Performance / 21 January - 11 March 2006

EXQUISITE PAIN

Tickets: 10

From a text by Sophie Calle
“I decided to continue… until I had got over my pain by comparing it with other people’s, or had worn out my own story through sheer repetition”.
A man and a woman tell stories of ordinary and not-so-ordinary heart-break, each story accompanied by a single iconic image. A red telephone on a hotel bed. A subway station. The view from a window. A green Mercedes. The woman repeatedly recounts the story of the end of an affair; each time remembering it differently, adding and subtracting details, finding new ways to both remember and forget what happened. The man tells stories from many different people; each a snapshot of sorrow, big or small, that takes its place in a growing catalogue of suffering, break-ups, humiliations, deaths, bad dentistry and love letters that never arrive.
Based on a project by the renowned French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, EXQUISITE PAIN marks the first time that Forced Entertainment have worked from ‘a text’ – in this case not a play from the theatrical cannon but rather words and images from an artist whose extraordinary work has long attempted to blur the boundaries between visual art, performance and real life itself.
In this simple and intimate performance Forced Entertainment explore how language, memory and forgetting move to contain, preserve or erase events; how people come to terms with trauma. EXQUISITE PAIN is about love, loss, and the stories we tell ourselves when things have gone wrong.
In EXQUISITE PAIN, director Tim Etchells and the company bring their own “distinctive brand of subversive theatre” (Sunday Times), to Calle’s “beautifully and movingly written” texts (Guardian) to create a unique theatrical event.
Read Lyn Gardner’s Guardian review
Forced Entertainment
From a text by Sophie Calle

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