End Meeting For All
Created 2020
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Created in April 2020 during the first coronavirus lockdown, Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting For All is a fragmentary online work in three short episodes.
Each 25 minute fragment is recorded in a single live take across six screens of a Zoom meeting with performers improvising, reacting and interacting from distant locations in Sheffield, London and Berlin. Completed episodes were then presented via the YouTube channels of our project partners.
Across the series the familiar Zoom-grid of screens is beset by technical difficulties and awash with creative misunderstandings. There are fake tears and bad wigs, missed connections, smeared make up and glimpses from the window as well as an unsteady stream of interruptions by dogs, noises in the corridor and ghosts.
Sometimes poignant and often ridiculous, troubled and strangely hallucinatory, End Meeting For All summons a world in which the lockdown appears to have been going on for a very very very long time – a meeting that never quite happens and which soon becomes a chaos of costumes and confusion. The project sees the group turn their eye for collage, formal innovation and narrative subversion towards video, creating a work from multi-layered improvisation to reflect on the strange state of lockdown, introspection and the wider anxieties emerging in the context of the pandemic.
Images
credits
Conceived & devised by the company.
Director Tim Etchells
Devised and performed by Robin Arthur, Tim Etchells, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor
Zoom advice and screen recording Jason Crouch
Post-Production video Hugo Glendinning
Post-production sound John Avery
With thanks for music in episode two:
Violin: Aisha Orazbayeva – J.S Bach Sarabande from b minor partita no.2 for violin solo
Alasdair Roberts – Slowly Growing Old, from the album Farewell Sorrow
End Meeting For All is a Forced Entertainment production commissioned by the Alliance of International Production Houses. Co-production: HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt a.M.), PACT Zollverein (Essen). Supported within the framework of International Production Houses by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
End Meeting For All - PREVIOUS SHOWS
13 May 2020 - 31 Aug 2020
12 May 2020
5 May 2020
28 Apr 2020