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Dateline: 14th July, 2002

Forced Entertainment - The Travels

Follwing the huigely successful tour of First Night during 2001/2, Forced Entertainment presents a new performance The Travels ­ an intimate documentary that deliberately crosses and re-crosses the line between truth and fiction, between performance and the real world.

The premiere is in Frankfurt (27-29 Sept at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm), The UK tour starts at the Company¹s studio in Sheffield (4, 5, 7, 8, 9 Oct) with performances at The Place in London (3-7 Dec) 2002. The tour also includes Aberystwyth, Brighton, Coventry, Exeter, Lancaster, Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham and Wolverhampton (full details below).

Through the summer of 2002 they undertake a series of journeys, tasks and personal investigations. They get their fortunes told in separate cities. They stay up all night, alone in a series of seaside hotels. They visit and photograph streets that have unlikely and poetical names.  Streets they have never been to before, in cities all over the country. They employ a medium and make numerous attempts to contact the dead. They surf the internet. They make lists of overheard conversations, graffiti fragments and wishes. They make imaginary snapshots of scenes encountered on the road.

The results form Forced Entertainment's The Travels.  Part confession, part intimate documentary, The Travels revisits their experiences through forensic reconstruction and a collage of stories using everything from taped phone calls to beaches on videotape.

Over the last 18 years, Forced Entertainment has created theatre and performance that smashes all conventions.  Their history as a permanent ensemble of artists is recognised as unique in contemporary British theatre.  Always at the cutting edge, they have created "a body of brilliant work unparalleled in British performance history" (The Guardian), producing projects in live art, installation, digital media,publication, video and film as well as theatre.

Their work invites an audience to think again about contemporary life and its representation in theatre, as strange parallel worlds are built from recognisable fragments of our own.  The Travels continues to build on the company¹s reputation for work that asks questions and side-steps artistic definitions, where entertainment and innovation are wholly intertwined.  Drawing on the documentary track initiated in their 1994 project A Decade of Forced Entertainment and continued in Tim Etchells' recent solo performance Instructions for Forgetting (2001), The Travels is an attempt to create a vital and distinctive contemporary theatre on the intersection of ideas, stories, facts, evidence and dreams.

Confirmed tour dates:
(telephone numbers shown are for BOX OFFICE)

      SEPTEMBER
27-29       Frankfurt, Germany  
              Frankfurt Künstlerhaus MOUSONTURM, 0049 69 40589520

OCTOBER
4,5,7,8,9  Sheffield
              Forced Entertainment Studio
              tickets c/o Crucible Theatre, 0114 249 6000

14-15      Lancaster
              Nuffield Theatre, 0800 0283042

17-18      Leeds
              Leeds Metropolitan University Studio Theatre, 0113 283 5998

22            Nottingham,
              Now Festival Sandfield Theatre, 0115 9526611

25            Aberystwyth
              Aberystwyth Arts Centre / Canolfan y Celfyddydau, 01970 623232

29-30      Coventry
             Warwick Arts Centre, 02476 524 524

NOVEMBER
5-6         Manchester
             Contact, 0161 274 0600

14          Brighton
             Gardner Arts, 01273 685 861

18-19      Exeter
              Exeter Phoenix, 01392 667080

26-27      Wolverhampton
              Arena Arts, 01902 321321

DECEMBER
3-7        London
             The Place, 0207 387 0031

13-14      Cardiff
              Chapter Arts, 029 2030 4400

 

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©Peter Lathan 2001