Dear Tim,1
I am writing from a train. I am on a train which is taking me to see the second world premiere of your latest show, The Coming Storm. To be honest, I am presenting this letter here and now as my paper for the CDE conference in Mülheim am Ruhr, Germany, called Bodies on Stage. It is 9th of June 2012, 10.30.
I am talking at the conference and blindly hoping to publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, so forgive my episodic attempts at academic allusions and telling you about things you already know. Like in your shows or writings, Tim, nevertheless, trendy words and phrases of academia such as simulacra, deterritorialisation, or rhizomatic might intertwine with low-brow expressions like fuck, cunt, or postdramatic.
Tim, I want to write about the stage and the body, and I would also like to tell you about the vulnerability, fragility, mistakes, and failures, which I find most fascinating in your work. It is in fact a failure which brought me here. Failure or coincidence: that you cancelled your show Tomorrow’s Parties, which I was originally planning to see and write about; this failure has brought me here. By here I mean the presence of my corporeal body on this very train, or this very room, and into this very letter. The work of Forced Entertainment is often considered to be very here and now. Let me remind you here of the context from which I approached your work initially, which is, rather than new British theatre, perhaps, “now” British theatre.2 Instead of theatre, perhaps, let me use performance art here, or Live Art, the platform which like your pieces focuses on the physicality of the body on stage. It makes me think of your stand-up aesthetics of a lonely and weak body on a stage addressing the audience; often failing to entertain or communicate anything.
Your coexistence with fringe projects that can be pigeonholed as Live Art accentuates the contemporary anti-as-if and here-and-now-for-you tendencies. The plethora of approaches towards performance of your compatriots, such as the bleeding pieces of Franko B, the distinguished dances for sale by La Ribot, or the durational public space invasive interventions of Lone Twin, to name just a few, makes me wonder if your work stands to be classified Live Art-ish, or whether you personally prefer to stick to the term theatre.
Tim, as time is passing by, my train from Prague is nearing Dresden, the station where I change trains. We are passing a spectacular landscape. Like in your works, outside my train window, so many unique lives parade, so many stories appear and vanish. In contrast to theatre in a more-or-less traditionalist understanding, Live Art performance mainly does not present the illusion of events, but rather presents actual events as art. I wonder what you would make of the label performance theatre, meaning a renewed emphasis on process, which enhances the non-reproducibility of the artwork; or, to put it differently: that it cannot be reimagined even though it is restageable (Bailes 21-22). Or do you care at all?
Life passing by outside the train window makes me think of your earlier performances. What crosses my mind first is the story behind Speak Bitterness (1994), a show you produced both for theatre (as a 90-ish-minute piece) and as durational six-hour performances. Particularly the pictures of Hugo Glendinning, the company photographer-in-chief, taken during your rehearsals, without looking through the camera: the subjective rendering of the photographs as if to reveal the dynamic, overtly fragile, and human-scale force in the ghosts of your bodies on stage. The photographs also testify to the way you devise your work. Actually, with these images in mind, I embarked upon the idea to create a text as a letter to you, which, like your work as I perceive it, mixes the highly visceral personal micro-narratives fidgeting on the border of your personal biographies, or “borrowed and second-hand identities” (Shaughnessy 133). What is striking about your work is the interplay between the real and fictitious, the imaginary, or, as you put it, “the summoning of presence in the context of absence” (Etchells, “Step” 10). But I still wonder whether implementing Hugo’s highly subjective way of responding to your work proves helpful.
Tim, the idea of reality and confession in your work brings back memories of my journey this morning. Waking at 4:48, packing my stuff, kissing my three children and wife goodbye, taking a four-kilometre hike through the woods to the nearest bus stop in a tiny village to catch my bus to a bigger town, there change to Prague to deliver me to your performance, The Coming Storm, in Braunschweig. In the morning, as I made my way through the forest, I was watching the sky and the coming storm; I took a picture which I attach; the accumulated clouds filled me with expectations, as you can guess. Yes, eventually I got soaked before reaching the shelter of the bus stop. Now, as my clothes are drying on my skin, my anticipation of tonight’s show is rising. The only thing I learned about it comes from the press release published 6 February 2012. It promises a thought-provoking mixture of deep contemplative entertainment intertwined with forced shallow bullshitting on stage. For the sake of the other listeners and readers, let me partly quote it here:
In this new work international innovators Forced Entertainment follow the lead of their 2009 performance Void Story and turn their attention to narrative – deconstructing and reconstructing something like a ghost story to test the limits of the form. Employing devices from amateur dramatics, puppet theatre, song and naive dance, they tell an epic story that is resolutely too big for the stage. This unwieldy narrative is absurd, contradictory and might fall apart at any moment as it is overwritten, reshaped and cannibalised. In a style as inventive as it is clumsy, wrong-headed theatrical tricks take their place alongside broken dances, live music and increasingly frantic attempts to illustrate this blackly comic and haunting tale. (Forced Entertainment 1)
The ghosts in both your story and the photographs remind me of the fact that throughout your 27-year oeuvre, Forced Entertainment actors have retained their civilian names. Therefore, the often experienced notion of ghosting, coined by Marvin Carlson, which is the projection of the spectators’ previous experience of the actor in a different role (8-12), collapses entirely in your works. On the contrary, by always learning something new about the people in your next shows, the spectator adds new layers or juxtaposes the levels of meaning and enhances the aforementioned permanent interplay between hereness and thereness, reality and artifice, presence and illusion, certainty and provisionality. Therefore, I would like to drag your projects into postdramatic territory. Your work promises a mixture of failure, mistakes, irrationality, thus evoking feelings of sympathy rather than empathy as well as boredom. I would call this controllable uncontrol, meaning that your devised performances are entirely improvised in rehearsal and fully scripted at the end. The excessive control, I believe, also brings about a failing anticipation of spontaneity.
Your penchant for the use of the naive, amateur, or absurd seems to be given justice in the new production. As I have learned researching your work, Tim, you are well aware of the possibilities of space. In your ongoing photography project with Hugo Glendinning, called Empty Stages, you plainly expose the sheer potentiality of stage space as magical as well as practical and everyday-ish. These photographs, I dare say, also illustrate succinctly the way you work – your method of “staring at the space, or stage, with all your stuff in or empty, because at the beginning [you] are always stuck” (Etchells, ‘Devised Theatre’). The stage for you is a container of possibility, like life, I would argue. I value the way you experiment with making things rub against each other, especially the moments of silence, the nothings you start your shows with. I am convinced they are to do with stage possibilities. Also in your devising process, Tim, you recycle your ideas, music, lines, or videos; you stitch them together without any rules.
Dear Tim,
I am writing to you from a train again. I am heading towards Mülheim/Ruhr Hauptbahnhof, from there to get to the conference venue at a tram stop ominously called Mourning or Meaning or Moaning – I forget.3 Yesterday, I finally saw The Coming Storm. Similar to the storm in my home village I was describing earlier, your performance brought no real storm either. I cannot help replaying the expectations I had of the “epic story too big for a stage.” I expected a bit more drama-wise; last night, I missed the spontaneous fuck and cunt in your work: last night I experienced how you pushed the limits but only within your aesthetics. I lacked something more in-yer-face, original; it appeared as if you live your life on stage not for the stage. As if you do not care, or are getting old, or both, I am worried whether for your bodies on stage really matter to the audience. Last night I saw a sequence of provocation & fun, yet without much extra liveness behind. The life within appeared to be weary or ennui as if in a controlled isolation.
Nevertheless, what I found highly symptomatic about the piece as far as bodies are concerned was that the audience at the Staatstheater Braunschweig had to go through the backdoor corridors in order to sit on the stage, where the seats were located underneath a mass of cables, lights, projectors, fog machines. I found this shift or transformation from auditorium to stage highly entertaining when bearing in mind your interest in space and audience, whom you like to call “witnesses.” As I already observed, you often speak of the space as of a potentiality, and the theatre of yours can be described as filling the potentiality with people, or stories. Somehow the audience thus comes to coexist in the potentiality of that stage. Speaking of the audience, what I also realised last night was that you fundamentally split the audience into granulised individuals.
At the beginning of your “epic” piece, you filled the stage with stories. The bodies of your six actors on stage (all five veteran actors joined by Phil, who had already collaborated with you in The Thrill of It All, 2010) basically produced beginnings of stories, some of which were highly spectacularised, impossible (especially Phil’s), some a bit dull, civil, boring (Richard’s). What I immediately noticed was the resemblance to your earlier projects (e.g. And on the Thousandth Night…, 2000, a durational piece where actors are asked to produce any kind of story but never finish it since they are interrupted). What I missed in the diverse applications of your so-called narrative kaleidoscope was a feel of spontaneous improvisation or organic stage fortuity.
After witnessing your body of work in Braunschweig, I also realised that I am a traffic-light ignorant. I kept crossing the road on red and enjoyed watching the faces of the waiting German pedestrians opposite, puzzled, hesitating whether to join me or reprimand me or something else. Tim, I realised that in this way, your work is also traffic-light ignorant. You kind of walk around freely in order to provoke. Sometimes, like last night, I feel perplexed by your work. At times, I feel like crying with laughter at some stories, for instance when Cathy’s question: “If this were a Hollywood film, which actor would play the part of …?” makes Richard tell the story that Nicole Kidman phones him at Brad Pitt’s flat to inform him that Richard’s mother has just died. Sometimes, I feel embarrassed and bored by the predictability, mundanity, and the sheer length of some scenes. After your Spectacular show in Dresden in 2009, I am not sure if you remember, I told you over a glass of wine, drunk, that I found the piece too much, too long, too boring. Maybe since then you have stopped replying to my emails. I also recall your interview with Aleks Sierz for TheatreVoice where Aleks points out the excess of time you spend on a scene. You did not seem particularly pleased then, either. It made me feel sorry for you. Tim, I wonder, do you enjoy watching your audience, uncanny, discomforted?
This morning, I began to feel more sympathetic towards your aesthetics of ghostly dilapidated and anonymous hotel rooms. Leaving the most expensive accommodation of my life, a single room at the Stadthotel Magnitor with only cold water in the shower and hot water in the washbasin, I realised how funny yesterday’s story by Terry was. She was telling a story of her return to the empty hotel room and having a phone call from her boyfriend, knowing already that something had gone wrong. The more I recollect, the more entertaining I consider Robin’s intervention, in which he asked Terry to change the characters from her story: from boyfriend to first her sister, then to Elton John, Angela Merkel, Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, to finally Barack Obama, who, instead of bad news, was producing only strange unintelligible sounds between laughter and crying. I considered the anonymity of a phone call to an anonymous hotel room utterly compassionate. So I felt sorry for Cathy spending fifteen minutes describing what is happening on stage in her far-from-perfect Russian. In fact, I feel I am doing the same here. Forcing some other people to listen to me for 15 minutes or to spend even more time reading, as I try to describe what happened on stage in a foreign language. Such forced entertainment. So much like: the tyranny of theatre as space.
Last night, The Coming Storm summoned again the idea of Speak Bitterness, which basically is a six-hour medley of confessions. Confessions of a day-to-day character, e.g. “We held each other’s hands,” “We looked at the pictures of rare skin diseases,” or “We farted on the first date,” to ones of a most ridiculous nature, such as “We crashed the spaceship on purpose,” or “We knew that a professional foul inside the 30-yard box could lead to a penalty, but in the 83rd minute we felt there was no choice – some of us went one way and I went the other, sandwiching the bloke and bringing him down hard – the referee was a Hungarian and never saw a thing.” Yesterday, the show made me think of the We of the confessions and the imaginary link between the audience, your bodies and your body of work in-between. I admit, it could have been me who “smiled in the ID line, or was often seen on the background of other people’s snapshots.” Was it my neighbour who “had HUNGER for breakfast and STARVATION for lunch,” or “was a suicide bomber”? Or “fucked around” or “killed the first daughter of all English greengrocers in an attempt to avoid any unfortunate recurrences of the last 10 years”? Maybe my neighbour did, because like me, she was taking meticulous notes during all of the performance, which drew my attention to her. What is more, she really was attractive, but as in your performance last night, I will not tell the ending here.
In a way, your show made me also think of my own human scale, my mortality and loneliness. In a way, it made me realise a certain similitude between the loneliness of an academic paper giver as well as the futility of the academic endeavour to produce solutions, explanations, reasoning, or reconciliation, in a way. A lonely body on an empty stage. I feel almost happy to suggest the slight absurdity of theorising on performance art. It is nicely visible in the complexity of rhizomatic artistic attempts to deterritorialise and granulise the creative landscape of contemporary performative strategies. A Jacques-in-the-Box: Lala Cancan and DerriDada, if you would pardon my French. Such Sisyphean labour, naturally, is shadowed by the antagonistic tendency of academia to deliberately reterritorialise these trends by pinning them down.
I am aware of the fact that you have always sat inside the theatre as a slightly alien presence, and this has continued until today; and your feelings towards what theatre is and what it can be have been in a slightly ambivalent or even antagonistic relationship (Etchells, ‘Devised Theatre’). But what I would like to argue is that theatre as a space and as a theoretical concept plays a seminal role: as both the physical edges (or boundaries if you will) and the temporal edges of the conventional 60-to-90-minute performance time. The negotiations of these spatial and temporal edges are also the negotiation of the border between art and life, given the aforementioned way your actors ‘act.’ Therefore, I would like to finally suggest the implementation of another strategic term, Life Art, meaning the process-based and -driven activity challenging the boundaries between the theatrical and the everyday, in other words, between art and life. Nevertheless, I am perfectly conscious of the perilousness of the term.
Life Art, the way I see this umbrella coinage, operates threefold: 1) to make me understand and excuse yourselves for what you are doing. Hence I am convinced your performances are honest, groundshaking, kind and sympathy-provoking, no matter how tiresome and frustrating they appear. 2) To describe how your projects embrace your aesthetics presencing yourselves on stage and blur your biographies with stage identities. And finally, 3) to tick another box in My Academic Coinages.
My conclusion therefore suggests that the constant presencing of your bodies interestingly projects your life onto the spectator, to a certain extent, naturally. This projection implies the necessity for the implementation of new terminology, given the fact that Forced Entertainment operates as a creative force that strives to fill the stage with life. Your devised work committed to theatre, I am convinced, is a case study in provoking questions about reality on stage in theatrical terms or frames. Your epic bullshitting too large for a stage still gives me hope that my punk-academic serendipitying and epic attempts on this very stage (of academia/art/life) are the same: fragile, fleeting, and irreversible, like yours. The duration of your life within art as well as art within life (similar to my activities here) need not be forcefully revolutionary or ground-breaking but can at least attempt to feel enjoyable and entertaining, life-like. The application of the Life Art framing underpins the human play of your (Tim Etchells/Forced Entertainment) and my body? on? stage?
Dear Tim, I will remain forever your humble servant and devoted critic,
Best,
Jan4
{Note: Tim Etchells has never replied to this letter; nor has Terry O’Connor, who willingly asked me about the letter at the Perform Repeat Record book launch at Live Art Bistro, Leeds, 29 June, 2012. Finally, the paper roused controversy among German scholars responsible for editing the CDE journal; eventually the paper was two times rejected despite numerous attempts to rewrite it and calls of its support amongst more down-to-earth, sympathetic or visionary members of German punkacademia, namely Anette Pankratz and Ariane de Waal. Thanks.}
Speak Bitterness. Dir. Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment. 1994. DVD.
The Coming Storm. Dir. Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment. Staatstheater Braunschweig, Braunschweig. 5 June 2012. Performance.
Bailes, Sara Jane. Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service. New York: Routledge, 2011. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as a Memory Machine. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
Etchells, Tim. ‘Devised Theatre.’ Archa Theatre, Prague. 20 September 2011. Lecture.
---. “Step off the Stage.” The Live Art Almanac. Ed. Daniel Brine. London: Live Art Development Agency, 2008. 7-16.
Forced Entertainment. ‘The Coming Storm Press Release.’ Forced Entertainment Website 2012. 24 August 2012 <http://www.forcedentertainment.com/page/3021/Press>.
Shaughnessy, Robert. Shakespeare Effect: A History of Twentieth-Century Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Sierz, Aleks. ‘Interview with Tim Etchells.’ TheatreVoice 2 November 2010.
24 August 2012 <http://www.theatrevoice.com/2588/tim-etchells-of-forced-entertainment-on-their-latest-hit>.
Wyver, John. ‘Live at UK: Keynote Presentation.’ The Live Art Almanac. Ed. Daniel Brine. London: Live Art Development Agency, 2008. 73-78.
1. Dear reader, the letter is purportedly addressed to Tim Etchells, the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, a cutting-edge British experimental theatre group. If you want to recreate the live performance, while reading the letter aloud with a slight Czech accent, you should ideally listen to two songs: the first one is “A Few Thoughts about Time” by John Avery; the second song is “Together We Will Live Forever” by Clint Mansell. Both songs are supposed to be looped. Thank you for the perusal of this footnote. You may return to the text now.
2. I am trying hard not to use the word new here; these are “now” media (Wyver 76).
3. Dear reader, as this is an academic paper committed to The Truth, I have to inform you that the correct name is, unominously, Monning.
4. The research for this article was generously granted and completed within GAUK project number 396211 supported by the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague.
‘Bodies? On? Stage? Human play of Forced Entertainment’ was originally written by Jan Suk, 9-10 June 2012, additional comments added on 22 December 2012; previously unpublished.