Diva

“We all wanted to become ballet dancers, football players, astronauts, where did we go so wrong?” Berlin’s theatre group Gob Squad asked in one of their shows. The action had the group’s members sit from nine to five behind desks in a slick office building. With the professional smiles of financial advisers, they revealed the labour market’s ugly strategies to whoever would listen. Viewers and the employees of nearby companies dropped by to spill out their frustrations and complain about their careers.

Playing through the loudspeakers were children’s recorded stories about who they would be when they grew up, and personifications of childhood dreams – the Olympic winner, the sailor or the film star – visited the set. In the action, Gob Squad asked about how we constructed our own self and why we had abandoned our original dreams on behalf of the calculated ones (“I’ll buy a house,” “I’ll start up a nuclear family”). Quoting the earliest attempts to enter into a role (“who will you be?”), the artists ironically commented on the normative attitudes generated by capitalism already on the level of infantile dreams. Is the dream of becoming a sports champion or a Miss World not a ...