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IB Theatre - Collaborative Project (first assessment 2024): Forced Entertainment

This guide provides resources for the Collaborative Project external assessment task for IB Theatre (first assessment 2024).

Forced Entertainment

Signal to Noise Trailer April 2024

(2:50) There seems to be a problem, a problem with the connection…

An upbeat spectacle which is slowly breaking apart, Signal to Noise summons a delirious late-night churn of fragments – dances, rehearsals, altercations, scenery changes and unexpected weather reports. AI voices are enlisted to perform the text – their unreal chatter and patter mixing interior monologues, unfinished jokes and off-topic interviews. It all sounds right, more or less human, more or less real. What could go wrong?

The six performers lip-sync all the voices, sometimes carefully, sometimes with unhelpful abandon, bringing life to these disembodied, never-bodied speakers. In the process they summon a strange and compelling world where the question of what’s human and what’s not, what’s real life and what’s just pretending is never far away.

If All Else Fails (trailer)

(1:36) Created in Spring 2023. Directed by Tim Etchells Devised and Performed by Seke Chimutengwende & Cathy Naden. Filmed by Hugo Glendinning.

A Concise Introduction to Forced Entertainment (Essay) - Digital Theatre+

Forced Entertainment (Company) - Digital Theatre+

Edinburgh Showcase 2017: 'Real Magic' by Forced Entertainment

(4:42) Forced Entertainment’s new show 'Real Magic' creates a world of absurd disconnection, struggle and comical repetition. To the sound of looped applause and canned laughter, three performers take part in an impossible illusion – part mind-reading feat, part cabaret act, part chaotic game show – in which they endlessly revisit moments of defeat, hope and anticipation. Caught in a world of second-chances and second-guesses, variations and changes, distortions and transformations, 'Real Magic' takes the audience on a hallucinatory journey, creating a compelling performance about optimism, individual agency and the desire for change.

Edinburgh Showcase 2015: 'Tomorrow's Parties' by Forced Entertainment

(4:57) Forced Entertainment is a group of six artists who have worked together since 1984 to make compelling, inventive and provocative new theatre. Combining discussion, improvisation and writing, the group’s rehearsal process is a creative laboratory that discovers unexpected and inspiring answers to questions of life and art.

'Tomorrow’s Parties' explores the ideas and clichés of hope, the speculative nature of anticipation and the myriad possibilities the future holds in store. Drawing on utopian and dystopian projections, the work twists and turns in performance, carrying the audience along on a tide of conjectures and dreams.

Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment, 'Tomorrow's Parties' - performed at NASA in 2013

(13:29) Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment, 'Tomorrow's Parties' was performed at NASA on 14 March 2013. The performance was programmed in relation to the Statement Exhibition by Nicoline van Harskamp, 'Yours in Solidarity.'

         

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