Forced Entertainment

On Thursday's lesson, we looked further into Forced Entertainment. A previous blog on this subject can be found here. This blog, however, should provide a better insight into the Sheffield based company, their style and who they are influenced by.

Academic Article

The first thing that we did in the lesson was read the below academic article, categorising and highlighting key quotes into the sections: facts, style, and past performances. I found the article easy and interesting to read, mostly because I have read academic articles for coursework and EPQ work and because I really like the style of Etchells/Forced Entertainment. I would be very happy if I got a play by Forced Entertainment in either this unit (contemporary theatre) or in the Director's Challenge unit as I want to experiment with how this style works and how it can be improved - I am also inspired because of the company's Sheffield based background.

The major style that is evident when watching a Forced Entertainment style or by reading the article is that their plays are powered by society. Moreover, their plays don't appear to follow any real storyline. Most of the time they are stating truths or lies (as shown in Speak Bitterness) which are all presented as fact. Not only is what they do onstage improvised, as it is said in the article, Forced Entertainment can be seen as "avant-garde", that is, ahead of their time which I think is clearly true as shown by their "1994 piece entitled, A Decade of Forced Entertainment" where they plotted world events onto a map of the UK. Additionally, the influence of other contemporary practitioners can be seen with a suggestion of Boal where an audience member is expected to be an active participant; this is also similar to Brecht because an audience member has to think about what Brceht is trying to suggest which is certainly done with a form of spass in Forced Entertainment. Forced Entertainment does differ slightly from Brecht - Forced Entertainment does have a political vibe, but it's certainly not as in-yer-face as Brecht did with his play entitled The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui which is most definitely seen as a parable as Hitler's rise to power. Forced Entertainment differs in style to Stanislavski as well; Stanislavski has characters, a visible plotline, and said that an audience member should enjoy themselves when watching a piece of theatre - he is much more about finding a way to connect to an audience by making them emotional by distancing them through an actor's circles of attention and by allowing a character's story arc to be similar to that of an audience. Forced Entertainment and Etchells, however, want an audience member to have an active part in the piece, which can be summarised by the comment that when an audience is witnessing something traumatic on stage, they aren't living it.


Speak Bitterness

"The essence of Speak Bitterness is a line of people making confessions from behind a long table. Occupying a brightly lit space, the performers take turns reading from the text that is strewn across the table. The litany of wrongdoing to which they confess ranges from the big time of forgery, murder or genocide to nasty little details, such as reading each other’s diaries and refusing to take the dogs out for a walk.

First presented in 1994, Speak Bitterness has subsequently been shown in both theatre and durational versions, the latter lasting up to six hours and allowing the public to arrive, depart and return at any point. An exhaustive catalogue, the text draws on the diverse cultures of confession in, for example, contemporary chat shows, churches and show trials. Dressed in suits, the performers compete to confess the most horrific, amusing or convincing things. Speaking softly, they meet the gaze of the audience (who are partly illuminated), drawing them into direct and intimate contact."

https://www.forcedentertainment.com/project/speak-bitterness/

The major theme, I believe, that is present in Speak Bitterness is that of the need to confess as highlighted under themes in the academic article above. The play feels as though it is improvised especially as actors appear to speak and move in whatever way whenever they feel like it. There's a feeling that the play is personal because an audience member has probably read someone else's diary or not taken the dogs for a walk as suggested in the quote above. Not only does that make an audience member feel guilty about the actor, it makes them feel guilty about their actions. This perfectly shows their style as they are actively involving audience members in order to make them connect with the actor and potentially more with themselves. The video below is a five-minute clip from the play: 

The video below is our own interpretation of an extract from the play:

Most of what is shown in the video is improvised - when we would say lines and what line we would say which allowed for people to speak over each other and showed people's actual reactions to what was going on. We wanted the section to feel as though it was a group of people simply reading off a script with no predetermined movements and to seem as casual as possible in order to relate to more audience members. This can be shown by the casual entrances and exits, the sparing humour that we use, and in the use of scripts as props. I do think that we expressed the politicalness of the piece too much and made it too obvious with Joel's line at the end: "We're guilty. We confess" which although does show the theme, it makes the theme too obvious and too in-yer-face but certainly not as much as Brecht. Personally, I really enjoyed this performance as I felt comfortable and natural and it allowed me to experiment with a theatre that I don't feel I fully understood when we did our first lesson on Forced Entertainment at the start of last year.

Tabletop series

"In Complete Works six performers create condensed versions of each and every Shakespeare play, comically and intimately retelling them, using a collection of everyday objects as stand-ins for the characters on the one-metre stage of an ordinary tabletop.

Forced Entertainment have long had an obsession with virtual or described performance, exploring in different ways over the years the possibilities of conjuring extraordinary scenes, images and stories using language alone. In a brand new direction for the group, Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare explores the dynamic force of narrative in relation to Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories and late plays. What follows is simple and idiosyncratic, absurd and strangely compelling as, through a kind of lo-fi, home-made puppetry, the stories of the plays really do come to life in vivid miniature.

Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works is the first time they’ve approached dramatic literature and the Shakespearean legacy. The result is a kind of levelling of the plays – a gently comic re-casting of them via objects from the kitchen cabinet and grocery store shelves – as well as a celebration of their power as stories, and the act of storytelling and theatre itself."

https://www.forcedentertainment.com/project/complete-works-table-top-shakespeare/

Below is a video of  myself and Maya's version of the tabletop series based off the musical West Side Story:

I think that we didn't take the piece/style as seriously as what Forced Entertainment did, but I do think the piece was somewhat effective largely because we used props that we'd found moments before in the Drama Office.

Forced Entertainment

Lesson: Thursday 14th December 2017 and 21st December 2017

In the following lessons with Starbuck we will be working on Forced Entertainment. Forced Entertainment is an experimental theatre company based in Sheffield which was set up by the artistic director Tim Etchells in 1984. The core members of the company include: Tim Etchells, Richard Lowdon (designer and performer), and performers Robin Arthur, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, and Terry O'Connor who have been part o the company since it began. They devise their pieces through improvisation, experimentation, and debate, sometimes focusing on current politics much like Brecht. They think that their work should look like it got thrown together - "chaotic, out of control, unintended" from Tim Etchells' book Certain Fragments. When they were working on their production of Nighthawks (1985) the company went around Sheffield and picked up loads of objects from all over the city, however, they didn't want anything in the performance to be recognisably British. Tim Etchells said "We did once think of putting Look Back in Anger with all the performers drunk on cider but, rather fortunately, we didn't pursue the idea" which I think shows how prepared the company is to break the rules of theatre in order to make a statement of some kind (or rather just to have fun). Etchells also comments that "A confident audience understand and enjoy that. An unconfident audience take it personally and think we are attacking them" which again shows that they are prepared to break the conventions of theatre to make the audience feel uncomfortable which is in some respects is similar to Artaud.

Tim Etchells wrote Status Update which was one of the plays that the upper BTECs chose for their Director's Challenge assessed piece of the course. The version that I saw of this piece often jumped from topic to topic with seemingly no relation to what the actors were speaking about before. In the play there are no characters and the actors are just relaying things that they know to the audience. We used some of this in our piece. For example, we spoke directly to the audience and listed some things that we knew about the world that we had created.

At the beginning of the lesson, we were told to write down rules, tasks, and characters that were to be presented within the piece that we would be creating. We were then given a random profile that someone else in the class had created; mine are shown below.

Task: Eat a piece of paper
Rule: You are not allowed to touch the floor
Character: Homer Simpson
Characteristic of character: He is fat
Secret Task: Touch everyone's head in the room without them noticing it's weird

My rules influenced the piece. We included eating the piece of paper as a random moment within the piece, which is somewhat like how Status Update changed from topic to topic which would remind the audience that the piece they are watching is a performance something which Status Update does to some extent. My rule of not being able to touch the floor meant that I was 'office chair' bound for the entire piece which allowed for some moments of humour (which I saw in Status Update) such as trying to move myself along the space with a crutch to the Wallace and Gromit theme tune.

We were allowed to share every rule/task/character that we had been given except for the Secret Task which we had to carry out in the middle of the piece but not tell anyone else in our group what we had to do. We were also given an additional rule from Starbuck whereby the start of every sentence had to be in alphabetical order (for example: "An apocalyptic forest in Russia many years ago" followed by "Billions") which made creating a piece much more difficult.

The group that I was put in consisted of Alex, Bruce, Hannah1 and Izzy.

The 'storyline' that we came up with was that there was a group of creatures in the Ural mountains separated from the rest of society by an electrified gate. These creatures have evident malformations - one is a werewolf, one is 'office chair' bound, one has a crutch, one has a limp and can only count in numbers, and one can only walk with their legs crossed. We talked about how these creatures were not allowed through the gate which made for a serious social message, something which was sometimes evident within Status Update, of how different (disabled, from a different country etc) people are often treated. We also added in the character of zombies which was a random element within the piece which only came about because we had to fit within the 'alphabet' rule. Despite the obvious despair that these characters have, they still "like to have fun" which is shown when I moved across the space on the office chair to the theme tune of Wallace and Gromit. Behind me, the other characters are turning into zombies which allows for humour (and I'm still not entirely sure why we included it within the piece).

Alex's Tasks etc.

Task: 
Rule: Must always have legs crossed
Character: A Russian woman
Characteristic of character: She is old

This had some influence on where the piece was set. We based the piece in the Ural mountains of Russia which has an extensive forest area making the piece more believable (if members of the audience knew what the Ural mountains were like). This also allowed for a fairy tale feel to the piece which was made more evident with Hannah1's character of a werewolf. As Alex always had to have her legs crossed

Bruce's Tasks etc. 

Task: Stand on a chair
Rule: You can only stand on one leg for the entirety of the piece
Character: Hal
Characteristic of Character: Lives in an apocalyptic forest

I wrote the tasks for Bruce's piece which made it easier to incorporate the character of Hal into the piece. Hal is an original character of my own creation who lives in an apocalyptic forest (hence why we based the piece in the Ural mountains) with his so-called mother. There is an electrified gate in the middle of the forest that he lives in which separates the apocalyptic forest and the wonderful city on the other side of the electrified gate. This influenced many of the ideas within the piece. The electrified gate element of this original character was woven into the piece as a barrier between the apocalyptic forest of malformed creatures and the 'beautiful' land which lay beyond the gate. The rule of standing on one leg meant that Bruce used a crutch for the majority of the piece which added to the malformations that every character had.

Hannah1's Tasks etc. 

Task: 
Rule: Has to remain standing
Character: 
Characteristic of Character: A werewolf

Hannah1's character of a werewolf shaped the piece into becoming about how people treat others who have malformations or are different. It also added to the element of living in a forest and also the fairy tale element. One thing that we decided that Hannah1 would do whilst playing the werewolf would be that she would have a mask on when she turned into the wolf part of her character. She would have the mask on the back of her head which would mean that when she would turn into a werewolf she would turn around so the audience could see the mask on the back of her head, creating humour within the piece. 

Izzy's Tasks etc. 

Task: Stay in the drama office for 15 mins (which we then changed to walk up and down the steps 15 times as we couldn't make the piece 15 mins long in the short space of time we had to devise and rehearse the piece)
Rule: Has to walk with a limp
Character: 
Characteristic of Character: Can only speak in numbers.

Izzy's character also shaped the piece in some aspects. As she had to walk with a limp, this emphasised the malformations that each character would have. And as she could only speak in numbers this reduced the amount of lines that she could speak. One of her lines that she did get which was quite a clever play on words was when Hannah1 bit Izzy when turned into the werewolf. Instead of saying "no" Izzy said "nine" which sounds like the German word for no - nein. This allowed for the 'story' to be conveyed as well as sticking to the given rules.

Below is a run through of our first run through as I don't have access to the final version. Much of what was done in this version is largely the same as what was don in the final version.

I think that if we had more time for devising and rehearsal, we would have made the piece longer and more efficient. As such, we had no time for rehearsal because of the Director's Challenge performances running throughout the week which we paid more attention to, to help the Y13s.