G - hebbel am ufer

© Sophie Calle
“Exquisite Pain” is co-produced by Theater der Welt 2005 (Stuttgart), BIT Teatergarasjen
(Bergen), The National Museum of Art, Design and Architecture (Oslo), Kaaitheater
(Brussels), La Filature, scène nationale de Mulhouse, and Tanzquartier Wien.
Sophie Calle’s original work was the product of a period
of intense grief she experienced 20 years ago when a
relationship broke up. Her way of dealing with this was to
recount her misery to everyone she met – 99 times –
and then asking them to share their worst moments with
her, thus 99 stories of powerful grief emerged. Forced
Entertainment base their work on this, exploring how the
forces of language, memory and forgetting move to
contain, preserve or erase events.
that never arrive.
“Exquisite Pain” explores how the forces of language,
memory and forgetting move to contain, preserve or
erase events, how as a person one comes to terms with
trauma. “Exquisite Pain” is about remembering and
forgetting, about love and about loss, about the stories
we tell ourselves when things have gone wrong.
“Exquisite Pain” is an extraordinarily simple and intimate
piece for two performers using text and images by Sophie
Calle. This is the first time the company have worked
with an existing text as source material – not a play from
the theatrical cannon, but rather text and images by the
French conceptual artist Sophie Calle whose extraordinary
work has long attempted to blur the boundaries of visual
art practice with performance and real life.
A man and a woman sit at identical tables and tell stories
of ordinary and not-so-ordinary heart-break, each story
accompanied by a single iconic image. The woman narrates
repeatedly the story of a break up; the suffering
at the end of an affair, each time remembering differently.
In contrast to this obsessive repetition the man tells many
different stories collected from the lives of other people;
each story a snapshot narrative of sorrow, big or small,
that takes its place in a growing catalogue of suffering,
break-ups, humiliations, deaths, illnesses and love letters
“I decided to continue… until I had got over my pain by
comparing it with other people’s, or had worn out my own
story through sheer repetition”