Forced Entertainment article online

RealTime Arts (Australian online and print magazine devoted to live performance and multi-media) has just published my review on Forced Entertainment. You can read it here.

An evil rant

What can appear in this space? This is Tim Etchell’s question (from rehearsal blog notes, The World In Pictures)This is THE question, I think, for post-dramatic theatre and also in a wider sense for theatre. If (and we are) doing something other than suspending disbelief and entering fictions in the theatre, then we are surely concerned with appearances. The regional theatre is certainly concerned with appearances— the facsimile of art, in fact, which is increasingly a sealed loop of representation. The truism that art (increasingly forced to justify itself through other guises such as Doing Good) reflects life has become a diminishing fishpond of mirror-ball hypnosis between an aging white upper-middle class audience, and a timid not-for-profit theatre that tries to cater to it by “reflecting” it.

dying in reverse

Theatre is supposed to be in the present tense, though always in struggle with others. After watching all these Forced Entertainment performances, both live and recorded, I have the peculiar and mournful feeling of having fast-forwarded through lives I didn’t live. Because I saw Quizoola and Exquisite Pain in Vancouver, the performers there (Robin and Cathy) first appeared to me as their forty-something selves. Now, as if the past were out-takes of the present, I’ve been watching their younger and younger selves perform. I feel like some kind of time vampire, perched evilly at the screen, as if it is my attention that is creasing their time-lines — but of course this is dumb hubris.

Illusion and Mystery

The chronology of this blog is weird. I haven’t seen these shows in the order they were made so what’s here is my own idiosyncratic encounter with the work. First Night was made in 2001, the year I began teaching on September 11. (It was a wash; most of my students came from New York and for the very first and only time I can remember in the US, no-one could say anything. Unfortunately, that’s been rectified with a vengeance.)

In First Night, structured as a kind of desperate and bad vaudeville performance, there’s a sequence where the performers emerge from behind red velvet curtains and form a line downstage, smiling fixedly at the audience. Even though I saw this on video, I could smell the sweaty fear and resentment emanating from the performer’s faces.

The other story you write

I want to return to The World In Pictures, the Forced Entertainment show I saw in Dublin and wrote about several posts back (‘the story you write…’. I think I was being grumpy and more fixed on what it wasn’t than what it was when I wrote about it in Dublin. (more on that soon). Why do I think this? Because images and moments from the show keep coming back to me. For some reason I’m seeing astroturf, the hysterical green of fake grass, and Terry’s deadpan slide show of images of banal, everyday things like meat in plastic wrap. I don’t actually remember whether there WAS this lurid fake grass in the show, or if I’ve furnished it to fit some mental mise en scene. But this is the thing with shows, if they are alive they mutate and keep dividing in memory long after the event.

Hidden J

Today I watched Hidden J on video, made in (I think?) 1993. It begins with Claire coming on stage— a semi-basement space, with brown theatre flats leaning against walls– and sitting right downstage on a chair. She has a large sign around her neck that reads LIAR. Then the others come out and in “everyday” mode, set up the space. They build a small house/ box set/ in various combinations, which they consider, pull apart, rebuild, upstage. this seems like a tiny work demonstration of how they do theatre in fact The box they build is like a tiny theatre inside the theatre, complete with red curtains that pull across. There is a low wall downstage they climb over to get in and out through a big window, through which we can see what is happening in the box.

First Night

Another day in the library— I’m discovering how hard it is to just watch theatre on DVD or video. It’s exhausting, being in 2 mindsets at once– live and recorded. But this show (First Night made in 2001) was great. The idea was a bad vaudeville performance. The performers (5 men, 3 women) come out on stage in glittery frocks and bad checked suits, with bad make-up, and stand in a line and smile at the audience. Very cheesily. For quite a long time. The show is loosely composed of a series of bad vaudeville acts: A woman stands on a chair in a bathing suit covered in balloons and punctures them, one by one, with a cigarette.

Bloody Mess and less

Today personally was less of a bloody mess at the British Library. I’ve now watched 2 videos of shows of Forced Entertainment and I think that Bloody Mess gave me a context for understanding more of the show I saw in Vancouver. Also viewed (after a few glitches) the CD-ROM Imaginary Evidence which is a great title and also very informative about working methods and archive. It’s organized in a hand-drawn diagram that to me loosely resembled a brain or a picture of an electrical circuit. Words mind-mapped with arrows connecting them.

British library CD-Rom debacle

Yesterday was one of those hideous days when nothing works— wifi, public transport, etc. Today is much better. I’m at the British library where I”ve booked 5 days in the sound archive listening/ viewing Forced Entertainment materials. The British Library, by the way, is as impressive as you might imagine. Many floors, a lovely new building, reading rooms, collections of some 12 millions items. One would be forgiven for imagining that viewing a CD-Rom here wouldn’t be that hard. But in fact, it is. There are two computers in the library, it appears, that have this facility and neither of them have sound.

the afterlife of shows

On what happened instead, and my reluctance to see the show again— It strikes me that the life of a show unfolds afterwards, if it’s any good, if it can generate this kind of afterlife. Therefore there’s something unpleasantly forensic about going to see it again because it lives in the ripples of conversation and walking and the flow of images and associations and remembering and forgetting that constitute waking life. Like a little innoculation of dreaming into the everyday, that gets assimilated slowly (or fast if it’s junk food packaged art).