Forced Entertainment has today announced that the company are to become a Southbank Centre Associate Company and return to the venue after more than a decade, having last performed there in 2007 with And On The Thousandth Night as part of SPILL Festival, and with seminal piece Bloody Mess at Jarvis Cocker’s Meltdown. In December 2018 they will present their first work as an associate company, a new version of Artistic Director Tim Etchells’ That Night Follows Day. As a new Southbank Centre associate company, Forced Entertainment will work with the multi arts organisation to research, develop and premiere work.
Forced Entertainment Artistic Director Tim Etchells said: “As a Sheffield based company having a London home has always been important to us, and our exciting new partnership with Southbank Centre will help us show the performances we are making to new audiences in the capital, alongside working in other London contexts, as circumstances and opportunities arise. We’ll also continue our diverse collaborations and presentation partnerships around the UK as well as pursuing, in these depressing Brexit times, the development of new projects with our fantastic network of partners and presenters across Europe and further afield.”
In April, emerging from a months–long process of studio improvisation and discussion, provocateurs inside the contemporary theatre scene Forced Entertainment, will present a playful new work Out Of Order. The piece takes as its starting point the idea of the mistake, breakdown or accident in established systems and create a collage of scenes, images, texts, fragments and action to summon the error of the title. In Out Of Order almost everything approaches a state of collapse – the figures onstage do their best to continue, forging narrative and making intimate direct contact with the audience. Founder members of the Sheffield–based ensemble (Richard Lowdon, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor, Claire Marshall and Robin Arthur) share the stage with regular collaborator Jerry Killick and guest Nicki Hobday who, following recent performances with the group on existing projects, here joins the creation process for the first time.
In December Forced Entertainment will present a new version of Artistic Director Tim Etchells’ That Night Follows Day. Through a chorus of children aged between 8 and 14, the comical and poignant piece interrogates the ways in which the adult world shapes and defines that of young people, offering up the full range of advice, facts, white lies and excuses children hear from adults. The performance explores how we are all both made and constrained by language as we try to describe our experiences and imagine our futures. The piece was originally created in 2007 by Forced Entertainment’s Artistic Director Tim Etchells in a production for the Flemish theatre organisation CAMPO. The new version will assemble a new cast of local young people with an updated text.
Forced Entertainment has worked at the forefront of new developments in theatre and performance for 34 years, and has been a key player in the development of a truly contemporary theatre language. The group makes their work in Sheffield (UK) and tours their ground–breaking performances across the world. The work explores and often explodes the conventions of genre, narrative and theatre itself – drawing influence not just from drama but from dance, performance art, music culture and popular forms such as cabaret and stand-up.
Out Of Order is a Forced Entertainment production, co-produced by Künsterlhaus Moustonturm & Schauspiel Frankfurt, PACT Zollverein Essen, HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin and Gessnerallee Zurich, it will run from 27 April – 18 May. The Night Follows Day, commissioned by Southbank Centre, will run from 11 – 15 December 2018 in Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room.
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