Under Bright Light, a performance by Forced Entertainment, directed by Tim Etchells, PACT Zollverein, Essen, Germany, March 24–26, 2022.I used to find home aquariums deeply disturbing. People said they were soothing and that watching the fish move around made them calm. But that’s precisely what I found disturbing, the fish gliding from this side to that and back, between the plants, not avoiding each other but not making contact either, incessantly moving around in this very constricted space, not exactly in circles, but with very few possible variations. It wasn’t the thought that they might be bored or that the lack of variation might drive them insane that disturbed me. (I don’t know what makes fish happy.) Rather, it was the fact that they seemed perfectly content with doing absolutely nothing day in day out besides moving around. What exactly, I thought, distinguishes us from these fish? We do lots of different things, our radius is much larger and so is the scope of activities we engage in, but does that actually amount to anything more than this senseless motion, here and there and through the middle and back, until we move no more? There is sense, yes, enormous amounts of it, intricate and sophisticated, but does that really change anything?So now I’m sitting in a theatre or rather a venue for dance and performance, PACT Zollverein, and Forced Entertainment are about to come onto the stage, which consists of nothing but a green, rectangular floor with a freestanding wall at the back that resembles a warehouse with some objects placed at random: a stepladder, some chairs, a table, a small portable metal platform and a lot of cardboard boxes. Or rather not quite at random but in clusters in the four corners and in the middle. The performers appear, wearing identical blue boilersuits, and start to move stuff around, always picking up one thing and moving it to one of the other spots, then going somewhere else, picking up something else, moving it somewhere else.If this is indeed a performance, the members of Forced Entertainment are not really performing—rather, they are performing tasks. These tasks are specific but not completely specified, and what we are seeing is not really a choreography. In the most general sense, the task seems to be to move the objects from one place to another, and, in a way, that is already all that will happen. The cartoon-like music by Graeme Miller spurs them on and sets the tone. It starts with a continuously ringing bell, which will return periodically, which might be an alarm or, more in tune with the appearance of the space and the performers, a shop-floor signal to begin working. It lends urgency to the whole thing—Go! Go! Go!As a spectator, I am immediately intrigued by their actions, even though it soon becomes clear that they don’t lead anywhere. But there is drama in small things: all of sudden there is only one chair left in one corner. Will someone actually take it and leave the spot completely empty? Will this shift the overall balance in unforeseeable ways? What are the rules, are they allowed to do this? Then someone brings a second chair—relief, but also some disappointment. It would have been interesting to see what happens. Later it does happen, and then the spot gets filled again. In following all this, I keep trying to guess the rules, noting when they seem to change. First, everyone moves in straight lines, without hesitation. There is hardly any interaction, only very rarely someone hands a box to someone else. These instances multiply as the piece continues. At one point, almost everyone sits down, taking a break like workers in a factory. Later, when they have long resumed their work, someone starts to hesitate, being unsure where to take the object she has in her hands. Others do the same, without these hesitations becoming the general way of moving. It is more like a new possibility has been introduced, a new theme that can be taken up if necessary. Nothing is forced or forcibly coordinated.Then the objects start to multiply: it seems that there is an almost unlimited supply of boxes, chairs, ladders, tables, and platforms behind the wall at the back. They clutter the stage, obscuring the original pattern. But the movement continues. Sometimes boxes are stacked and carried like that. Someone stumbles and lies down, apparently exhausted. Then gets up again. Another new theme that inexplicably makes the audience laugh. Then the pattern changes, and everything is gradually moved to one side of the stage in a new kind of motion, the performers moving the objects in a half-circle above their heads. Then back to the other side, without any hurry, without a sign that signals the switch, more like a gradual change of direction that someone starts and that is slowly picked up by the others.There seem to be only two rules that run through the whole piece: (1) Do whatever needs to be done; (2) Don’t interfere with the others. Even if the only rule of interaction is not to interfere, it implies a sharp awareness of everyone else. There are no collisions. The occasional cooperative gesture just happens without being highlighted or celebrated and without changing the overall rule.But what does need to be done? If the general principle is to move the objects from one spot to another, which objects should be picked up? And where should they be moved to? There are no rules for these decisions, they depend entirely on the performers’ judgment, which has to be made on the spot. In a sense, nothing depends on it because there is no general order that has to be created or maintained. In another sense, everything depends on it because the whole piece consists of nothing but these micro-decisions. It could completely fall apart; the order of its world could cease to exist. But what would a wrong decision be? A decision that is not made, that is avoided, or that is made only half-heartedly would be wrong. It would be a disaster. Faced with the very real possibility of complete indifference, the performers have to maintain the urgency and decide again and again. So everyone keeps moving, always doing what needs to be done with no room for doubts. A decision that is made will have been the right decision. What is done will have been what needed to be done.The general form of performing tasks instead of performing a pre-structured piece recalls practices from the 1960s in dance and especially in music. The way pianist John Tilbury describes performing pieces by Christian Wolff seems immediately applicable: “You have no chance of emotional self-indulgence; you have a job to do and it takes all your concentration to do it efficiently—i.e., musically. With this music you learn the prime qualities needed in performing: discipline, devotion and disinterestedness.”1 Does this mean that the tasks can only be performed efficiently if they are performed musically? Or that the musicality emerges as a function of the efficiency? Maybe in our case the latter could be true, but there certainly is no need for musicality in the actual performance of the tasks. It would not enhance their efficiency but get in its way, a foreign kind of sensibility, an urge to create form and make sense. There is no place for this urge here. In fact, musicality has become a cliché in the performing arts, related to the other cliché that says when quotidian movements are used in art, they turn into a dance. But there is no dance here, and neither does musicality offer a way out, like an exaltation or even a promise of salvation.It is tempting to compare all this to the senseless, endlessly repeating and utterly hopeless labor of Sisyphus, whom, as we know, Albert Camus considered happy. But his acceptance of absurdity was singular and heroic, and there is nothing heroic in what we see here. Neither do we find absurdity embodied in rigorous structure like in Beckett’s Quad (1981), even though the original layout is the same. Then there is the obvious suggestion of seeing it as a critique of the condition of working and living in an all-encompassing capitalist system that has lost its promise of creating a better life for everyone. What remains is a type of work without any inherent reward, without any recognizable sense, without even the redemption of looking back at a task well done, a senseless drudgery under constant surveillance, goaded on by the bell and the threat of being dropped into the nothingness of unemployment.There is that, undoubtedly, but it is not all. This activity regulated by tasks and decisions takes on a life of its own, becomes an apotheosis of busyness. It is no longer geared towards productivity, not even in the indirect sense of furthering someone else’s profit. It makes no sense at all. But where nothing counts, everything starts to count. Nothing is unimportant. Of course, this doesn’t mean that being engaged in this kind of senseless, pointless, and endless activity is easy, or that it is fun. But there is a certain kind freedom in it, or at least a relief.Finally, the music that has retained the same character despite undergoing several changes assumes a different tone, quieter. The lights change from the bright light the title promises to an unsteady twilight, as if there were problems with the electricity. But the movement continues. Then it becomes sloppy, things start to fall and fall apart. Objects are tossed instead of carefully placed. Ladders fall or are pushed over. The agglomeration on the left becomes a chaotic pile. Everyone leaves. Lights out.When the performers stand before the audience after the show to receive their applause, they don’t seem happy or relieved but still tense, or maybe very concentrated. Only gradually they relax. Not making sense is work, and it is demanding. But if I am not mistaken, that is what we are in this world for—not to just continue our existence, not to make sense, or rather all of these things as well, but finally to move beyond sense, to produce non-sense, things that seem to shake off the questions of what they are or what they are for, which are not even beautiful and pleasing but simply non-sensical. Beyond making sense lies grace.