Forced Entertainment are a contemporary company who adopt a very collaborative approach to their performance making. Although they have a writer/director figure, Tim Etchells, they all contribute fully to the development process. This is an idea that we want to adopt for our piece as we do not want to be constrained by a text or a specific structure. Improvising in the rehearsal room “allows for spoken text on stage to be less constrained by the conventions of realism and more responsive to contemporary life.” (Bailes, S 2011, pp. 67) This is a trademark strategy used by Forced Entertainment. We can freely experiment with ideas without fear of it going wrong. Sometimes the better ideas come from unsuccessful endeavours.
A huge range of ideas can appear through play and these often happen within the breaks in rehearsal when actors are simply being themselves. You can’t always predict where ideas will occur but it is imperative that you experiment with them to test if they could work. If they are successful, you can then choose to explore them further and develop a structure. It is inevitable that you will leave “behind a trail of failed attempts and nonsense” but “slowly, very slowly, you accumulate a store of scenes and fragments that you love.” (Etchells 2012, pp. 36)
As well as the company’s techniques inspiring us in our piece, one of their performances Filthy Words and Phrases really interested us. The performance is a 7 hour piece in which one woman writes words which are
“‘normally’ unsayable, unwriteable and illegitimate”
(www.forcedentertainment.com) on a chalkboard in an old school hall. We found this notion of the ‘unsayable’ interesting and within ten minutes we had already compiled a list of words which are considered taboo in society. However, they are just words. They are simply letters combined together like any other word. So, why is it that they are so frowned upon? This led us to the idea of presenting them in such a ridiculous way that they lose their current meaning.
http://forcedentertainment.com/page/3073/Filthy-Words-and-Phrases/91#-gallery
As they state on their website, Forced Entertainment are “interested in making performances that excite, frustrate, challenge, question and entertain.” (www.forcedentertainment.com) This sums up exactly what we want to achieve when creating our piece of contemporary work.
Works Cited:
Bailes, S (2011) Performance Theatre And The Poetics Of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, London: Routledge.
Etchells, T (2012) ‘In the Silences: A text with very many digressions and forty-three footnotes concerning the process of making performance’, Performance Research, 17, 1, pp. 33-37.
www.forcedentertainment.com – accessed 26.10.13.
