Performance: Out There Festival 2011

"A bad photocopy of a photocopy" -- that's how Sean Patten of Gob Squad described "Gob Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good)." The group of theater artists from the U.K. and Germany will perform at the Walker Art Center from Jan. 13-15 on a tour that brings their live remake of Andy Warhol's film "Kitchen" to the United States for the first time.

"One of the jokes is that we have these terrible American accents," said Patten. "I wonder how that's going to go down. Maybe they'll just think we're talking weird."

Gob Squad's visit is part of the Walker's annual Out There series of boundary-pushing performance. For this year's series, Walker performing arts curator Philip Bither chose to invite all performers from Europe. "The companies are working in different ways," said Bither, "but all of them have created projects that forge new ground and are, each in a unique way, wildly entertaining. Each has an unexpected delight attached to it."

Audiences at "Gob Squad's Kitchen" will watch live performances on video from sets built behind the screens. When audience members arrive, said Bither, they'll enter the Walker's McGuire Theater through the stage door and walk through the sets."You see how it's all set up, say hello to the actors. They immediately put in your brain that this is a manufactured reality; they break the boundaries between stage and film."

Patten hesitated to divulge specific details of what will unfold onstage, but indicated that audience participation is integral to the piece. "We're keen to do something different than in TV shows where people are pounced on and made a mockery," he said. "We want to let audience members choose. We want to elevate them."

Specifically, volunteers from the audience will gradually replace members of Gob Squad on the re-created set of Warhol's famously shambling "Kitchen," as well as two other re-created Warhol films "playing" simultaneously on adjacent screens. In the original "Kitchen," Edie Sedgwick and other Factory regulars sloppily enact a meandering script set in a kitchen; audible cues come from off-camera, sometimes heeded and sometimes not. "In our quest to create as authentic a remake as possible," said Patten, "we're contrasting our slickness with the necessarily rough-and-ready quality of our 'found actors.'"

"Kitchen" is the third production Gob Squad has brought to the Walker; its first Out There appearance was in 2001, when the series was held at the Southern Theater. Patten described that production, "Safe," as the beginning of the troupe's experimentation with interactivity. "Safe" featured a series of rhetorical questions posed by the performers, "and for the first time," said Patten, "people started to answer back! It occurred to us that this is the culture for Jerry Springer and Oprah."

"The Twin Cities have a vibrant, fantastic theater scene," said Bither, "and most of the work that's available to see here is homegrown." The Out There series is "a chance for us to provide a window on what's happening elsewhere. It's about innovation and experimentation."

Throughout the Walker's 2010-11 performing arts season, curator Philip Bither has been spotlighting puppetry -- an art that is well-represented in the Twin Cities in companies like Open Eye Figure Theatre and In the Heart of the Beast. Betontanc and Umka.lv are two companies from Eastern Europe collaborating on "Show Your Face!," in which an empty snowsuit comes to life and makes a strange journey. "It's a beautiful and interesting piece that's won a number of awards," said Bither, "and it's finally coming to the States." A Slovene group ironically named Silence will perform live music to accompany the performance.

Berlin is the name of a group of artists based in -- nope, guess again! -- Antwerp, Belgium. "They're another collective of artists who use the form of film," said Bither, "but in a very exploded way. They do portraits of cities, and this piece we're showing is a European look at American culture." It's called "Bonanza," and it's a multi-screen portrait of the tiny town of Bonanza, Colo. Each of the town's five (count 'em, five) households is represented with a screen onstage, and there's a scale model of the town to help you get your bearings. It's an innovative synthesis, said Bither. "When does film," he asked, "become theater?"

French performer Philippe Quesne will build an entire basement on the McGuire stage, to be inhabited by his character Serge, "a Buster Keatonesque guy who ritualistically every Sunday invites a group of friends over to his basement and puts on these little spectacles." Like last year's "Call Cutta in a Box," presented by Rimini Protokoll in an IDS Center office, "L'Effet de Serge" will stretch expectations of what a theatrical performance is supposed to be. "I was completely knocked out by the nuance and gentle charm of this show," said Bither. "It's very difficult to describe or to capture on video, but it's utterly fresh and charming."