The Presence Project

Tim Etchells will conduct one of our first Presence performance workshops – to be hosted by the Centre for Intermedia, Exeter, on 15 February.

Tim is Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment, one of the UK’s most influential companies working across performance, installation and media.

Forced Entertainment is currently presenting two theatre pieces, Exquisite Pain and Bloody Mess, at the Riverside Studios in London.

Exquisite Pain is pared down re-telling of conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s stories, an exploration ‘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’:

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.

This is the first time the company have chosen to perform a text they have not created themselves.

Tim notes:

I loved the project's form of repeated exchange. Its "I'll tell you my sad story if you tell me yours". It's the kind of simple transaction that most of us have taken part in informally - in bars, cars or bedrooms - but in Calle's hands, as she repeatedly exchanges her own story of failed romance for the stories of friends, acquaintances and strangers, the process is reduced to its mathematical and psychological essence; a ticking tit-for-tat of death, lost love, existential despair and bad dentistry.

Two people sit in front of you and make their way through a collection of sad stories that belong to other people. A kind of bearing witness, a trip through the archive that Sophie Calle has collected, and a journey through her journey of remembering and trying to forget.

Bloody Mess is in many ways the antithesis of Exquisite Pain.

A highly physical spectacle involving ten performers ‘about the pleasure of watching, and about visual pleasure, physical pleasure,’ Bloody Mess emphasizes action, disorder and simultaneity.

Forced Entertainment’s work emphasizes the constructed nature of role, identity, and place.

Reflecting their concerns with media and mediation, the company frequently heighten the artificiality of the elements they play through, allowing one ‘fictional’ moment to shift onto or be juxtaposed with another.

Tim has suggested that such strategies foreground ‘the inability of the performers to fully inhabit the texts and gestures which they perform,’ reflecting the notion that:

The space that we really live in is a kind of electronically mediated one. And it feels like one’s landscape - the source of one’s images, the things that haunt you - are likely to be second, third, fourth-hand.

Yet in these ‘shifts,’ the vulnerabilities of the performers are revealed in counterpoint to the fictional ‘borrowings’ that make up the work.

Forced Entertainment pose questions about the performance of presence where mediation itself reveals the complexity of the ‘live’ act and event.

We will soon be developing Collaboratory project pages on Tim's work and Forced Entertainment in preparation for the workshop documentation.

Forced Entertainment’s website is at www.forcedentertainment.com/
Photos: Hugo Glendinning, courtesy of Forced Entertainment