Ping-pong
by Christine Peters Start one : About ten years ago I happened to see a performance by Forced Entertainment for the first time: Showtime was highly playful, cunning and ironic and I fell in love with the company's work immediately.In a more or less continuous dialogue and cooperation with the group since then, I've seen their readiness to explore the vast field of contemporary art, their experiments with different media, their intellectual and emotional strength, and their playfulness, all of which have become a huge inspiring resource for my own work as a programmer.
Start two : About twelve months ago I met Sophie Calle, whose work I had been interested in and following for several years. In our discussion about projects, ideas and the relationship between different media it was she who encouraged me to invite an artist to stage one of her works, curious to see what would happen to it in a live setting, in front of an audience.
Connection : At this suggestion I immediately thought again of Forced Entertainment's artistic director Tim Etchells, whose outstanding talent as a storyteller I appreciate just as I admire Sophie Calle's risky, radical and autobiographical artistic approach. Tim was excited by the challenge I proposed and, through a lucky coincidence of curious minds, both artists were ready for this adventure.
Tim chose to explore Sophie Calle's project Exquisite Pain , a work which exists as a sequence of narrative text panels and corresponding photo-images and which was published in book-form in 2004. A strong visual artwork that took almost fifteen years to complete, Exquisite Pain is an intellectually and emotionally disturbing piece. It's also a kind of richly layered and perfectly fine-tuned 'road movie' whose obsessed protagonist - full of pain from her lost love - tries to overcome her suffering by comparing it to that of other people.
Connection again: Once you've read Calle's Exquisite Pain texts and seen the photographs next to them, the link to the work of Forced Entertainment becomes immediately apparent: the narrative approach between true story and make-believe, factual and fictional, obsession, fatigue and melancholy, is the most obvious comparison, and yet if one looks closer another crucial and intriguing feature of both of their works soon becomes clear - 'the travel aspect':
"...with time I have become used to my last name, which, in Spanish means street, hence wandering... My first name means 'wisdom' in Greek so this gives 'street smart'..." (Sophie Calle, in her notebooks 1978-79, a period when she was collecting books in which the name 'Calle' appeared)
In their 2001 project The Travels , Forced Entertainment explored their own urban microcosm of pain and pleasure. Visiting locations in the UK chosen because of their unusual or literal street-names alone, the group walked through unknown terrain for months. Between dusk and dawn, the performers invented or collected stories from their encounters in a landscape of derelict houses, graffitied walls, fences, one-way roads and dead ends. In doing so they composed a dense, almost imaginary country full of spooky, sad, funny, unpleasant and serious narratives. The intimate actions and games of the company members, creating and collecting arbitrary situations during their lonesome journeys - raw material for the final theatre work - were in one sense already performances: intimate stagings of private diaries, drawings and dreams in deserted settings - each one a perfect little tableaux vivant, framed by solitude, anger, distrust and desire. The link to Sophie Calle, who for many years has made her work in precisely this space of travel, play and narrative, is clear.
Whether in the documentary style of performances like The Travels, or more theatrical pieces like Showtime, Forced Entertainment are masters of storytelling and economy, and masters of suspense. Their theatrical and artistic qualities are exquisite, their radicality and courage, their hospitality and politics of friendship, legendary.
I have always imagined Peter Sellers (aka Inspector Clouseau) meeting Alfred Hitchcock secretly in Forced Entertainment's home city of Sheffield to watch the company perform there - I am sure that they would have become addicted followers immediately.
And I hope that there will be many more followers and artists who take the same kinds of risk, who are not afraid of asking disturbing or surprising questions but who instead strive for an unmistakable, strong theatre:
Playful and skilful, emotionally touching, celebrating the pleasure of performing, seducing, disguising and unmasking. All at the same time.
The rest is silence.
© Christine Peters, 2005.
