Everything Must Go

Everything is a joke, but nothing is funny. Or everything is funny, and nothing is a joke.

In a bar that doesn’t exist, located either at the heart of a city or deep beneath the earth’s surface, the world outside is haunting the room like a ghost that cannot be dispelled. Beyond the doors, something has gone catastrophically wrong: the economy has burned, cities have run to ruin, and highways are sluiced thick with mud. Inside, six people are talking in circles, and the circles always, without question, come back to the same place. Here.

In this compelling physical performance, Forced Entertainment explores the boundaries of our humanity. The regular team of performers is joined by Seke Chimutengwende to navigate a landscape where the boundary between the self and the machine has blurred. They speak, but the words are not their own. Through their signature use of AI-generated voices and seamless lip-syncing, the group investigates the relation between human presence and the phantom desires produced by the capitalist machine.

Tim Etchells’ texts sculpt everyday language into a subversive, Dada-istic poetics that is at once comical and furious. On stage, the algorithmic expressions meet the dynamic, sweating, and exhausted forms of the performers.

Marking four decades of radical collaboration, Forced Entertainment continues to hold a mirror to our contemporary moment. They present us with a world where people talk to drown out the silence of a broken heart or a missed chance, fighting to find a pulse in a reality that feels increasingly synthetic.