Chantier Nomade

Strange times

Strange Times is a workshop project led by Tim Etchells, artistic director of Forced Entertainment, and Richard Lowdon, founder member of the company and designer and performer with the group since its inception in 1984.

The workshop explores processes and techniques for collaborative theatre making, drawing on Forced Entertainment’s rich 40-year history of creative group-work.

At the heart of the project are the approaches to improvisation, the use of text, action and movement material through structures of rules, games and other frameworks developed across decades in the Forced Entertainment studio. In his directorial practice, Etchells frames the rehearsal room as a kind of ‘divining instrument’ - a means through which the artists involved in a creative process work with playful seriousness to generate material that speaks to and about the world outside. It’s a process that emphasises listening - doing things and attending closely to material that emerges - a form of art-making that uses loose collaboration as a means to generate ideas and questions that arise from things done rather than from pre-formed thematics or intended messages.

In the group’s work the contribution of each performer is a vital part of the performance as it takes shape in the rehearsal process, balancing their own impulses and ideas with attention to the emerging world and structure of the performance. This dynamic interplay between individual choices and group situation or context is a key part of what drives the creation of Forced Entertainment’s work and will guide the workshop process of improvisation and research.  The workshop will survey a range of key approaches developed by Forced Entertainment, introducing the participants to a ways of making as well as thinking about and shaping original material. After a first phase of exploratory improvisations the workshop will shift gear towards questions of structure and of reproducing material created in free improvisation, with Etchells and Lowdon leading the group in looking at video, developing tasks to recreate and re-perform material and dramaturgy that has been generated initially through guided improvisation. This process - with deep roots in Forced Entertainment’s work - demands of performers both the initial improvisational energy, group-sensitivity and risk taking and the ability to look cooly at material in retrospect, understanding and learning to re-play the dynamics and timings of moments that occurred spontaneously.

Participants in Strange Times might be performers with an interest in contemporary theatre that goes beyond literary theatre and plays, or dancers, actors or performers with an awareness or engagement with practices that come from outside of theatre itself - from dance, from visual art, from cinema, from performance. The workshop will be conducted in English and will demand a good level of English comprehension and speech.