Strength, love, art, politics:

40 Years of Forced Entertainment

Online, by invitation only. 

Sunday 10th November 2024 at 7pm (UK time)

               From left: Claire Marshall, Terry O'Connor, Robin Arthur, Tim Etchells, Cathy Naden and Richard Lowden.

               Photographed by Hugo Glendinning

Forced Entertainment formed in Sheffield in 1984 and since that time has established itself as a unique, challenging and inspiring institution in the British and European independent theatre scenes. Settling as a collective of six artists led by writer and director Tim Etchells, the group’s performances take a wide range of approaches to the task of reinventing theatre for the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. They are equally at home causing trouble in large-scale group pieces complete with guest performers and musicians, as they are creating subversive and intimate text performances, improvised marathon works of 2 to 24 hours and giddy online experiments.

At a recent event marking the group’s 40th anniversary artistic director Tim Etchells spoke about “... the arrow we have drawn, the distress flare we have shot into the sky, the marker we have placed - for artist-led initiatives, for collective making, collective decision making, collective authorship.  For a theatre that brings in energy, ideas and influence from art, from stand-up, from music, from popular culture, from performance, from many other places. For work made in the studio not on the page. For ambiguity, For difficulty. Against realism, because as we often liked to remind people, the real is too important to be left to the realists. Against a narrow definition of politics. For poetry. For the live, relational and constantly unfolding moment of theatre and performance. For its space of individual and collective encounter. For all this. The doors we and others have opened, and will continue to open."

Strength, love, art, politics: Forty years of Forced Entertainment will be a 90-minute mix of live readings by the company from texts used in performances across four decades, alongside video clips and conversations. Interspersed will be presentations by a special selected group of artists, performance makers and writers who hold the company and it’s work dear,  presenting personal reflections, memories, observations and readings inspired by the group’s work over 4 decades. Includes contributions from Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment, Jennifer Hodgson, M John Harrison, Lois Keidan, Ocean Stefan Chillingworth, Laura Hopkins, Tanuja Amarasuriya, Lara Pawson, Lesley Ewen and others.

https://www.forcedentertainment.com/