British performance troupe Forced Entertainment returns to the Walker Art Center after its triumphant 40th anniversary year, ready to start off the museum’s annual “Out There” series in style.
The group will be performing “Exquisite Pain,” a work based on text from a piece of the same name by Sophie Calle, whose exhibition is on view at the museum.
Based in Sheffield, England, the company is known as much for its outlandish choices as its riveting quiet moments. Forced Entertainment first came to Minnesota back in 1996 as part of a showcase of British performance artists, and returned in 1999 and then 2004, for the Out There Festival plus a mini-festival of the group’s work. Most recently, the company brought its production of “Real Magic,” about a game show on loop as well as an improvised piece called “Quizoola” in 2018.
Just before the holidays, I caught up with Tim Etchells, the group’s artistic director. We talked about Forced Entertainment’s secrets for longevity in the performance landscape, how the group brought Sophie Calle’s text to light, and what comes next.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sheila Regan. Congratulations on 40 years of Forced Entertainment. That’s longer than most marriages. What’s the secret to being able to keep that collaboration thriving?
Tim Etchells: We’ve been lucky to have found an artistic conversation that’s continued to feel rich and fruitful and dynamic. We’ve allowed ourselves to do different things – we haven’t got locked into too much of a pattern. It’s been a space where we’ve all felt that we could continue to work and find new things.
We have had good supporters and consistent conversations with people in different places. I think had we just been working in the UK, we wouldn’t have lasted five minutes – maybe three or four years. But it’s been the international work on mainland Europe, but also partners further afield that have really helped us to create an economic context where we could actually keep working, and also where there’s been a kind of exchange with audiences and with different ways of thinking about what performance is and what theater is that’s been really enriching.
SR: What are some of your favorite places to travel to and collaborate with abroad?
TE: Sometimes the relationship has to do with the vibe in a city. Berlin has been like that at times. Glasgow, in the UK, it’s always great. There’s something rough and ready and sort of open about it. Sometimes it’s to do with the culture that a particular curator manages to install in a venue or in a festival. Frie Leysen’s time in Brussels at the Kunsten festival was really important for us. The festival, the people that one would meet, the conversation with audiences – it was all super dynamic and interesting. It’s a skill, making a frame that allows artists to present different kinds of visions, and makes a place where a particular kind of conversation can happen.
SR: When I was reading some of your interviews about your relationship with Sophie Calle’s text of “Exquisite Pain,” it made me think about a therapy for trauma I learned about a couple of years ago where the treatment is to be able to tell the story over and over again. Working with a therapist, the person takes agency over the story. Do you think that there’s something about what you’re doing with “Exquisite Pain” that’s about the healing power of repeating a story?
TE: Yeah, I think so. I think that there’s an element of that in Sophie’s project. From the outset, she has what she calls the night where she suffered the most. It’s a romantic breakup and she’s devastated. She comes home from New Delhi, and tells her first friend the whole story. She says, “The first time I told the story, it took me 12 hours, and I cried all the time.” And then the next day, she met somebody else, and it took eight hours, and she cried most of the time. So you can already see there’s a sort of diminishing.
The telling and the retelling is also a way of – through the retelling – getting to different perspectives. The tone is changing. Certain details are starting to come into focus. She’s starting to get angry at one point, at another point she’s starting to laugh a little bit about what happened. You can sort of feel from one version to another that things are shifting.
SR: Was Sophie Calle involved at all in your production?
TE: We approached her through the festival that originally commissioned the piece, and she was kind of up for it. I think she came to see “Bloody Mess,” and she still said yes. I think having seen “Bloody Mess,” which is one of the more theatrical pieces of ours, she was a little shocked by how minimal and intimate and direct we were with her text. I think maybe she imagined we would be getting up to all kinds of ludicrous theatrical behaviors.
SR: In chicken outfits?
TE: Exactly. But I think that’s to do with us also recognizing that what she has in the text is a perfect piece of cloth work. It’s a beautiful spell. It’s an incantation, basically, and there’s no point in messing about with it. You just need to do it.
SR: Does it evolve over the years as you perform and revisit it?
TE: I think it does. It’s not about pretending in the same way that some theater pieces might be. It’s very much on the energy and possibilities of the human beings who are doing it. We’re older. Richard and Claire, who were performing it, are older. Their energy is different.
Interestingly to me, all of the questions that one can have about acting come up when I think about this piece. There’s a whole thing about how far they lean into what they’re saying, and how far they pull back from it. In a sense, it’s super subtle. It’s interesting about how performers own or live with the text that they’re delivering.
SR: Do you think for the performers with this kind of intimate work, do they have to do prep or work after performance to be able to move in and out of that space?
TE: I think we tend to treat these things in quite a distanced way. I think there’s an approach which is about saying, this is what she’s recorded, this is the narration that another person has given of what they experienced. One’s job as a performer is to represent that, to report it, to share it, to read it, to enter it into the public record. And you do that with, you allow that to enter you a certain level. But it’s also very important that on another level you’re just telling it. This is just what happened. This is just what this person said. And I think that distance is really important, because that’s actually what allows the audience to do their work. I think we’re often trying to leave it a little bit open.
SR: Visiting the Sophie Calle exhibition at the Walker, I felt a back and forth between heightened emotions and aloof irony. I think that’s so interesting that creating distance is such a part of your own work as well.
TE: It’s probably to do with the way that in the theater, you have to be a bit careful with how you’re invoking emotions or dealing with emotional or traumatic topics, because if you go right to it, it’s not necessarily the case that the audience will go with you.
There’s something about irony or a raised eyebrow or a little bit of distance that actually then opens the possibility that this might be moving or might be affecting and in a way. You need to be clever if you’re going to get anything to have that kind of impact.
SR: Is this the only piece that Forced Entertainment does that’s completely from one text?
TE: There’s another one, called “The Notebook,” which is a book by a Hungarian writer called Ágota Kristóf. It’s an English translation of a French text. It’s also very much concerned with some quite traumatic business. We had to edit that one, but it’s a very minimal performance with two people.
There’s a third text- based project, which is using the works of Shakespeare, but we approach them rather differently.
SR: The other thing I noticed about the “Overshare” exhibition is that Calle has so many games that she sets up in her work, and I know that’s something that has been written about it with Forced Entertainment as well. What do games kind of open up?
TE: Often in our work, and in Sophie Calle’s work too, there’s a structural frame or a limit in place for yourself. She’s going to tell the story this many times. She’s going to ask everybody for a version of the day they suffered the most, or in Forced Entertainment’s “Real Magic,” we’re just going to drill around that little fragment of an imaginary game show. We’re going to do it lots and lots of times. And in a way, you’re hoping that through that process you’re going to discover something, you’re going to get to the heart of it. The restriction becomes a blossoming of new things becoming possible. Sophie’s work often feels like she set a limit for herself, but actually the limit is a generative. It multiplies possibilities.
SR: How does it feel to make work in the world right now?
TE: It’s a very confronting time, let’s say that, because I feel like so much horror on the international scene and in so many political contexts around us, there’s so much turned to the right. You will have a new president come in, and in many places in Europe, there’s a similar sort of populist twist and turn. It’s extremely concerning. It makes life very difficult. And I think, as an artist, you also then really wonder about what it is that you can do, what the place of the work is in these quite fragile situations.
SR: Anything you’re looking forward to in the next year?
TE: The next thing that I’m doing is I’m working with my partner, who’s a visual artist Vlatka Horvat – we’re going to make a piece with the ballet in Basel in Switzerland. In the middle of January, we go to Basel, and we’re there for nearly three months, working with 17 dancers to make a piece. I’m excited about that.
SR: Have the two of you worked together before?
TE: We have worked together on various projects and videos and various other things, but it’s the first time that we’ve really made a big dance or theater context piece together. We’re more in the mode, usually, where we’ll both be kind of invisible troubleshooters for each other’s work. This project is a nice opportunity to take that into a more full collaboration.
Forced Entertainment’s “Exquisite Pain” runs Thursday, Jan. 9, Friday, Jan. 10 and Saturday, Jan. 10 at 7:30 p.m. at the Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Pl., Minneapolis. “Exquisite Pain” is part of Out There 2025: The Future of Theater, Today, which runs through Feb. 22.
