- Venue
- Crucible Theatre
- Location
First then, to set the scene: there is a room; stripped back, bare. The lights are dimmed. Illumination comes from a chain of naked light bulbs strung up somewhat haphazardly, and from the gleam of a spotlight, which picks out two figures from the surrounding dark. The two figures, a man and a woman, first pause … then begin to speak. It would be improper to steal the thunder of their very first line, so imagine an ellipsis, the dot-dot-dot of passing time […] Two figures exchanging visions of the future, swapping narratives of optimism and despair, utopian and dystopian imaginings. A man and a woman, illuminated, mid-flow in the to-and-fro of exchange: “… in the future, everyone will have brown eyes … or, in the future there’ll be no word for weekend … or, in the future small will be beautiful; or, in the future no-one will care about algebra or trigonometry or sequence patterns or anything mathematical because computers will do it all … or, people will grow an extra thumb for quicker texting, or, people will learn to walk on water; or, everyone will speak all the languages of the world, or, no-one will remember the seventies”. The two continue to imagine what the future might be like through an unfolding litany of prediction, projection, prospection and prophecy: “in the future; or … in the future; or … in the future … or … or … or ” and so on.
What strikes me about Forced Entertainment’s performance, Tomorrow’s Parties, is the sense of two distinct modes of future-oriented imagination operating therein — not so much the tension between the utopian and dystopian, nor between the possible and impossible, nor even between the prosaic and fantastical visions of the future that are conjured up by the two performers, but rather that within this work, the future is imagined from two quite different temporal perspectives. Firstly, the performance speaks of the future as ‘foreseen’ (the future as ‘not yet’ but still imaginable, projectable there in the distance regarded from the perspective of ‘here and now’); whilst, secondly, its ‘live-ness’ attests to an ever-emergent future that is endlessly seized and inhabited through the improvisatory act of imagining, the ‘near’ and living instant of the future (conceived as ‘what now, what next’). The work thus proposes one mode of future-oriented imagining within the content of the words that are spoken (“in the future …”), whilst another is enacted at a methodological level in relation to how (through improvisation) that content was/is arrived at, even arrives. To distinguish between the two modes then: through acts of imaginative projection a ‘future-possible’ world is seemingly given shape (even scripted) in advance of its occurrence; whilst arguably, within the act of improvisation the shape of an unfolding future emerges simultaneously to its imagining.
Whilst the phrase “… in the future” within Tomorrow’s Parties signals towards the activity of looking forward to the future (as if it could be imagined to already exist), my assertion is that the punctuating interruption of the word ‘or’ (as in “or … in the future”) creates the conditions for a very different quality of imaginative futurity. Here, ‘or’ serves as both a rupturing and affirmative force simultaneously breaking one flow of imagining whilst initiating the possibility of another. Or — the imperative to stop, begin again. Contraction of the word ‘other’, the interjection ‘or’ does not simply present an alternative to the terms of the existing situation (according to the binary logic of ‘either/or’, ‘this or that’) but instead might be considered as a site of repeated and continual intervention and invention (or … or … or). Turning attention away from the product (what is imagined) towards the process of imagining, Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties explores how the creative production of the future (as different or otherwise) is not only one of planning or proposing future-possible worlds, but rather emerges through a restless capacity to interrupt what already exists with an interventionist, insurgent ‘or’.
