Forced Entertainment - Information

Forced Entertainment

Origins:
They started in 1984 and have been running for over 30 years.

The Company:
The company has 6 core artists who have based themselves in Sheffield. They have been running for 30 years in which the company has been able to show a rare example of their people building, maintaining and developing vocabulary, ways of working and innovating together over long periods of time.  The company is always ready and prepared to take risks in their performance by being able to push themselves to their limits. This also means that the company have control over their performance as they are based on personal needs because they do all the devising for their performances. 

Funding:
The company are funded through the national lottery and Arts Council England which are both from public funding.

Style:
The company's main aim is to challenge people's views of the theatre. They use their 'creative laboratory'  in order to create unexpected and inspiring answers to questions on life and art. For their audience they want to create a state of confusion as it will lead them to question the aspects of their work and the expectations to theatre. They do want to break the norm in the relationship between actors and the audience so they try to make their performances like a conversation between them. It therefore brings the audience deeper into their performance and closer to the art being performed. 

Stimulus:
When the company want to start a new performance, they go back to the rehearsal room in which they discuss ideas, raid costume boxes, play music, focus on specific lines in dialogue or improves a scene until something starts to stick. The stimulus is a very important part in the devising process as it can become the starting point or main component to their artistic projects. Stimulus's could be  anything from an object, dialogue, picture, mood or music piece which could open up their imagination in the creative devising process. The company previous stimulus have varied from ideas when they were drunk to objects that rub against each other in everyday situations but have worked together as it has created tensions and excitement in the companies imagination.


Starting Point:
In order to build some of their ideas they have created lists, played games, been in silence, dressed up, used jokes, got drunk, used improve, spoken in gibberish and experimented with long durations of time (the longest being 24 hours). This also leads the company to look into different and contrasting themes like comedy and serious, for example they created serious scenes that turned out to be funny and vis versa. They also experiment with aspects of the theatre like gallery installations which means their setting would change the audience would move interaction with the art.

Devising Methods:
The company  is mainly devise from their stimulus as it gives them a starting point which they can creatively work around to develop their ideas further. However they also look into different devising methods like the emotional states of the actors. They have an occasion used the actor's mental state like tiredness to add layers to their characters or the scene itself, They have also used accidents in rehearsals into shows to break the expectations of traditional theatre as the audience doesn't expect their to be mistakes. They also use creative blocks to their advantage as it forces the artists to push themselves to get out of the creative block.