Performing Immanence

Forced Entertainment

Jan Suk

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110711028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Performing Immanence: Forced Entertainment is a unique probe into the multi-faceted nature of the works of the British experimental theatre Forced Entertainment via the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
Jan Suk explores the transformation-potentiality of the territory between the actors and the spectators, namely via Forced Entertainment's structural patterns, sympathy provoking aesthetics, audience integration and accentuated emphasis of the now. Besides writings of Tim Etchells, the company's director, the foci of the analyses are devised as well as durational projects of Forced Entertainment. The examination includes a wider spectrum of state-of the-art live artists, e.g. Tehching Hsieh, Franko B or Goat Island, discussed within the contemporary performance discourse.
Performing Immanence: Forced Entertainment investigates how the immanent reading of Forced Entertainment's performances brings the potentiality of creative transformative experience via the thought of Gilles Deleuze. The interconnections of Deleuze's thought and the contemporary devised performance theatre results in the symbiotic relationship that proves that such readings are not mere academic exercises, but truly life-illuminating realizations.

1 Theatre & In-Between

1.1 The Aims of the Book: Deleuze & Forced Entertainment’s Poetics

It may be that believing in this world, this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy 75).

Theatre as well as performance is an artistic form exploring the possibility of experience connected to a life. The theatre experience is real, although it is derived from a more-or-less staged or illusionary world presented on stage. The creative process that leads to the creation of the performance is transferred onto the spectators who, by witnessing, ultimately collaborate in the overall creative process of theatre experience. Ideally, the experience is mutually transformative, both for the performers and the audience. It is the interconnections of their lives in the here and now that constitutes the territory of in-between that is difficult to locate, yet seminally important for the understanding of the affect of theatre and performance. The notion of immanence as advocated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari operates as a continuum enabling the mapping of this interspace.

The aim of my project is to map the transformative, liminoid relationship between the performers and the audience, the territory “between the real and the phantasmatic” (Phelan, “Performing” 11) wherein a theatre production of Forced Entertainment explores the potentiality of proximity to achieve an intimate bond with its spectators. Thus, the company’s performative approaches are analysed along the question of performing (in) time; performance’s affect, in other words, what I have called the performativity of immanence.

Initially, the thesis in this chapter further elaborates upon the concepts of the postdramatic, performance theatre, and the theatres of immanence. I build upon the only academic treatise dedicated solely to Forced Entertainment, Not Even a Game Anymore: The Theatre of Forced Entertainment (2006) edited by Judith Helmer and Florian Malzacher, which maps the first two decades of Forced Entertainment, to critique and springboard the company’s other more recent projects from the third decade of the troupe’s existence, during which their idiosyncratic voice fully crystalized.

The present analysis is therefore structured to cover the company’s productions from their third decade and beyond, mapping their formative mature years, i. e. from 2004 to 2016; specifically, the research examines closely six devised performances and five recent (or recently revived) durational projects. The studies will comprise six devised productions, namely—Bloody Mess (2004), Spectacular (2008), Void Story (2009), The Thrill of it All (2010), The Coming Storm (2013) and The Last Adventures (2013). Their organically devised manner reflects the major aims of the book: a focus on the rhizomatic dramaturgy within an open-system that produces spectatorial sympathy within their performance of devised and open-structured pieces, accentuating the aforementioned radical presence.

Secondly, the other five durational projects from their third decade: Speak Bitterness (1994, performed 2014), Quizoola! (1996, performed 2013), And on the Thousandth Night (created in 2000, performed 2013), Complete Works (2015) and From the Dark (2016) will be also considered in connection with their creative restraints, self-imposed limitations, or “survival techniques” (Quick, Wooster 272)—choreographic rules which performers have to follow while delivering their speeches or performing their routines. The inclusion of rule-based theatre-making dramaturgy is highly symptomatic for Forced Entertainment. Nevertheless, particularly in the case of their durational pieces, the rules are usually simpler, contributing thus greatly to the mapping of their creative strategies. These conceptual and durational performances are hence analysed to support especially the elements of time-perception along with the company’s unique chronopoetics—the strategy to stretch scenes or whole performances to their bearable limits. The chapter aims to demonstrate that the extended time frame enables the greater operation of their immanent poetics.

Forced Entertainment as a subject of my examination has been a logical step. On the one hand, the company has been labelled as “Britain’s most brilliant experimental theatre company” (Gardner, “25 years”), praised for their collectively devised original productions concerned with the periphery. Simultaneously, the company was awarded with the prestigious International Ibsen Award in 2016. The jury justified their choice as a “recognition of theatre as a collective art form, and the theatre’s importance within society” (“Jury”). More specifically, the committee praised Forced Entertainment genre-defying theatrical approach, which also investigates the theatrical possibilities of exploiting the potential of video and digital platforms. The official statements read: “Forced Entertainment revive and challenge the theatre, and recognise and utilise the power inherent in the art form” (“Jury”). On the other hand, it is the self-contained Forced Entertainment universe, which makes their productions seen more as European, or international theatre, rather than British.¹

My analysis of the productions is based on a mixture of sources. The vast majority of the projects have been witnessed personally, thus the analysis is built solely on my live experience. Quite recently the company has started to live stream their productions, therefore a substantial part of the analysed material was experienced via the company’s live streamed productions. Thirdly, the DVD versions and available performance texts (both of which can be purchased via the company’s website) were also analysed, which itself is paradoxical, given the fact that the issue of liveness is one of the company’s chief interests. This fact also contradicts the abovementioned call for the non-repeatability of the performance, as advocated above by Peggy Phelan. Nevertheless, the obtained material sufficed to demonstrate Forced Entertainment’s performative poetics of immanence.

Paradoxically, considering the international acclaim of the company, underpinned by the fact that Forced Entertainment theatre was awarded the highly prestigious International Ibsen Award, there still exist relatively few other critical treatments of Forced Entertainment to build on. Besides the above-mentioned monograph devoted to their oeuvre celebrating the 20^th anniversary of the company’s existence Not Even a Game Anymore, there are several studies that devote chapters or sections to Forced Entertainment including, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Service (2011) by Sarah Jane Bailes and At the Sharp End: Uncovering the Work of Five Leading Dramatists: Edgar, Etchells, Greig, Gupta and Ravenhill (2007) by Peter Billingham, Finally, there are scarce chapters dealing with the company’s individual projects, such as “Forced Entertainment—The Travels (2002)—The anti-theatrical director” by Alex Mermikides, published in Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes (2010), edited by Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender, Christina Wald’s essay “Forced Entertainment’s Adaptation of Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain,” Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook by Alison Oddey; or Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation by Nick Kaye, to name just a few. As is apparent, there is no other single study devoted solely to the complexity of Forced Entertainment’s performance projects to this date (January 2020).

Prior to the actual analysis of the company’s performance pieces, both the quasi-fictional and fictional writings of Tim Etchells will be closely examined in chapter three, since Etchells’s prose often reverberates in theatrical performances and bears a striking resemblance to the palimpsestuous and conceptual approach of the troupe’s performance-making strategies. Although my book focuses chiefly on the company’s performances with their collectively devised immanent character, Etchells as an individual directorially signed under all productions, logically connects both theoretical and analytical parts of my project. Thereby chapter three will serve as a bridge to highlight rhizomatic interconnectedness of both Etchells’s directing as well as devising technique. It will also demonstrate, in wider context, deterritorializing force of Etchells’s work into the realm of theatre.

Tim Etchells’s as a director represents a transcendent force within immanent theatrical set-up of Forced Entertainment. Again, it may be seen as a paradox, but the collective nature of devising Forced Entertainment’s productions is signed by the directorial agency of Tim Etchells. Therefore, chapter three will introduce further nodal connections between Etchells’s writing technique and performing strategies of Forced Entertainment. More particularly, I will address the issue of Constance school approach to literary works, especially two central points of Wolfgang Iser’s theory: the concept of “implied reader” and narrative “gaps.” These concepts should justify the ongoing attention shift from the author and the text and refocusing it on the text-reader relationship, a method applicable both on theatre as well as prose projects.

Yet, on the onset of the analysis, I will address Etchells’s aforementioned book Certain Fragments. The book deals with life in/and theatre, providing a basi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Theatre & In-Between
• 2 Deleuze & Performance Theatre
• 3 Immanence and Tim Etchells’s Prose Texts
• 4 Devised and Durational Performances of Forced Entertainment
• 5 Durational Performances of Forced Entertainment
• 6 Performing Immanence: Theatre of Forced Entertainment
• List of Illustrations
• Person Index