About

Forced Entertainment 'Signal to Noise'

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An upbeat spectacle which is slowly breaking apart, 'Signal to Noise' summons a delirious late-night churn of fragments – dances, rehearsals, altercations, scenery changes and unexpected weather reports. AI voices are enlisted to perform the text – their unreal chatter and patter mixing interior monologues, unfinished jokes and off-topic interviews. It all sounds right, more or less human, more or less real. What could go wrong?

The six performers lip-sync all the voices, sometimes carefully, sometimes with unhelpful abandon, bringing life to these disembodied, never-bodied speakers. In the process they summon a strange and compelling world where the question of what’s human and what’s not, what’s real life and what’s just pretending is never far away.

Director Tim Etchells' musical score mixes everything from filmic atmospheres to noise, xylophones to slowed classical strings, beats, trumpets, grunge guitars, and birdsong, but as ever with the company, the performers are the heart of the work - animating it with the energy and inventiveness that Forced Entertainment have made their calling card.

Created as the group celebrate their 40th Birthday, the show is a powerful mix of performance magic and off-hand deconstruction, a simple idea unfolded to open a unique space for the thoughts, laughter and reflections of spectators.

'Signal to Noise' is a Forced Entertainment production

Co-produced by Athens Epidaurus Festival, GR; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Festival d’Automne à Paris; HAU, Hebbel Am Ufer, Berlin; Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main; PACT Zollverein, Essen and Theatre Garonne, Toulouse.

Cast and creative team

• Director Tim Etchells
• Devised and performed by Robin Arthur, Seke Chimutengwende, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden and Terry O’Connor
• Dramaturgy Tyrone Huggins
• Lighting Design Nigel Edwards
• Sound Design Tim Etchells
• Production Management Jim Harrison
• Image by Hugo Glendinning

About Forced Entertainment

Forced Entertainment is an ensemble of six artists founded in 1984 and based in Sheffield. Touring and presenting their ground-breaking provocative performances across the UK and further afield, the group have sustained a unique collaborative practise for forty years. The work explores and often explodes the conventions of genre, narrative and theatre itself drawing influence not just from drama but from dance, performance art, music culture and popular forms such as cabaret and stand-up.

Pay What You Decide

Pay What You Decide (PWYD) tickets are available for this event. These are limited to 20 tickets per performance, with a maximum of 2 tickets available per customer. Find out more