Spatial Awareness
Project Preparation 2014
Forced Entertainment are a six piece experimental Performance group based in Sheffield. The unique dynamic of the group comes from a continuing partnership between the six artists developed over 30 years. Tim Etchells, the artistic director explains their relationship with theatre: “We're gripped by it - and its liveness. We love its codes and conventions, but we are also frustrated by them and wage war on them." It is through this deconstruction of traditional theatre techniques that have made Forced Entertainment so popular, or unpopular. "but we are compelled by difficulty. By making things more difficult for us and the audience, we sometimes go to the edge, a really interesting place to be. A confident audience understand and enjoy that. An unconfident audience take it personally and think we are attacking them." Not only do Forced Entertainment push the audience to places where they do not believe they should be. Why should they sit and watch a performance that goes on for over 8 hours? Why should they watch something where nobody is speaking and they are waiting for something to happen?
It is these techniques that over this teaching block we will begin to research, explore and unpack in order to experiment with and create something new and intriguing in teaching block two.
Forced Entertainment
Notable pieces by Forced Entertainment, which we will be exploring in this teaching block, include Quizoola!, an improvised part-game part-performance, first performed in 1996, that involves two bodies on stage where a continuous stream of questions are asked and answered. The questions in the performance range from deep, prying, and personal to seemingly random and irrelevant. It has been performed in theatrical form and durational forms of 6 and 24 hours. The engaging aspect comes from the unique dynamics between the performers themselves, and the energy, pace and content offers an unpredictable and sometimes hilarious spectacle.
In the Forced Entertainment performance Speak Bitterness, which was first performed in 1994, the stage is occupied by performers, who in turn deliver a pre-written catalogue confessions to the audience. The themes of the confessions vary from humorous to awkward. The content is sometimes horrific, for example confessions of murder or genocide, and at other times mundane – a performer may simply declare how they had burned the dinner. Forced Entertainment’s artistic director Tim Etchells explains;
“As with so much of the work we’ve done, Speak Bitterness endlessly complicates its position, appearing to be serious, then shifting to absurdity and impossibility, stretching the seriousness until it breaks, and then picking it up again, more serious than before.” (Etchells, 2014, para 10) In exploring these performances we hope to gain an understanding of Forced Entertainment’s models of Play & Improvisation, Fiction/Real/Everyday, and Time/Duration.