Performance
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Heer Ranjha
Ankur Productions -
Critical Encounters 2: Encountering the Spectacular
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Spectacular
Forced Entertainment -
Otter Pie
Fish & Game -
Hidden City at Tramway
conFAB -
Framed
Visible Fictions and Prince's Trust Scotland -
One Night Only
Junction 25
Spectacular
Forced Entertainment
www.forcedentertainment.com
Spectacular is an extraordinary new performance from Forced Entertainment adding to their unique and remarkable body of work and following recent acclaimed shows The World in Pictures, Exquisite Pain and Bloody Mess.
A lone performer takes to the stage, explaining that the show we’re watching is somehow different tonight. The atmosphere is different, his entrance was off, the lights are wrong, some scenery is missing, some performers are absent. The tone is all wrong. Things are somehow falling to pieces, or maybe things are just now falling into place. The audience reaction, our protagonist says, is not quite what he expected, not quite what he’s used to. Perhaps the fact he is dressed as a skeleton has something to do with it.
Intimate and comical, Forced Entertainment’s Spectacular slowly and seductively winds the audience into the world of a missing performance.
Our skeleton host seems relaxed about it, cracking jokes, staying chatty and amiable. But still something’s wrong. The fact that the next performer who comes on-stage is caught up in some long, melodramatic and agonised death scene may also explain the shift in tone.
Spectacular is about the ‘now’ of the performance moment, the trembling edge of laughter, possibility and invention. It’s about death and playing dead, about the strange contact between two performers on-stage and an audience caught between what they are watching and what they’re being told.
Led by Artistic Director, Tim Etchells, Forced Entertainment have over the last 24 years continually strived to find new performance and theatre forms with which to describe contemporary urban life. Their trademark collaborative process – making work through long months of improvisation and discussion – draws not only on theatre but on cinema, music, culture, literature and fine art. They continue to tour widely and to great acclaim throughout the world.
Simple, logical, absurd, impossible and humorous by turns, Spectacular is Forced Entertainment’s provocative and playful new work.
To view a trailer for Spectacular please click here
To view Forced Entertainment’s myspace page clcik here
Reviews
The Times
Four Stars. For full review click here
Co-production Partners
BIT Teatergarasjen (Bergen)
Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin)
PACT Zollverein (Essen)
Les Spectacles vivants –
Centre Pompidou (Paris)
Theatre Garonne (Toulouse)
Tramway (Glasgow)
Forced Entertainment is regularly funded by Arts Council, England and Sheffield City Council.
‘One of Britain’s greatest theatre companies’
The Guardian
‘Theatre turned inside out’
Sunday Times
‘Confounding conventions and exploding audience expectations.’
The Times
Post show discussion
Friday 5 December
Simon Murray, Glasgow University
Image: Hugo Glendinning
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Thu 4 - Sat 6 Dec 2008
8:00pm
Tramway 1
£10 / £6