Forced Entertainment

Emerging from the delirious limbo of lockdown the just over five hours long online performance “How the Time Goes” features Forced Entertainment in improvised Zoom-interactions with the pianist Marino Formenti, from separate locations including Sheffield, Berlin, rural France, London, Vienna and Budapest. 

Recorded between March and May 2021, the work in seven parts extends the pandemic strangeness of the group’s “End Meeting for All” (which premiered in April 2020 at HAUOnline) to create a spiral patchwork of unedited fragments, neither diary nor fiction. 

As the work progresses apparently aimless unbroken video calls drift from theatricality to unexpected intimacy and back again, creating a world in which people cook, practice piano, dance and sleep online. 

Recorded in a single live take each episode of “How the Time Goes” lasts between 25 and 60 minutes, offering a mix of wry comedy and melancholic slow-time shenanigans as the group build on the porousness, connection and disconnection inherent in the new online situation to extend their long established modes of live performance and narrative deconstruction.