'Forced Entertainment' originally making and touring theatre performances before expanding to long durational performance, live art, video and digital media. Their work has been presented throughout the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe as well as Australia, Japan, Canada and the United States. They develop projects using a collaborative process - devising work as a group through improvisation, experimentation and debate.
"We are a group of six artists based in Sheffield, presenting our work in many different places, to audiences all around the world..." - Forced Entertainment
The work that 'Forced Entertainment' makes tries to explore what theatre and performance can mean in contemporary life and is always a kind of conversation or negotiation, something that needs to be live. They're interested in making performances that excite, challenge, question and entertain other people. They're interested in confusion as well as laughter.
Creative Team:
2. Tim Etchells (Artistic Director)
3. Richard Lowdon (Designer)
4. Claire Marshall
5. Cathy Naden
6. Terry O'Conner
This group of six artists started working together in 1984; in the many projects that they've created since then they've made lists, played games, spoken gibberish, stayed silent, made a mess, dressed up, stripped down, confessed to it all, performed magic tricks, told jokes, clowned around, played dead, got drunk, told stories and performed for 6, 12 and even 24 hours at a stretch. They've worked on texts, they've danced and moved, they've fixed things meticulously, they've improvised. they've made serious work that had turned out to be comical, and comical work that turned out to be serious, digging deep into theatre and performance, thinking about what those things might be for them and what kinds of dialogue they can open with contemporary audiences.
Management Team:
1. Eileen Evans (Executive Director)
2. Jim Harrison (Production Manager)
3. Natalie Simpson (Office Manager)
4. Sam Stockdale (Marketing Manager)
Board Of Directors:
1. Frances Babbage
2. Deborah Chadbourn
3. Adrian Friedli
4. Martin Harvey
5. Annie Lloyd
6. Simon Shibli (Chairman)
Regular Collaborators:
1. John Avery
2. Hester Chillingworth
3. Nigel Edwards
4. Hugo Glendinning
5. Elb Hall
6. Phil Hayes
7. Jerry Killick
8. Ray Rennie
9. Bruno Roubicek
10. John Rowley
They also invite performers and other creatives to work with them on individual projects and they are credited on their relevant projects pages.
As well as performance works, they've made gallery installations, sight-specific pieces, books, photographic collaborations, videos and even a mischievous guided bus tour. In many ways, the company itself - a unique 30 year collaboration - is the bedrock of everything they do, a rare example of people building, maintaining and continuing to develop a vocabulary, ways of working and innovating together over a long period of time.
Reception:
Reception:
1. "Confounding conventions and exploding audience expectations" - The Times
2. "Legendary" - Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman
3. "The best group of stage actors in Britain" - David Tushingham, The Financial Times
4. "Internationally successful and storied" - Robert Avila, The San Francisco Bay Guardian
5. "Beyond these shores, however, the company is regarded as one of the greatest British theatrical exports of the past 20 years... It is this ability to smash through the pretences of theatre that has kept the company ahead of the game" - Lyn Gardner, The Guardian
6. "Produced some of the most exciting and challenging theatre of the past few decades" - The Guardian
7. "I had never seen anything like it before, a piece that was so political, provocative and poetic because it was a group of artists speaking about their lives - and therefore our lives - in the most direct way. To this day, Speak Bitterness is one of the very few experiences that have radically changed my understanding and vision of theatre" - Marie-Helene Falcon, Director of Montreal's Festival de Theatre des Ameriques, Speak Bitterness
'The British Library' claims that the group "Continue to tour widely and to great acclaim throughout the world"
Publications About Forced Entertainment From Others:
1. "Not Even a Game Anymore": The Theatre of Forced Entertainment, by Judith Helmer and Florian Malzacher. Berlin: Alexander Verlag Berlin, 2004
Further Reading:
1. Contemporary Theatre Review and International Journal, edited by Franc Chamberlain.
2. Searching for Reception with cardboard wings: Forced Entertainment and the sublime chapter, by Andrew Quick. Volume 2, Issue 2, 1994.
3. Art Into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents, by Nick Kaye. Harwood Academic Publishers / Psychology Press / Rutledge, 1996.
4. Theatre Forum, edited by Jim Carmody, John Rouse, Adele Edling Shank and Theodore Shank.
5. Struggling to Perform: Radical Amateurism and Forced Entertainment chapter, by Sara Jane Bailes. Issue number 26, Winter/Spring 2005.
6. Staging the Screen, the use of Film and Video in Theatre, by Greg Giesekam. Third Hand Photocopies: Forced Entertainment chapter. Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.
7. Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, by Sara Jane Bailes. Profane Illumination: Theatre and Forced Entertainment chapter. Routledge, 2011.
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