End Meeting for All: The Performative Meta-Collages of Forced Entertainment

Luciana Tamas

doi:10.1515/jcde-2021-0008

Article

End Meeting for All: The Performative Meta-Collages of Forced Entertainment

Luciana Tamas
is a Romanian-German visual artist, scholar, curator, and translator currently working as lecturer and writing her PhD thesis on Avant-Garde Rupture and the New Theatrical Vocabulary at Technische Universität (TU) Braunschweig. In 2012, she was granted a full, five-year scholarship from the DAAD to study art at Braunschweig University of Art (HBK); parallel to that, she graduated in English Studies and Art History/Aesthetics at TU and HBK Braunschweig. She has participated in and organized over 130 cultural events – solo and group shows, artist talks, and lectures –, and has been granted several awards, most recently the DAAD Prize for Art History.

Published/Copyright: May 19, 2021

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From the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English Volume 9 Issue 1

Abstract

Collage – the insertion of ready-made materials into artworks or texts – is a technique that has been used in all art forms since the experiments of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes and has, in its different shapes, often been used in theatre performances as well. The British theatre group Forced Entertainment provides a contemporary example of a (post-)avant-garde vocabulary that actively borrows from and transforms the practices of their precursors. They employ a palimpsest-like layering of visual and verbal elements, which I will here define as performative meta-collages. In this article, I will discuss their practice and take a look at the ways in which Forced Entertainment’s performative meta-collages verbalize and produce “future” in one of their recent performances, End Meeting for All, which imagines a scenario that takes place “a year and a day” after the beginning of the COVID-19-triggered lockdown in the spring of 2020.

Keywords: Forced Entertainment; Tim Etchells; avant-garde; End Meeting for All; language; collage; meta-collage; crisis; lockdown

About the author

Luciana Tamas

is a Romanian-German visual artist, scholar, curator, and translator currently working as lecturer and writing her PhD thesis on Avant-Garde Rupture and the New Theatrical Vocabulary at Technische Universität (TU) Braunschweig. In 2012, she was granted a full, five-year scholarship from the DAAD to study art at Braunschweig University of Art (HBK); parallel to that, she graduated in English Studies and Art History/Aesthetics at TU and HBK Braunschweig. She has participated in and organized over 130 cultural events – solo and group shows, artist talks, and lectures –, and has been granted several awards, most recently the DAAD Prize for Art History.

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Published Online: 2021-05-19

Published in Print: 2021-05-06

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2021-0008

Keywords for this article

Forced Entertainment; Tim Etchells; avant-garde; End Meeting for All; language; collage; meta-collage; crisis; lockdown