Less Professional But Just As Appealing:

how daniel feels about forced entertainment

It's difficult for me to write about a moment in Showtime because my perception of Forced Entertainment's work is tied to a concept of the passage of time. I don't think their work is interesting because of what happens in any given moment, but because of the difference between the beginnings and the ends of things.

In class this became obvious in relation to our discussion of the laughter of the audience (in the video of Showtime). It didn't mean anything to say: "Yes, the beginning was very funny, the audience laughed a lot." It only meant anything to say: "The laughter changed between the beginning and the end. At the end, no one was laughing." That absence of laughter is profoundly a part of the totality of the show, somehow more for having come from the laughter at the beginning.

There is a sense in which Forced Entertainment's shows (the ones I've seen, anyway) function in a way that makes me think of how Gertrude Stein writes about theater. She writes about how the audience is always either ahead of or behind the action. Forced Entertainment short-circuits that predilection for forecasting by making the focus what is happening on stage, and how it will begin to happen differently so slowly that unless you watch the whole thing from beginning to end, you won't even know. Think about the opening monologue in Showtime. The arc of the text is so subtle, its destination so inscrutable, that there's nothing you can do except pay attention.

Watching Forced Entertainment's performances was the first time I actually understood why anything might need to be durational. The movement of their shows is so bound up in the temporality of their shows that they couldn't exist as snippets or parts. A scenario in a Forced Entertainment show only makes sense in relation to how that scenario changes. For example, in 200% and Bloody Thirsty, reenacting the nativity story and the "death" of one of the characters multiple times results in the emotional weight of the final repetition. Acted out only once, the nativity and the death would only seem silly, but watching the reenactment change over time supplies a different way of reading the performance: reading the performance through its change.

The movement of Forced Entertainment's shows is bound up with the idea of lists. Reading a list, or watching Forced Entertainment you can't understand what's going on until enough of the same thing have piled up to perceive their commonalities, their differences, and their organization. Confessions, in Speak Bitterness, dirty jokes in Disco Relax, theater related aphorisms in Showtime, Tim Etchells admits to being infatuated with the idea of lists. Forced Entertainment articulates and explores a theatrical language tied to duration, to attention (the audiences), to how one watches performance.