About three years ago I was asked to give a presentation at a gathering in Lancaster to mark the 20th anniversary of Forced Entertainment: what follows is an edited version of it. In many ways, it was a bit of a surprise to find myself there in Lancaster. A pleasurable one, yes, I was chuffed to be there, but a surprise nonetheless. I don’t regard myself as any kind of ‘expert’ in this context (or any others for that matter). For over half of Forced Entertainment’s more than 20-year existence, I wasn’t even living in Europe, I was on the other side of the world in Australia. I only came back to work in England at the end of the 1990s. So for a 13 or 14 year period, I had no direct contact with these people and this growing body of work. Whatever impressions I formed were the fruit of (at the very least) second hand information and experiences - and the same can be said of a small number of other influential presences shadowing my psyche; they are part of my memory and of how I constitute myself, they hover around the edges of the stories my cortex hums to me about who and where I am, I recognise them but I couldn’t claim to ‘know’ them.
In the case of Forced Entertainment, in Australia I saw the odd grainy copy of a copy of an often quite baffling video, decayed flickering traces drifting ever further from the ‘events’ they purported to register, the cassettes exchanging hands like a rather dodgey samizdat from another world. I also came across the odd text by Tim Etchells: sharply perceptive and interrogative, challenging, dissident, very funny and a bit arsey in ways that reminded me of something of what I missed of England, and of what was absent from so much of the performance I was able to see. In addition I heard the odd story from my old friend Claire Marshall, who is a long-term member of FE; we met sometimes when I came back to England for work or family reasons. She once sent me a video of Marina & Lee, and I showed it to the programmers at the Perth Festival of the Arts, who were quite evidently bemused and thought I was having a bit of a laugh.
And then a lot of word-of-mouth: that generative connective tissue that thrives on the unstable blur between memory, desire, fiction, and all sorts of assumptions and projections about what-it-is-one-would-like. In the early 1990s, for example, Phil a friend from Perth in Western Australia traveled to England, and somehow found his way to Sheffield to see Forced Entertainment’s retrospective trilogy Welcome to Dreamland: (Let the Water Run its Course) to the Sea that Made the Promise, 200% and Bloody Thirsty, and Some Confusions in the Law about Love). On his return, it was clear that something had happened to Phil. And that something was still happening for Phil. He burst into my house wild-eyed and waving a programme from the performances, ranting about angels and skeletons and wigs and dead people and the interruptions and not-knowing-whatthehell-was-going-on and the shouting and the weeping and the overload and the mess and the aching aching beauty of it all…. In the end he just flopped into a chair, took a deep breath and with a quiet melancholic seriousness said: ‘Jeeeez Dave mate, you’d have fuckin loved it!’
Somehow these mediated fragments made rather a lot of sense to me in Australia, with its lopsided grins and its displacements and its savage histories and its collective amnesias and its surreal wildlife in-the-everyday and its cultural frictions and its combative politics and its freak weather systems and its apocalyptic fires and its national ‘Sorry Day’ and its skywriters marking the vast indifference of the scriptable blue with ephemeral words like ‘GREED’ and ‘YES’ and ‘WE’, yes the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky, and now not even the sky but the memory of sky, and the blue of the earth in your lungs. I was living in a city where there were shops with names like ‘Bloody Cheap Strides’, and graffiti like ‘Chica! Estas fuerte!’, and ‘More than repair, everything is in need of mercy’. I had visited places with names like ‘Burnt Shirt’, ‘Catastrophe’, ‘Infinity’, ‘Useless Loop’ and ‘Paradise’. And I was fascinated by all those failed Australian explorers, setting off into the vast interior of this island continent in search of their projected desires (in particular imaginary inland seas), losing their way, and ‘dying of landscape’: they are part of the constitutive mythology of Australia. And then all those 19th century convict escapees from Sydney, heading west through the Blue Mountains towards the Red Centre, a line of flight to freedom, or so they thought: it was said that China lay on the other side of these mountains …
Then in early 1999, shortly after arriving back in England, at a time of major transitional uncertainty in my life personally, professionally and culturally - around that time I first read Tim’s book Certain Fragments, started to see some of the Forced Entertaiment shows, started to meet and talk around these events, then took part in a couple of workshops, and got to know a little bit more of these people and their work. And that’s pretty much it.
So my contact with Forced Entertainment over these 20 years has been sketchy, inconsistent, fragmented, at a distance, far more imagined than actual, but no less formative or real to me for all that. It feels as though I’ve been in some long-distance conversation with them across time and space for quite a while. And certain aspects of what they may have done and do indeed seem to do have marked my thinking, writing, teaching, making, playing, and dreaming in fundamental ways. It feels as though their fingerprints are all over my imagination - which is a slightly scarey thought: you don’t really where those digits have been, do you? … And so, as a stand-in for an absent ‘expert’, all I can hope to do is continue that conversation, and rehearse some sense of how these fingerprints have changed my perspectives – how they’ve shifted the angles and shapes of my perception, attention and energies to some degree: try to describe some of the patterns they form for me, how they feel, what they do, what they ask, what they enable. Not all of my stories will be true, but perhaps some of them will be good. A good story and a true story are not at all the same thing. And that suits my purposes here just fine ...
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An enquiry into the word 'we' (1)
Imagine. A naked man in a monkey mask, with white feather angel wings on his back, is squatting up a tree. A woman stands below, trying to persuade him to come down.
She offers him glass beads
She offers him PJ Harvey
She offers him an intimate secret
She offers him a banana
She offers him a list of other more modest trees, bushes and shrubs
She offers him a small act of kindness
She offers him a barely veiled threat
She offers him a list of things that go up and must come down
She offers him a magic trick
She offers him a hat
She offers him a home
She offers him a real good time
She offers him the vegetable of the day
She offers him words of wisdom
She offers him a single entendre
She offers him a small companion animal
She offers him the involuntary sounds of her body
She offers him an incomplete collection of back issues of Vogue
She offers him a variety of weather conditions
She offers him an obscene vetriloquism act
She offers him an impression of Bjork
She offers him a seismograph of her heart
She offers him flying lessons
She offers him descriptions of imaginary places
She offers him Pina Bausch
She offers him a crime that is bound to work
She offers him Archie Gemmill’s goal against Holland
She offers him a right old mess and a good kicking
She offers him a glimpse of the place where the nothing shows through
She offers him Edith Piaf
She offers him the big long breakfast thing
She offers him a medley of chimp calls and bird songs
She offers him her hand against the glass of a window
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Liars and thieves
Dear Claire
Someone once sent me a rather poor photocopy of a photo of you - in Hidden J, I think, it was a show I never saw. In the photo - and you’ll know the one I mean - you’re wearing a black dress and a cardboard sign tied with string around your neck, with the word LIAR written in capital letters. You look vulnerable and isolated adorned by this material textual object, 'othered' as if the sign has been coercively imposed. In some photos of you in this show, a slightly blurred Richard Lowdon is lurking in the background, his eyes directed towards your back, and his presence seems to confirm this coercion. Yet the nomination LIAR remains ambiguous, and any stable reading skids. You do seem to be located as A liar, if not THE singular liar. At the same time the word and your gaze also point outwards to any readers of the sign, and the term can attach itself to anyone who witnesses – perhaps to be freely accepted and shared in complicity: aren’t we all liars anyway? – or it can be received as accusation. Who? Me? Nah.
The photograph came to me at a time when petty criminals were being publicly shamed in some states in Australia. A boy who had been caught shoplifting in a glossy new mall in Canberra was punished in the children’s court by being obliged to stand every Saturday outside the ‘scene-of-the-crime’ in the shopping centre wearing a T-shirt with the word THIEF printed on it. Within days of his sentencing, this civic stigmatisation had been co-opted and dispersed as thousands of identical T-shirts were printed, distributed and worn around the shopping malls of Canberra.
Whenever I’ve seen this image of you, Claire, and it’s often been reproduced, I’ve wanted to undo this solitude, and have tried to imagine (it’s not so hard) a proliferation of liars on street corners and in courts of law, in shopping centres and front gardens, in railway stations and pubs and theatres and art colleges and online. A community of liars, with no way of ever knowing if any of us were telling the truth.
Love to you, D
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An enquiry into the word 'we' (2)
'”We” is a performance art. But how does one learn what to do together? How to be, once again, bodies in public, together, guardians of each other’s shame, looking the part? Where do the steps come from? […] But once we know the rules of the game, we can think about our performance, we don’t have to worry about the game. We take some things for granted so that we can take other things for something else' (Adam Phillips)
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Walkthroughs (1): rude cement fart o nite
What happens if you bring a group of people into a city they don’t know, let them loose on its streets, encourage them to fall off the map and get lost? What are the stories and lies they might tell? What might they find? What possible worlds might they imagine? What desire paths might they create? What invisible cities are interwoven with this one? What other places can migrate here? For the city is multiple, mutable, layered, and always in the process of being ‘made up’...
In April 2000, Forced Entertainment invited 13 people to participate in a workshop, led by Robin Arthur and Claire Marshall. Dancers, video makers, performance makers of different kinds, the odd teacher. Only one of them was familiar with Sheffield. Over a ten-day period, this ad hoc group was introduced to some of the recurrent propositions and strategies of Forced Entertainment’s working processes, with a view to generating a site-specific durational performance as the culmination to the workshop: Saturday Night at the Grosvenor Hotel. I was one of the 13.
We did a lot of walking in and around the city, maps in hand. We interviewed each other about what we had seen, the traces of places we carry within us, places in our memories and dreams. We described to each other the places we believed they were thinking about, and the people and objects that ghosted those places. We collected objects, textual fragments and vast quantities of photographic traces; we used them to invent stories and tell bare-faced lies.
My notebook of that time is full of odd lists: The list as conjunction without causality, elliptical cartographies and historiographies, overflowing through accumulation, always in excess, and always incomplete, partial. Too much and too little. In particular here, there are lists of fragments of gags, trigger words or punchlines - trifle deaf / wide-mouthed frog / boomerang that doesn’t come back / what’s grey and comes in pints / Al Caprawn / why couldn’t the sea urchin see 'er chin / 2 freemasons having a bath / William Hague walks into a bar / brass belly button / my girlfriend’s writing a novel in her sleep / why couldn’t the viper viper nose / Carrie was always a troubled child / Doctor Doctor I’ve got a pastie on my head. Also, street names I lifted from the maps of Sheffield: Blonk Street, Blast Lane, Blue Boy Way, Carsick View Road, Carsick Grove, Jaunty Lane, Nodder Road. And lists of mystics, criminals and dictators I thought about claiming to have encountered in the streets of the city: Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Pol Pot, Sri Baba, Myra Hindley, Mme Blavatsky, St John of the Cross, the Emperor Bokassa, Squeaky Frome, Reggie Kray. In the end I claimed to have met Charles Manson in a baker’s shop, and Jesus on the ring road, asking for directions to the Sheffield suburb of Paradise.
Collectively we drew maps of the city and marked on them the sites of events, memories, hallucinations, desires, possible dis-placed places: the Agamemnon Sporting Club and Drop-In Centre, the Clytemnestra Massage Parlour, the Mark E Smith Ward for the Criminally Insane, the River of Blood, Nirvana Avenue, Berchtesgarden Villas, The Odessa Steps, The Hanging Gardens, The Winter Palace, The Silk Route, Attention Deficit Disorder Drive etc.
Our base and performance space was the Grosvenor Suite, a vast tacky ballroom in the Grosvenor Hotel in the centre of Sheffield. On the wall by the entrance to this space was one of those grooved boards with white felt lettering, spelling out who’d booked the room: FORCED ENTERTAINMENT. Every day we rearranged these letters to make obscene or nonsensical anagrams – for reasons that remain murky, the only one I remember is: RUDE CEMENT FART O NITE. Every morning when we returned to the space, the letters had been put back in the right order by some invisible nocturnal hand.
We tried on a lot of old Forced Entertainment costumes, the sloughed skin of ghosts. We told jokes in many languages, until generic formats started to collapse and migrate into other jokes, producing rambling broken narratives in search of a laugh forever deferred. We shuffled objects and furniture and lights in our space until we found a configuration that contained a kind of tawdry tension.
‘Acting’s allowed as long as you can’t see it’, Rob said.
Out of the debris of material produced, we elaborated a structure for a 6-hour durational performance. A tiny stage at one end of the cavernous ballroom, all silver and blue tinsel tat and bright lights; in the middle, a huge dance floor scattered with empty chairs, its outline ringed with fairy lights; then the spectators at the other end of the space, perhaps 30 metres from the performers, in an area of chairs and long white tables, with video monitors relaying extreme full-face close-ups of events on stage.
The event looped around a recurrent 3-part structure: (1) a fractured stand-up routine at a microphone onstage, with absent punchlines, possessed ramblings, lonely visions, driftings and stumblings and failings through sorry gags that had themselves fallen off the map into a kind of disoriented yearning - appeals to be heard, to be loved, to take (a) place; (2) an interrogation/interview from a shadowy figure at a table on the dance floor about ‘the city’ - now a composite palimpsest of desire, imagination, possibility, unabashed lie and the actual here now - it’s only a short walk from Campo Street past Netto’s the supermarket to the collapsed church next to the lake with the immersed statues, only a short drive from Cafe Uno in Ecclesall Street to the crossing point in the wall and the desert beyond; and finally (3) improvised dance marathon routines in teams - like the gags, broken pleas, temporary alliances unravelling into further dispersals, mis-matchings, attenuated mechanisms for losing the way, then briefly finding it, then losing it again. Stand-up and dance marathon sections were conducted at 16 rpm, the gramophone giving us Mrs Mills on Valium. The interview was conducted in silence.
‘Give yourself enough rope to hang yourself’, Rob told us.
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An interruption about knowing: Gregg's story
My friend Gregg Whelan of Lone Twin told me about going to see Pina Bausch at Sadler’s Wells a few years ago. He’d never seen a Bausch show, and he’d never been to Sadler’s Wells; in fact he confessed he’d never been to what he called ‘a proper posh theatre’. Anyway, he was having a drink in the bar beforehand, checking out the surroundings and the punters, dressed up to the nines. Suddenly his attention was caught by an unusually loud laugh, and everyone turned round … to see Simon Callow wading through the crowd in a dinner jacket, holding a glass of champagne aloft in front of him, with a rather beautiful young man following him in his wake. There’s Simon Callow, everyone said. Gregg was surprised at how round and glowing Simon was. Then everyone started to move into the auditorium, and eventually settled into their seats. Everyone was in, and there was a low and expectant hubbub. Then at the last gasp there was a mini-kerfuffle behind him and everyone turned round … and Simon Callow came in at high speed down the aisle, still carrying champagne glass, still with young man in tow, then proceeded to squeeze along a row past dozens of seated punters with a series of excuse me’s and beaming smiles and muffled laughs. It’s Simon Callow, everyone said. Then just as Simon & friend sat down bang in the middle, the lights started to fade to black. Gregg started to applaud. He thought it was brilliant. So this was the world of Pina Bausch ...
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An enquiry into the word 'we' (3)
Imagine. A naked woman in a monkey mask, with white feather angel wings on her back, is squatting up a tree. A man stands below, trying to persuade her to come down.
He offers her gleaming things from the other side
He offers her an Elvis move
He offers her a comic fruit
He offers her his inner clown, called Peanut
He offers her a pint and a takeaway
He offers her spurious origins for his scars
He offers her a peacock cry
He offers her Thom Yorke dancing
He offers her a view from space
He offers her the dream about the horse in the shopping mall
He offers her a new identity and no questions asked
He offers her a shoulder, and a neck, and some arms
He offers her a soft landing
He offers her a fish with eyes like wells
He offers to disappoint when the chips are down
He offers her a melancholy shuffle and a stifled burp
He offers her a swift rub-down with an oily rag
He offers her a ride on a pantomime horse
He offers her a variety of silences
He offers her a map of the world, scratched on the ground with his toe
He offers her an orchard and a lake and a lame excuse
He offers her a crime that is just bound to work
He offers her a volcano
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Walkthroughs (2): ‘And in that failing is your heartbeat’
In retrospect, the legacy of this workshop (and of other encounters with the company’s work) takes shape for me in five core sites that linger on in my thinking and practice:
First, something about a compositional process. It’s a topological process, where topology is (in Michel Serres’s words) a ‘science of proximities and ongoing or interrupted transformations’. Here is Serres talking about his own multi-modal journey towards an unstable ‘map’: ‘When you are working on relationships that are in process, you’re like a man who takes a plane from Toulouse to Madrid, travels by car from Geneva to Lausanne, goes on foot from Paris towards the Chevreuse valley, or from Cervina to the top of the Matterhorn (with spikes on his shoes, a rope and an ice axe), who goes by boat from Le Havre to New York, who swims from Calais to Dover, who travels by rocket towards the moon, travels by semaphore, telephone or fax, by diaries from childhood to old age, by monuments from antiquity to the present, by lightning bolts when in love. One may well ask: ‘What in the world is this man doing?’ There are dilemmas in the mode of travelling, the reasons for the trip, the point of departure and the destination, in the places through which one will pass: the speed, the means, the vehicle, the obstacles to be overcome, make that space active. And since I have used diverse methods, the coherence of my project is suspect. […] In fact, it was always a matter of establishing a relation, constructing it, fine-tuning it. And once established, thousands of relations, here, there, everywhere – after a while, when you step back and look, a picture emerges. Or at least a map. You see a general theory of relations, without any point focalising the construction or solidifying it, like a pyramid. The turbulences keep moving. The flows keep dancing’ (111-12).
In this context in Sheffield, composition involved the generation of masses of fragments (which Blanchot calls ‘the little by little suddenly’) through drifting as a means of uncovering versions of what’s there. This requires patience, an attentiveness to detail, to multiplicities and connectivities. Knowingly not knowing what it is ‘about’ at the outset. Tracking something emergent, trying to go for the ride, knowing it will always be a few necks ahead of the rider. I’m sure this must have been something like the process of WG Sebald, whose works dance around unnamed polycentric subjects that are only ever implied.
Second, something about the relations between space, place and identity. ‘What the map cuts up, the story cuts across’, wrote Michel de Certeau. Location and identity are produced as much through narration as through what already exists: more to do with doing than knowing. This kind of work provides opportunities to rehearse and play-fully refashion those heterogeneous personal mappings that we are continuously making up and over, and out of which we constitute our-‘selves’. So, a kind of fluid performative ‘auto-topography’ that creates senses of self and of space and place (rather than the ‘self’ or the ‘world’ occurring preformed, as if they were pre-existent entities rubbing up against each other). Space, time, self as ‘a multiple foldable diversity’ (Michel Serres), a field of flows and intensities: spacing, timing, selfing. Here a dynamically spatialised (and fictionalised) self-in-process perhaps frays just a little the dualist territorial imaginaries of inside and outside, of self-identity in opposition to radical alterity. A philosophy and practice of passage, rather than of ground or territory. If the continuity of identity is secured through movement and the capacity to change, rather than the ability to cling to what is already established, then this work proposed simple strategies for abandoning the logics of mastery and letting elements of outside in-here.
Third, something about politics and the political. The FE work struck me as overtly political - in the micro-politics of its collaborative processes, the complex authorship in the elaboration of its forms and languages; in its critical engagement with the task of ‘bearing witness to the dreams and failings of a culture’ (Tim’s words in Certain Fragments); in its ambiguously contestatory relations to a range of conventions and expectations in theatre; in its obsessions with the urban; in the ethical complexity of the situations it creates for its spectators and the agency it grants them as makers of meaning in the proliferative play of signification. In a notebook I once wrote, ‘Forced Entertainment are the bastard children of Brecht and a drunken panto horse. Poor old horse’.
Fourth, something about dramaturgy. In his book The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker writes about contemporary art practices involving animals or animal representations, where ‘things appear to have gone wrong with the animal, as it were, but where it still holds together’. He discusses strategies of imitation where the disguises are tawdry, compromised, incongruous conjunctions, coming apart at the seams, active reminders of difference, and perhaps of a certain shame. With reference to Deleuze & Guattari’s word ‘rater’ (to spoil, ruin), he coins the term ‘botched taxidermy’ for such practices, giving examples under thematic headings which sound like a taxonomy of Forced Entertainment strategies: ‘Mixed materials … ‘Stuffed’ animals not as taxidermy but as toys … Other uses of ‘wrong’ materials … Hybrid forms … Messy confrontations … Taxidermic form reworked … Finally, tattiness …’. I think of Roland Barthes on the body, and how to write it: ‘Neither the skin, nor the muscles, not the bones, not the nerves, but the rest: an awkward, fibrous, shaggy, ravelled thing, a clown’s coat’.
As Baker points out, ‘botching’ (and the related term ‘bodging’) don’t necessarily always mean utter ruination or abject failure, the wrecking of something. ‘It can also mean sticking or cobbling something together in a makeshift way, an ‘ill-finished’ or clumsy or unskilful way, with no attempt at perfection but equally with no implication of the thing completely falling apart’. So it’s related to assemblage and bricolage, and the knowingly open display of ‘faulty’ technique: a creative procedure in the generation of the provisional, the informal, the recycled – instances of the inexpert that are ‘questioning entities’ (to borrow a phrase from Jacques Derrida).
Now, I’m not just referring to all those shonky animal disguises and uncertain animal/human hybrids in Forced Entertainment shows: Cathy in the dog costume in Showtime, the panto horse that gulped whisky through an eye socket and cans of lager through the join between the two halves of the costume, and danced in its own lagery piss in Pleasure, the recurrent gorilla suit with or without head, and so on. I’m also thinking of the structures and tonalities that seem to characterise so many of these shows: messing with received and overly-familiar and overlooked representational forms, displacing them, defamiliarising them, turning them inside out and on their heads, messing with their anatomies, abusing them, taking them apart, stitching them up (in both senses) and reanimating them as comic or pathetic or psychotic or narcoleptic or drunk or incompetent or conspiratorial or inventive revenants in a different context here-now. Everything staggers on the lip of falling apart, yet it somehow still holds together. It was this tension that was happening to Phil when he burst into my house years ago, and he couldn’t resolve it. It’s a core ambiguity and complexity in this work, which one might call a fucked-up-and-yetness. This ‘and-yetness’ (which is political in its invitation to possibility and connectivity) takes many forms compositionally and affectively, from the melancholic, the poignant and the corrosively comic to the most astonishing micro-events of a flaring into appearance.
Which brings me, finally, to something about the 'event'. What is the nature of the event, and of ‘eventhood’? Natalie Crohn Schmidt has reflected on notions of event in the discourses of 20th century science and their further exploration in post-Cagean aesthetics: ‘In science it has come to be understood that the event is the basic unit of all things real – that energy, not matter, is the basic dictum. In the increasingly widespread perception of reality as endless process, performance, not the art object, becomes primary […] performance is an event rather than an object’. The notion of ‘event’ is much discussed in contemporary philosophy, notably in the work of Emmanuel Levinas (‘the event of alterity’), Jean-Luc Nancy (the notion of passibilité), Gilles Deleuze (the concept as event), Alain Badiou (ethics and event), and Jean-François Lyotard (the event as ‘non-mastery of self over self’). Lyotard writes of the event’s capacity to exceed and undo the cognitive reach of the self: ‘Because it is absolute, the presenting present cannot be grasped; it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event. That something happens, the occurrence, means that the mind is disappropriated. The expression ‘it happens that…’ is the formula of non-mastery of self over self. The event makes the self incapable of taking possession and control of what it is. It testifies that the self is essentially passible to a recurrent alterity’ (Lyotard, The Inhuman, 1991, 59).
In the early 1980s the performance theorist Herbert Blau asked how one might ‘effect the liberation of the performer as an actor who, laminated with appearance, struggles to appear’? (Blau 1982, 257). The struggle is all, ‘at the dubious end of ideology, at the possible end of history, when our lives are still dominated (incredibly) by the prospect of an actual disappearance. All theatre comes against the inevitability of disappearance from the struggle to appear. The only theatre worth seeing – that can be seen rather than stared through – is that which struggles to appear. The rest is all bad make-up’ (ibid, 298).
So what happens at those moments of a flaring into visibility through appearance, of an ephemeral visitation in the active vanishing of performance? like that of a ghost (une apparition) erupting through the walls of appearance to take (its) place? At the intersection of visible appearance and invisible happening, dream and event, the ‘doing’ and ‘the thing done’ (Elin Diamond), what then appears, and to whom? How might one make space for something akin to Lyotard’s theatre of energetics, in which what appears is ‘the highest intensity […] of what there is, without intention’? (‘The Tooth, the Palm’, 1997). I don’t have the answers, and ‘the turbulences keep moving, the flows keep dancing’ - but it seems Forced Entertainment (and others) return again and again to related questions: in particular, in terms of a desire to create situations in which we are encouraged to watch the people in front of us, at risk, ‘not representing something but going through something’. ‘Staying inside difficulty’. At such moments, as Tim suggests, ‘They lay their bodies on the line … and we are transformed – not audience to a spectacle, but witnesses to an event’ (Certain Fragments, 49).
The last word goes to Tim Etchells in a text called ‘We seek the unsought misfortune’ (2004), which itself forms part of Matthew Goulish’s text ‘Peculiar Detonation: The Incomplete History and Impermanent Manifesto of the Institute of Failure’:
'I am in love with you. I want you to see me. I want you to see me without filters, without frames, borders, deceits. I want us to meet in this time. In this moment to abandon expectations. Defences. Limits. To breathe. And I want you to be wary. To be aware that your gaze judges and prescribes me. And that my gaze is also judgemental. That I do not love or trust you. How could I? I do not know who you are ...
Presence. The moment. The now.
Thrown back on your own devices. I will not help you with this. You have to ‘deal’. Which means cope with un-meaning. Or with the possibility of un-meaning. Or cope with me not coping. Or with me not meaning. The trembling of this moment ...
To put it very simply: You get up here (you come up here) and you fail. And in that failing is your heartbeat, and in that failing is you connected to everything and everyone'.
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An enquiry into the word 'we' (4): 'Good evening, Sheffield - Is there anyone there?'
Q. David, you’re on the tallest building in the city: what do you see?
A: I see a stadium with its lights on. I see a deserted soccer pitch on top of a hill. I see the disused steel works and a huge mound of tyres. I see a canal system like arteries running through the city. I see the ring road. I see a motorway bridge across a gorge. I see roof gardens. I see a block of flats in the shape of a honeycomb. I see a field of ashes. I see an eagle perched on a rock on top of the multi-storey carpark, staring. I see two men in blue boiler suits walking along the river’s edge. I see the peaks in the distance. I see the sky. I see seven hills. I see seven dwarves outside Debenham’s waiting for it to open. I see seven samurai directing traffic. I see seven seasons in one day. I see seven people dying from smoking related illnesses. I see trousers with seven creases. I see seven fingers on one hand. I see seven steps to Heaven. I see seven seas. I see seven tombstones with the word YID scrawled on them. I see myself at the age of seven.
Q. You mention Debenham’s. You’re driving past Debenham’s in a speeding car, heading for the desert. What do you see?
A. I see pedestrians scattering, it’s a pedestrian precinct. I see Isabella Rossellini coming out of the HMV shop with a DVD - looks like the first series of ‘Twin Peaks’. I see the lady of the bridge. I see a statue of an angel with one wing missing. I see a man eating a kebab. I see a black dog chasing a white plastic bag. I see the engineering works on Matilda Street. I see the scene of the crime.
Q. Do you know what’s the best place to be when the rains come?
A. On top of the tower in the old radio station, it’s a stopping point for the small fleet of craft that takes to the water as it rises. When the rains come, whole suburbs disappear; and when they recede whole communities are revealed, they return to life, churchbells ringing. Ghost cities perfectly preserved. And the desert is carpeted with flowers.
Q. Do you know the big wall? What’s on the other side?
A. I’ve only been there once, and that was a couple of weeks ago. There’s a memorial to all those people who died. It was the anniversary. Flowers, scarves, messages. I went with my spray can ... to leave some thoughts. There was no one else there apart from a woman, who said to me, ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ … And beyond that, well, there’s “a wreck of a place. There are three gates standing ajar and a fence that broke off. It is not the wreck of anything else in particular. A place came there and crashed. After that it remained the wreck of a place. Light fell on it”.
And now I have some questions for you: - Is there anyone there who has ever been penetrated by a traffic cop? Is there anyone there who has ever defended a dog in a court of law? Is there anyone there who has ever danced with a life-sized cut-out of Adrian Heathfield? Is there anyone there who has ever tried to murder someone by sneaking up on them with two Bic lighters, then held one to each nostril and released the gas? Is there anyone there who has ever been trapped in a lift with an entire rugby league team? Is there anyone there who has ever felt love for a whippet? Is there anyone there with their own teeth? Is there anyone there who feels pain? Is there anyone there with a heart? Is there anyone there?
Is there anyone there?
References
Baker, Steve (2000). The Postmodern Animal, London: Reaktion Books
Blanchot, Maurice (1995). The Writing of the Disaster (trans. Ann Smock), Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
Blau, Herbert (1982). Take up the Bodies: Theatre at the Vanishing Point, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press
Etchells, Tim (1999). Certain fragments: contemporary performance and Forced Entertainment, London & New York: Routledge
Etchells, Tim (2004) ‘We seek the unsought misfortune’, in Helmer & Malzacher 2004: 264-5
Helmer, J. & Malzacher, F. (eds) (2004). Not Even a Game Anymore: The Theatre of Forced Entertainment, Berlin: Alexander Verlag
Lyotard, Jean-François (1991). The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby), Cambridge: Polity Press
Lyotard, Jean François (1997). ‘The Tooth, the Palm’ [1977], in Timothy Mottram (ed.), Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary Thought, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 282-8
Serres, Michel & Latour, Bruno (1995). Conversations on Science, Culture and Time (trans. Roxanne Lapidus), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Edited version of ‘Welcome to Paradise (you’d have loved it)’, opening keynote address at symposium to mark the 20th anniversary of Forced Entertainment (’We are searching for a theatre that can really talk about what it’s like to live through these times’: A Forced Entertainment Symposium’, Lancaster University, 2004. All presentations recorded & held by the National Sound Archive, London). Photograph of Claire Marshall in Hidden J © Hugo Glendinning/FE. Texts © David Williams. My thanks to Hannah for her help with this material. For Chris Kohn's RealTime review of the Lancaster symposium, see here.
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