to hold subtext, and the tensions between what is seen and felt is a vehicle for humour, irony and surprise (often delight). This novel directing style makes GOSS unique.

In short: to produce a show that feels like a show, one needs lies, delusion and illusions.

According to Burkett, a non-exhaustive list of things one can do to be more stupid and ambitious:

Ask for what you want and be happy with what you get.

Restage your own work. Or call new work a restaging.

Have pieces less than evening-length? Host your own triple (or quadruple, quintuple) bill.

Be bold. Then solve it later.

Unfortunately, even if your ask is ridiculous… put it out there.