G - hebbel am ufer

Forced Entertainment are regularly funded by Arts Council England and Sheffield
City Council
Forced Entertainment are Robin Arthur, Tim Etchells
(Artistic Director), Richard Lowdon (Designer), Claire
Marshall, Cathy Naden and Terry O’Connor.
2009 marks Forced Entertainment’s 25th anniversary.
Since forming the company on graduation from University
in 1984, the six core members of the group have sustained
a unique artistic partnership for quarter of a century,
confirming time and again their position as trailblazers
in contemporary theatre. The company’s substantial canon
of work reflects an interest in the mechanics of performance,
the role of the audience and the machi nations of
contemporary urban life. The work – framed and focused
by Artistic Director Tim Etchells - is distinctive and provocative,
delighting in disrupting the conventions of theatre
and the expectations of audiences. Forced Entertainment’s
trademark collaborative process – devising work as a
group through improvisation, experimentation and debate –
has made them pioneers of British avant-garde theatre
and earned them an unparalleled inter national reputation.
Tim Etchells, May 2009
The desire to break theatre - by overloading it, by stretching
it, by simplifying it, by speeding it up and by slowing it
down - is well reflected in this Live Brits Special Season
which presents a wide range of our recent projects.
Spanning our work on Sophie Calle's conceptual love
story text „Exquisite Pain“, the uproarious and combative
six hour story-telling marathon „And On The Thousandth
Night...“ as well as new developments in our work including
the radio-play/graphic-novel-come-to-life „Void
Story“ and my monologue for American actor Jim Fletcher
„Sight is the Sense...“ this season shows the company
in its ongoing attempt to reinvent theatre and performance
for the contemporary context.
A similar spirit runs through the work that we have pursued
at Forced Entertainment in relation to theatre, where
since the group's inception in 1984, we have interrogated
and reinvented theatre, exploring questions of contemporary
landscape and identity alongside a playful and limittesting
inquiry into systems such as those of language
and of the theatre itself.
Baudelaire spoke of the child's elemental relationship to
the toy being that of asking 'how can I break this?'