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Instructions For Forgetting: Some Notes on Forced Entertainment's Recent Documentary Projects.

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/10/2006
<mark>Journal</mark>TDR
Issue number3
Volume50
Number of pages23
Pages (from-to)108-130
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Bibliographic note

Special Individual Circumstances. In this article, Etchells defines a grammar or an economy for performance works constructed through processes of gathering or collecting materials, with special reference to projects that he wrote and directed such as Instructions For Forgetting, The Travels, Nights In This City, A Decade of Forced Entertainment and Marathon Lexicon (the latter made in collaboration with Dr Adrian Heathfield). Together the essay and the performance text/document map the differences in process, structure and aesthetic between the work on overt theatrical spectacle that he has created (Bloody Mess and The World in Pictures above) and the more minimalist documentary works. It explores his thinking about performance, theatre and the possibilities of its relationship to the shared social reality that we call the world, as well as highlighting questions around the construction of on-stage personas that lie between 'truth' and 'fiction' and exploring ethical questions about performance work that uses personal documentary material. Central to his exploration are ideas about what he comes to call hybrid documentary forms in performance -- works in which factual materials are mixed with or collaged next to fictional ones and in which the dynamics and rhetorics of different modes of storytelling can be exposed. The performance document itself reconstructs the live work as script and description but breaks from this strategy at key points in order to reflect on and re-make the work as something that exists on the page. RAE_import_type : Journal article RAE_uoa_type : LICA