Tim Etchells
Tim Etchells (born 1962) is a British performing artist, who is the artistic leader of the performance theatre company Forced Entertainment, for which he has worked as a director, playwright and at times also actor. Besides his work for Forced Entertainment, Etchells is an acknowledged academic and visual artist.
As a visual artist he works with photo/video and text, often also in the form of books. As an academic he has published a large number of articles and books, mainly about the genre of performance theatre.
Forced Entertainment received The International Ibsen Award 2016.
Information
(Objekt ID 2906)| Object type | Person |
| Functions | Director, Writer, Researcher, Artist, Dramatist/Playwright |
| Nationality | British |
| Gender | Male |
| tim@timetchells.com | |
| Website | timetchells.com - home, forced entertainment |
"From the beginning, an important part of the group’s avant-garde theatre practice has been to attempt to exceed the limits of the visual arts, and to work with children and young people, or collaborate with other artists. Forced Entertainment have developed a theatrical language that does not seek to represent the world beyond the theatre stage, but rather examines the reality of the theatre situation as being imaginary and speculative, as well as a real, physical space of experience - a language they have researched for thirty years.
On this basis, and under the direction of Tim Etchells, the company has developed an entirely new relationship between production and audience, and between new narrative strategies and new theatrical forms. Forced Entertainment’s theatre is not illusory, but imaginative. It is not political in the sense of agitation, but offers the experience of an artistically mediated practice - the performances thereby anticipating the state of another world.
(...)
Forced Entertainment’s work does not rest with a single form, style or tradition, but represents a seeking and revivifying force; a continual creative exploration of what the theatre is and can be, in a way that has changed the theatre’s possibilities. An award to Forced Entertainment is therefore an award to the entire dynamic, challenging and collective process that is theatre, and to what theatre might be in the future."
SOURCES:
Ibsen Awards, www.ibsenawards.com, 30.03.16, http://www.internationalibsenaward.com/winners/forced-entertainment/
Store Norske Leksikon on Tim Etchells, https://snl.no/Tim_Etchells
- Forced Entertainment - Text