Forced Entertainment

Last day before Essen….

May 16th, 2012 · Uncategorized

Last day in the studio before we leave for Essen, the rehearsal like a typical Friday but amplified – aware that the day is shutting down and with it this phase of the process. Trying to squeeze out any last bit of work that can be done before the break. Everyone tired. Everyone pretty sick of the rather circular arguments which knot and surround the material at this point. Several rushed improvs on a scene, then a discussion about abandoning it, then a half-hearted discussion about what you’d do in its stead. Finally a last attack on the same material, another improv on the scene, with a mild tweak of the rules and the transition. A stumbling start, fractured stuff, shards of delight and then it’s rolling. Very funny. The scene bursts beautifully and you’re at this moment with Claire crouched ‘behind’ the piano but in plain sight. Her dance, normally hidden except for her hands, now reversed, visible. Very sad. Richard electric chair, trembling for a minute or two, then gives up. Phil guitar. Drums. Bass. Everything in a fragile suspension. Nice work flowing through to scenes we already have, the transitions from new material means the atmosphere changed. I’m watching the clock on my phone in the last minutes… really wishing I didn’t have to call time on the improv… but aware that people (me included) have to stop and get trains.

Tim Etchells
11 May 2012

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On touring in the UK

May 14th, 2012 · Uncategorized

On Saturday Claire Marshall, one of our founder members, sent the following contribution to Getting It Out There, a one-day symposium on touring contemporary theatre and live art in the UK:

Dear Alice, and dear All,

I’m 46 now and I’ve been touring since I was 23, that’s half my life; so I figured I should have something to say…

Ten years ago my great-aunt May died , and when we were clearing her house we discovered a pile of postcards that I had religiously sent her from the early years of touring with Forced Entertainment; a shoebox full of neatly written, enthusiastic and highly censored memories. Descriptions small towns in Winter and slightly underwhelmed audiences. Tales of truly fantastic performances, of loading and unloading endless lengths of scaffolding, of televisions that suddenly stopped working; and buzz’s and hums and driving at night, and of people that said , “that show was just like my life”.

I wrote wishing her good health and sunny days and hoping she was still getting out to the hills; thankyous for birthday tenners and how they were spent , excited news of imminent trips abroad and hopes for our own rehearsal space. Repetitive and a bit dull. I didn’t tell her everything.

In Leicester we went to nightclubs in shopping centres

In Dursley they opened the off-license for us at midnight

In Wolverhampton I bought shoes for to wear at my Grandpa’s funeral

In Scarborough we danced to Pulp in the secret cellar bar

In Kendal I got the news that my niece had been born and was seriously ill

In Portsmouth we found a taxidermy museum where all the exhibits were road-kill. A diorama of “Wind in the Willows” –all their little faces smashed up.

In Glasgow we (I) forgot the costumes

In London we made birthday cakes at 3am

In Cardiff I bought buttons shaped like roses and hearts

In Bedford we measured our weight loss or gain by squashing ourselves into the 12” gap between the dressing room double doors

In Cambridge my school-friend told me she was leaving her husband and kids

In Totnes we fell over in the sea

In Nottingham we plotted an experimental theatre 5 a side football league

In Southhampton we bought cheap sparkly tops to wear after the show

In Leigh we got depressed

In Portsmouth we played pool in the launderette

In Edinburgh we nearly killed Bob

In Crawley we shared the bill with the Chippendales

In Leeds we barely fitted on the stage

In Cardiff tumbleweed rolled slowly across the stage…

In Manchester we discovered how difficult it was to buy fairy lights in May

In Lancaster we lived at the Farmers’ Arms

We did all the things you do. In towns that were foreign but became familiar we learned where the best places were to collect fallen leaves, where to buy chalk that would produce dust, where to buy streamers and balloons and the right sort of party hats; where to get beer after hours and pizzas with no sweetcorn.

We loaded and unloaded vans. We drank instant coffee. We played cards during long soundchecks and made up buckets of blood. We drank and drank and smoked and ate crisps and flapjack and bananas. Children were born and people died. We returned to the same places over and over. We watched high streets homogenize, we sent rubbish presents and late birthday cards with apologies; we stayed up late watching rolling news of elections and wars.

We did the things you do; in Birmingham and Brighton and Newcastle and Milton Keynes and Aberystwyth and Basildon and Stamford Bridge and Bristol and Sheffield and maybe some other places too.

I stopped taking photographs because they all started to blur-stick figures on November beaches wearing long dark coats; us in a bar , us in another bar, us in another bar, us all squashed into a chintz-thick bedroom where “contractors are always welcome”. More late night conversations.

We started to say: let’s be more nimble

let’s play bigger stages

let’s do fewer gigs for more people

let’s find an audience to grow older with us

We began to refer to “a tighter bombing pattern”

This is nostalgia: sentimental and incomplete. I don’t really want to go back there-but there is something ; something about sideshows and circus and vaudeville-end of the pier-shysters and charlatans that I miss. Different towns that are sort of the same ,the rhythm of returning at the same time of year( England in the Autumn), meeting people, re-meeting people missing people; arriving, doing the show , leaving –your only traces being talcum powder on the blacks or some bit of costume hurled in the air and stuck in the rig. Tourists maybe- tourists who can’t help but come back with a new bag of tricks.

We said it would be ridiculous if we were still doing this when we were forty….

So we started to play bigger spaces and left some of those towns off the map. We made it to the States with a bunch of similar souls brought together by Lois and Catherine at the ICA; and driving in a real yellow taxi from JFK to Hotel New York (home from home for those seeking “transient chic”) Ronnie Fraser Munro drawled “I see nothing here that can compare to Crewe Station”.

And now we do play some bigger stages –and some small. And we still stay up late. And we say: we don’t like buildings where the audience and performers never really meet , buildings where they’re surprised that you can do the laundry and perform, buildings where they want to know who wrote it; buildings where there isn’t a bar people actually want to stay in.

In all sorts of places we, and what we might refer to as our filthy collaborators are still asking: What the hell is a good show? Who comes to see us and why?

I’m sorry that this is just looking back, I acknowledge that I’m ignoring all sorts of work that operates out there! I think I’m trying to make sense of it all by going back maybe; re-telling and reinventing. We still want to be nimble , to respond and make in all sorts of ways and to surprise ourselves, and maybe the demise of touring is okay: more work made for specific places- big shows and small shows, shows that work outside of 2 hours in a dark room, live streaming..it’s exciting and it’s complicated

People can watch a theatre performance beamed live from London in the comfort of a multi-plex ,with close-ups and everything…but I really liked being in Taunton not so very long ago-with a disparate bunch of people who wanted to be in the same room , the kind of gig where small connections are made; where someone can talk to me about what they saw and how it punched them in a way that they didn’t expect; the kind of gig where they say “and when are you coming back?”

With very best wishes

Claire

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Tim Etchells on narrative, Void Story and The Coming Storm

May 4th, 2012 · Uncategorized

Void Story was a kind of post apocalyptic tale – two unfortunates escaping their apartment in a ruined city, trying to find safety. It was told through sound effects and projected images, with the live performers doing voices for the ‘characters’ appearing on screen. The feeling was like a graphic novel come to life and I wrote the text and made the images, collages using photographs I’d made as well as pictures taken from the internet. It was a very unusual project for us because it really did deal with a story, albeit a highly picaresque one in which the narrative is boiled down to an absurd series of events. It’s a project that falls between different possibilities which are held a really interesting tension – it’s both a story and at the same time ‘just’ list of unlikely incidents, it’s cinematic, and almost anti-theatrical but at the same time extremely compelling and vivid in performance terms.

We started work on The Coming Storm again with a singular narrative in mind but as the rehearsal process unfolded we moved more and more into a territory of fragments – unfinished narratives and ’scenes’ or images which appear to both relate to and to contradict what’s spoken. It’s a familiar journey for me! I’m fascinated with stories but in the work (and in life perhaps!) I’m frustrated with singularity – so the limit of one single story seems to be something that I always want to challenge in the work.

We are creating the text for the piece through improvisation – so that it retains a loose, easily spoken form and there’s a lot of interplay between the different elements of the performance – text, sound, music, action. The stories we’re working with are very different – some appear to be personal, anecdotal or reminiscences whilst others are like incredible tangled movie plots.

What interests me very much is the way that an incomplete narrative is always filled in, or imaginatively completed by an audience. The way the work in rehearsals looks right now it’s radically incomplete – we’re creating a situation out of which many narratives are spinning and forming. Things – stories, tones, atmospheres – are constantly in a state of almost cohering and then dissolving again. The structure is elusive – it’s been hard for us to find the checks and balances in it – but I think we are succeeding slowly. In a strange way the frame we are working with is as much musical as it is narrative – the principles are associative, poetic, to do with energy and pattern, contradiction and connection. What this leads to (hopefully!) is a work that’s very live to watch – where the sense is precarious, always emerging, always on the edge of something.

I’m not writing much text but my role in the process remains very much connected to the generation and organisation of the material – text and everything else. During improvisations you often see me running on and off the stage, whispering instructions to people, or sometimes even yelling to try to change the course of what’s happening, adding a detail or adjusting things. I have an overview – where people are, what the whole picture is – and at least some sense of where it might all go. The rest of the group are of course in it the whole time, so their individual perspectives are always quite particular. Several of the performers in The Coming Storm are wearing quite absurd costumes at times – things that restrict their ability to move or to see or to hear properly – so there’s sometimes a very real sense in which they don’t know what is going on! Often my interventions in the improvisations are about trying to nudge the performers towards particular pieces of content or tone that we are working with, whilst at other times I’m trying to cut a certain scene and move on before it becomes too solid. This whole process in the studio is a kind of writing of course – a writing that we are doing together – inventing things, trying things, combining them, a writing that takes place between text, action, sound, light and time.

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The writing's on the wall…

April 30th, 2012 · Uncategorized

the writing on the wall

It’s getting to that time when we start ordering and reordering all the material we’ve produced so far. Putting different things side by side. Finding the shape and structure of the show. Looking for a pattern which pleases us.

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