description

Stretching from midnight to midnight, Who Can Sing A Song to Unfrighten Me? takes the public and its fourteen performers on a long journey from night to day and back again. Combining a firm frame with an endless demand for improvisation and ‘liveness,’ the twenty-four-hour performance recycles and mutates a collection of scenes, performance structures and costumes.

There are kings, skeletons, zoo animals, ballerinas. There are disappearing routines, dances, sleazy cabaret demonstrations of the difference between life and death. There are lists of fears, language lessons, alphabets chalked on a blackboard, and bedtime stories that grow and change and crosscut and somehow never end.

The focus throughout the piece is on the act of staying up all night as a kind of protection from the demons hidden in darkness and on performance itself as a way of marking and sharing time.

© Forced Entertainment 1999. 24-hour durational performance.

Credits

Conceived and devised by the company
Performers: Robin Arthur, Mark Etchells, Ruth Geiersberger, Tim Hall, Jerry Killick, Gisela Jurcke, Tobias Lange, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Sue Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor, Roy Peters, Thomas Peters, Susanne Plassmann, Sanne van Rijn
Direction: Tim Etchells
Text: Tim Etchells and the company
Design: Richard Lowdon
Lighting Design: Nigel Edwards
Soundtrack: Found Sources

Commissioned by LIFT, Royal Festival Hall (London) and SpielArt (Munich)