Tim Etchells
Director Tim Etchells has developed a rich practice at the crossroads between performance, visual arts, and writing. He is the artistic director of the Forced Entertainment collective, founded in 1984 in Sheffield, with whom he came to the Festival d’Avignon in 2012 to present The Coming Storm and Tomorrow’s Parties, as well as the Empty Stages exhibition, with photographer Hugo Glendinning. Tim Etchells has exhibited widely in the context of visual arts, with solo shows at Gasworks and Sketch (London) and Künstlerhaus Bremen (September 2010).
Forced Entertainment. The company's trademark: a constant interest in the conventions of the game, which they willingly dynamite, a permanent questioning of the role of the audience, which they never forget to solicit, and of our society of the spectacle. Rarely based on a pre-existing text, but always resulting from improvisation, experimentation and collective debate, their creations mobilise other arts (performance, cinema, visual arts) with inventiveness and irreverence to open up a breach towards their audience, seeking to please them as well as to take them by surprise. For this 77th edition, he wrote and directed L’Addition, in collaboration with duo Bert & Nasi.
