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

Abstract

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.