This is the setting for a new production at London-based Camden’s People’s Theater: GuruGuru. Created by Ant Hampton, who is a member of artistic collective Rotozaza, in collaboration with film-maker Joji Koyama and electronic composer Isambard Khroustaliov, GuruGuru, which means ’round and round’ in Japanese, takes a mischievous and surreal look at focus groups, self-help culture and the consumer mindset.
Only performed for/with five people each time, the five theatre goers will enter a brightly lit room where five chairs are positioned around a TV. A session begins, and as each audience member follows different instructions via headphones, they begin to understand ‘who they are’.
Proceedings are led by an on-screen, animated character whose twin roles of marketing and spiritual guru are confused by his reliance on untested and accident-prone technologies.
The production hopes to unsettle our dependency on self help books and consumerism: “The overproduced, digital sheen of our focus-group world cracks open into a colorful volcano of boiling absurdity. A hilarious chaos develops, exposing today’s consumer-mad inability to distinguish between what we want, and what we need.”