On Watching a 6-Hour Performance: Forced Entertainment's Speak Bitterness
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Feb 20th 4-10 pm
Here is what I thought about while witnessing this six-hour show by the British group Forced Entertainment. I once met Tim Etchells, the director, liked him very much, and I’ve been eager to see him perform.
I am ten minutes late to this show that seems to be made up of declarative statements, mostly confessions. Some are justifications, a fragment of an excuse, a few non-sequiturs. The MCA auditorium is about 2/3rds full. I hope I like this.
"We thought that testing was good."
"We wrote the songs that made the world go round."
"We were British officers and no one could talk to us like that.
"We had bad table manners. We were frightened of balloons."
Yes, I like this. I find that this list-form show is, in fact, to my taste.
"We stared at Miley Cyrus, wondering what the fuck had happened to her." The woman who says these words says them with great feeling for the ludicrousness of Hannah Montana’s fade-out. I love this performer. She looks like she is going to laugh. The actors are all excellent listeners to the papers they are reading. Half reading? They are definitely reading. This is definitely to my taste, seeing this listening.
"We liked the White Stripes. We downloaded ring tones. We aged badly."
It's all about "we," as if they speak for multitudes, or for the group of five of them up there, seated in a row at a table all dressed in gray. Yes, my taste is exactly this, to witness this endless variation on a simple theme. Not to mention that in the past, I was part of a performance group that sat at a long table reading. The V-Girls. The taste for watching people who look somewhat authoritative at a table is not just mine.
Not everybody wants to see a performance like this. What is this taste that defines me? Us? It’s for people confessing petty things next to big violence, laughing or grimacing at the possible equivalences set up between them. Our taste is for horror in neutral sentences, ridiculous things in emphatic sentences. We like it, it makes us feel like we are navigating a world that otherwise seems un-navigable. We like things that sound familiar but aren't. We like simple things next to complicated ones. We like imitations, people imitating others. We like confessions in different voices: self-disgusted, shy, nonsensical, people who sound like they might be saying something but they're not. We like to be a part of things. We like to be a part of this.
But, also: We like to think of ourselves as better than some of the people who are laughing in the audience. We have sympathy for some people who are watching impassively and/or we hate other people who are laughing too loud.
The house lights are slightly up. Why? Usually, it’s to establish an equivalence with the audience. I also know this means that the actors can see us, at least a little bit. Sometimes they look at individuals, but only briefly, not accusingly, not with the stupid avant-garde-style false intimacy you get when somebody suddenly catches the eye of an audience member and stares aggressively at him/her for too long. Because they can. Because they are the performer and the audience is captive. This look of the English performers is more homey and more neutral. It says that we're all probably guilty, but there’s no real blame. They're confessing for and with us.
I realize that this means they can see me taking notes.
"We did not stand behind the yellow line."
"We held out our hands and then withdrew them rapidly."
One man who I think must be Tim Etchells stands up a bit more than the others, but otherwise they all do the same, they are the same, they read from the same pool of papers on the table.
"We didn't believe in the Holocaust."
"When people said Yes we can, we said, No you fucking can't."
"We mistook anger for justification."
I think about how many audiences I have been a part of. So fucking many. Everybody in the audience is probably experienced in this way. I feel a part of these others who are here, even though we are probably different in many ways. We go in and out fetching water, free coffee (thanks, MCA) and cookies ($$). The performers each take at least one break, disappearing fluidly from the stage and then reappearing.
We are different, but we are also the same. We have all been lectured too, we all know how we are expected to behave. We have all chosen to be here, to play the part of this audience. We're an hour and a half in to the six hour total and we’re comfortable now. We feel we know what to expect. We may be wrong, but we are united in feeling that we know.
"We set up a a web site, telling people what we were up to.”
“We never updated our website."
"We juggled our options for New Years' Eve."
Four more hours. I'm wondering why we've chosen to sit still in a seat for this long. At this point, I’ve put my feet up. I’m curious if the people who are leaving are leaving for good or if they'll come back. It's impossible to know.
I'm afraid to think about the next four hours. I am letting myself believe that I can leave at any time. I don't feel pressure to stay, though I did tell M. that I would stay until he got here after he finished work. He should be here in about an hour.
"As soon as we met people, we started to complain about how busy, stressed and overworked we were."
"We were light years ahead."
"We wanted to be two steps ahead when really we were three steps behind."
"We came from a country where there were more people than jobs."
"We cut a woman's eye in half. We were artists."
Are we like priests, a witness to unburdening? Nope.
"We told our kids not to think too much."
One of the performers is suddenly overcome with laughter. It's real. I know it's real because she's not laughing at anything that's particularly funny. To us. Then again, it’s possible she might have rehearsed laughing this way. The actors I know, M included, are good at standing on that fine line between authentic feeling and rehearsed performance. The down-side is that in their life they can often feel confused -- about how to behave, about when not to perform.
"We spoke in a simplified language."
"We wrote false receipts."
"We gave up on kids, because they were too much trouble."
"We laid siege to cities."
"We staged long, titillating fights between good Barbie and bad Barbie." (Big laugh.)
"We got old and lost our magic."
"As journalists, we only reported on what others reported, not on actual events."
"We did not install the proper anti-virus software."
M. arrives, stepping over empty seats to slide into the one next to me. The auditorium is about half full now. I realize that I feel proud to still be here. I feel closer to the others who have also chosen to stay.
M and I have a whispered conversation.
"Is this it? Or has there been any variation in the mise-en-scene?" he asks.
"This is pretty much it. Sometimes they go sit behind the platform. They sit down there and, I don’t know, rest their eyes."
"Are these the only performers?"
"Are they reading? Is it scripted?"
"They can read what they want, I think, from the papers spread in front of them, but there are rules." I had just read the program.
"Right," he said. Then, pointedly: "Just like the first act of LSD."
M, too, is a veteran of the kind of performance where people sit at a long table, speaking authoritatively and messing with the authority through rites of ridiculous equivalence. Bittersweet equivalence, startling interruption. He's a veteran of the ur-group, The Wooster Group.
"This is very genius emotionally," he then says approvingly. "You feel almost like you could jump in and join them." Then his ex-wife texts him from somewhere in the auditorium and he goes out to meet her briefly in the lobby. She’s leaving. He comes back with her snacks.
Who would go to a show like this? A girl and her friend come in and sit near us. "Students at SAIC" notes M, and that seems plausible. Then a man with his teenage son comes and sits in front of us, gaze very seriously at the stage. We see Peter Taub, the performance curator, sitting in the audience wearing a cute cap, taking pictures of the stage with his phone.
"We enjoy our own decline."
"We were endlessly amusing to ourselves."
When you look at life this way, there are endless ways to be bad or do bad or feel that one is bad or doing bad.
I have that feeling again, that feeling of superiority to those who are leaving before the end. And then the next minute I am worrying that I'm stupid for staying.
This is endurance art, though not the kind of endurance art where you watch someone who is suffering. This is the kind of endurance where you endure repetition: in this case, the repetition of the same people speaking a similar statement. On the other hand, the repetition is sensitizing. We notice the slightest variations.
One the performers suddenly speaks really loudly. In fact, she shouts. During the whole first four hours of the show, there has been nothing this extreme. This is a first. It’s a great surge in the anesthetizing flow and it feels like a reward, a little reward of a new tone for having come so far watching the show.
"We spent every Lent in the Betty Ford clinic."
"We made our lovers weep and then said, oh how beautiful you are when you cry."
It really is remarkable how the performers recover once they start talking at the same time. This is clearly the most rehearsed aspect to the show. Elegantly, one of the two stops talking, the other goes on. There is a whole rhythm of speech and pause, speech and pause. The elegance of this recovery depends on falling back into that rhythm.
At this point, I can tell that I am not listening as carefully. I do something else. I draw something, ignoring the performance for the first time, giving my brain a rest. Then I go back to it. I read the program again, noticing that there are six performers listed, but only five on stage.
Without expecting a real answer, I ask M why this needs to be six hours.
"So it becomes something else?" he says.
"I bet it would work just as well at four hours," I say, restless.
"Yeah. Maybe it's so that something interesting will happen in them?" he says, referring to the performers.
"Maybe we'll get something for staying until the end," I said. "Like a prize."
"If it was just one hour," he adds, "it would just be complaining."
A group of chic and foreign people suddenly get up and leave noisily, laughing. I believe they came in a few minutes previously, but I might be wrong. They might have been there all along. I wonder if their laughter is contemptuous. Nobody else takes any notice of them.
"I like it that the actors aren't miked." Says M. But then he notices the five mikes in front of the big desk. "Well, those aren't directional mikes," he says, "so they do virtually nothing." I'm not sure if I believe that. "Maybe they're just there as props," he says.
"When asked to say a few words at a conference or a meeting, we droned on and on for hours, draining the audience of the will to live." This one gets a huge laugh from everybody in the audience including me. The performer who says it isn't laughing. She looks out at us, though, with empathy, I think. She probably knew we'd laugh. She likes making us laugh, why wouldn't she.
I can’t help imagining what it will be like at the end, how we will get up. I imagine clapping. Will they bow. I think yes.
M and I take a break, going out to the lobby to roam around a bit, look for coffee, but it's already been taken away. We lie down on a bright orange-red couch in front of a video loop playing, it turns out, a different show by Forced Entertainment. In the video, we see the people who are now on stage, some wearing pathetic clown makeup. They look both pathetic and defensive. "Wait," says M. "That's Tim Etchells." We have both met him, the Forced Entertainment director, but only briefly. M is right. I realize that the somewhat more dramatic person on stage that I thought was Etchells is actually not him. Which explains the fact that there are only five people on stage when the program promised six.
We get up from our orange couches and go over to chat with the house manager and his assistant, who are there to watch the door. (They are also captive to the performance's length.) We ask them about Etchells. Etchells is sick, says the house manager. He doesn't have details. "They don't tell me everything," he says.
There's a loud party going on upstairs. It’s a company rental, says the house manager. The museum seems empty in spite of the residue of extreme drinking and chatting wafting down on us.
Back in the auditorium, it’s clear that there’s been some kind of tonal change. There's new energy. Two of the performers, both women, are engaged in a kind of duet, going back and forth quickly.
"We got on people's nerves."
"We were religious. We were poisonous. We put the last buffalo to sleep."
"We practiced bizarre interview techniques."
There’s also a repetition of some text we heard earlier in the performance. This recognition of the repetition is another reward for sitting through it all. Nobody who left would hear the echo.
20 minutes to go and I really want to go home. I feel bludgeoned, impatient, though the performance hasn't changed. My comprehension is way down.
"We fell asleep while our partners made clumsy attempts at reconciliation."
"We outsourced everything. We didn't really give a shit."
It’s funny how the audience is laughing more. We, the audience and the performers both, are like horses with the stable in sight, running now. There is an aura of mad glee for having done this together for such a long period. The end is looming up and we know that we’ll soon be parting.
Then the performers start speaking slower, and more purposefully.
"We thought we were funny."
"We were talkers not doers."
"Our smiles were not genuine."
"We were all talked out."
"We sat back and watched from a distance."
I start to worry. How will the performers know when it’s time to end? I think, they don't have watches! I feel unaccountably panicked that the show will never end. M on the other hand doesn't seem concerned.
Then, suddenly, the lights go out.
"Ah you see. The lights are timed to go out at 10," says M. I look at my watch. Yup, exactly 10. I feel relieved for the performers that the lights didn't go out while they were in mid-sentence. If they had, I wonder if the performer would have stopped in mid-sentence or kept speaking in the dark. Either would have worked, I think.
There was great applause and two sets of bows. Then the lights come up and Peter comes over to say hello.
"Jessica wants a prize for staying until the end," says M.
"What kind of prize," asks Peter. I don't know, I am mute, overcome with tiredness. Peter has to take the performers out for a drink now. M. thinks they might be too tired. We ask about Etchells who, it turns out, had a debilitating attack of gout and never made it to the U.S. at all.
