description

“They drew a map of the country and marked on it the events of the last ten years — the sites of political and industrial conflict, the ecological disasters, the show-biz marriages and celebrity divorces. On the same map, they marked the events of their own lives — the performances they'd given, the towns and cities where they'd stayed, the places where they'd incurred injuries of one kind or another, the places where they'd fallen in or out of love.”

A Decade of Forced Entertainment is a map of the period between 1984 and 1994 — a map that is at the same time accurate, haunted, fictitious and false. Part performance and part illustrated lecture, A Decade… presents a tenth-birthday look back on the company's work and processes. Mixing performance, autobiography, documentary and historical speculation, the piece combines insight into the company's work with a reflection on ten years of change in the urban British landscape which has inspired it.

The text for A Decade… is published in Certain Fragments.

© Forced Entertainment 1994. Performance/lecture.

Credits

Conceived and devised by the company
Performers: Robin Arthur, Tim Etchells, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor
Text: Tim Etchells and the company
Design: Richard Lowdon
Lighting Design: Nigel Edwards
Soundtrack: John Avery