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12 am: Awake & Looking Down

Forced Entertainment Theatre Company (Great Britain)

Forced Entertainment Theatre Company

The group of six artists and performers (Tim Etchells (Artistic Director), Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon (Designer), Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O'Connor), from 1984 working in industrial Sheffield (England) and touring worldwide, has become actually the classics of the Modern theatre. Their method of collective composition and direct communication with the audience is now studied in theatre schools. In their shows are mixed a cabaret, chaotic game without rules, documentary theatre and social drama. Actors of Forced Entertainment always remain themselves, no one pretends to be someone else and they are able to ask the audience complex, provocative questions in a simple and simultaneously unpredictable form.

In 2016, Forced Entertainment received the prestigious Ibsen Award for creating a unique performative space in the history of the World Theatre. In Russia, the British company toured three times, the first time at the 3rd World Theatre Olympics in Moscow.   

They seem to perceive the theatre as a “second hand”: a set of used characters and situations that can be tried as worn clothes.

"12 am: Awake & Looking Down" is the most obvious example of the functioning of this model. Two hangers with shabby dresses, jeans and jackets plus a couple of dozens of cardboard plates with the designation of characters. It’s not only all the props of the production but the whole story as well. Actors every minute change a dress, choose another sign, show it to the public, silently pass through the stage and again get to the hanger.

The plates are composed not from the dramatic stamping ("The girl in the first elevator", “Sentimental Worker", "The girl who looks innocent"), not from some of the scums of pop culture: "Queen of the Void" or, for example, "Elvis Presley (singer, who died)".

This is not even a "kaleidoscope of untold stories and ghostly Characters", as program describes the "12 am: Awake & Looking Down". All stories have already been told, and the characters became the back numbers: laconic plate easily replaces the plot. Most of all it resembles a well-known joke about the company of people who instead of telling all the familiar anecdotes, called their ordinal numbers.

Oleg Zintsov, Vedomosti

https://www.forcedentertainment.com/project/12am-awake-looking-down/

June 3
Meyerhold Center