End Meeting for All: The Performative Meta-Collages of Forced Entertainment

Collage – the insertion of ready-made materials into artworks or texts – is a technique that has been used in all art forms since the experiments of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes and has, in its different shapes, often been used in theatre performances as well. The British theatre group Forced Entertainment provides a contemporary example of a (post-)avant-garde vocabulary that actively borrows from and transforms the practices of their precursors. They employ a palimpsest-like layering of visual and verbal elements, which I will here define as performative meta-collages. In this article, I will discuss their practice and take a look at the ways in which Forced Entertainment’s performative meta-collages verbalize and produce “future” in one of their recent performances, End Meeting for All, which imagines a scenario that takes place “a year and a day” after the beginning of the COVID-19-triggered lockdown in the spring of 2020.

Dem Zuschauen zuschauen?

Zeitgenössisches postdramatisches Theater, immersive Installationen, Walks und/oder Games weisen unmissverständlich darauf hin, dass Kunst- beziehungsweise Theatermacher_innen sich nicht mehr mit einem lediglich zuschauenden Publikum begnügen möchten. Schon aus diesem Grund ist es obsolet, das Zuschauen im Theater erforschen zu wollen. Allerdings wird auch dem ganz traditionellen, distanzierten Zuschauen Unrecht getan, wenn es als passiv und leibfern beschrieben wird; ich möchte daher vorschlagen, das Wahrnehmen im Theater (und ähnlichen Settings) als eine mit dem Körper vollzogene Praxis zu beschreiben – unabhängig davon, welche theatralen Formate untersucht werden sollen. Exemplarisch untersuche ich das Publikumsgelächter in einer Forced Entertainment Aufführung von Bloody Mess.

Failure, Trauma, and the Theatre of Negativity: the New Tragic in Contemporary Theatre and Performance

In this article, Alex Mangold identifies failure as a defining element of tragedy and argues that traditional understandings of the genre have been too narrow. Here, he asserts that tragic failure contributes to a tragic ‘mode’ that transcends genre definitions and, instead, extends to all kinds of contemporary theatre and performance. Examining a wide range of performance examples, including work from Sophocles to Sarah Kane, Forced Entertainment, Sasha Waltz, and Orlan, he argues that tragic failure, as it has come to be realized in examples of postdramatic writing and in site-specific or dance-based performance, is presented as an option, a dramatic choice, an outcome or part of an overall denial of dramatic form. The true power of the new tragic consequently lies in its ability to foster social change and a more ethical stance toward social dystopias. Alex Mangold lectures in the Department of Modern Languages at Aberystwyth University. He is co-editor (with Broderick Chow) of Žižek and Performance (Palgrave, 2014) and has published articles and chapters on the work of Sarah Kane and Howard Barker.