Program Notes for FORCED ENTERTAINMENT: Exquisite Pain
Forced Entertainment
Exquisite Pain
January 9–11, 2025
McGuire Theater
Exquisite Pain
A Forced Entertainment production from a text by Sophie Calle
Conceived and devised by the company
Director
TIM ETCHELLS
Text & Images
SOPHIE CALLE
Performers
FORCED ENTERTAINMENT: CLAIRE MARSHALL & RICHARD LOWDON
Lighting Design
NIGEL EDWARDS
Design
RICHARD LOWDON
Production Manager
JIM HARRISON
Touring Technical Manager
ALEX FERNANDES
Exquisite Pain is co-produced by Theater der Welt 2005 (Stuttgart), BIT Teatergarasjen (Bergen), The National Museum of Art, Design and Architecture (Oslo), Kaaitheater (Brussels), La Filature, scènenationale de Mulhouse, and Tanzquartier Wien.
Tonight’s performance runs approximately two hours and ten minutes with no intermission.
Please join us before and after the performances in the Walker’s Cityview Bar.
Friday, January 10: Post-Show Q&A with Walker’s Chief Curator, Henriette Huldisch
Exquisite Pain is a related event for the Walker exhibition Sophie Calle: Overshare (October 26, 2024–January 26, 2025).
Forced Entertainment Artistic Team: Tim Etchells (Artistic Director), Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon (Designer), Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, and Terry O’Connor.
Forced Entertainment Management Team: Deb Chadbourn (Co-Executive Director), Eileen Evans (Co-Executive Director), Jim Harrison (Touring Producer & Production Manager), and Jessica Matthews (Participation Producer).
Marketing: Caroline Griffin Consultancy
Press: Bread & Butter PR
Accessibility Notes
ASL interpretation is planned for the Friday performance.
Content note: This performance contains profanity.
For more information about accessibility, visit our Access page.
For questions on accessibility, content and sensory notes or to request additional accommodations, call 612-253-3556 or email access@walkerart.org.
About Exquisite Pain
“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.” –Sophie Calle, Exquisite Pain
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 recall 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 canon 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 extraordinarily 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.
A Note from Tim Etchells
In London sometime in December 2004 I read the published version of Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain on a long underground train journey.
I loved the project’s form of repeated exchange. Its “I’ll tell you my sad story if you tell me yours”. It’s the kind of simple transaction that most of us have taken part in informally – in bars, cars or bedrooms – but in Calle’s hands, as she repeatedly exchanges her own story of failed romance for the stories of friends, acquaintances and strangers, the process is reduced to its mathematical and psychological essence; a ticking tit-for-tat of death, lost love, existential despair and bad dentistry. I enjoyed the absurd juxtapositions of stories – commonplace tragedies next to almost-comical melodramas and stupid or unbearable accidents – and I liked the way that different contributors seemed to trump, doubt or even refuse Calle’s invitation to describe “the time that they suffered the most”. Most of all perhaps I enjoyed the simple eloquence of the different micro-narratives and their periodic excursions towards self-analysis, self-aggrandisement, self-understanding or self-mockery.
Sitting on the train I looked up from the book from time to time and imagined the stories that my fellow passengers might have contributed, had Sophie asked them. At other moments, and with less distance, I tried to decide which story of suffering from my own life I might have added to her catalogue. A romantic disappointment? A medical nightmare? There were several candidates. I liked the way that, like all catalogues or lists, Sophie’s Exquisite Pain somehow invites at least the thought-experiment of adding things to it.
I loved the audacious repetition in the writing too; Calle’s obsessive circling of the topic of her own sadness, re-telling and re-remembering her story, getting closer and closer to it and at the same time further and further away from it. It seemed to me that, as well as wearing out her own pain, Calle was also making a very precise exploration of how telling something can change it, of how time and language enable distance.
Later the same week we held the first informal ‘rehearsal’ for what would become our staging of Exquisite Pain. Sitting on sofas in the lobby of the hotel where we were staying, Cathy Naden and Claire Marshall read the book to me as other guests rushed or drifted past, oblivious. It was clear soon enough that – having spent twenty years devising, improvising and otherwise creating our own performances – we now felt compelled, for the first time, to ‘do’ a text. And it was clear too that most of what we would need to ‘do’ would consist of exercising restraint. There is something so perfect about the declension of the Exquisite Pain text that our strongest desire was, and remains, to let it be there as simply as possible; unfolding, taking both its time and its toll in what may be the least theatrical but most effective way we can muster.
Two people sit in front of you and make their way through a collection of sad stories that belong to other people. A kind of bearing witness, a trip through the archive that Sophie Calle has collected, and a journey through her journey of remembering and trying to forget.
–Tim Etchells, Forced Entertainment, Sheffield, April 2005
About the Artists
“One of Britain’s greatest theatre companies” (The Guardian)
Formed in 1984 and based in Sheffield, FORCED ENTERTAINMENT is an ensemble of six artists – Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor, led by director and writer Tim Etchells. The company’s work spans theatre, durational performance / live art, gallery installation, video and digital media. Forced Entertainment continually try to find new performance and theatre forms with which to describe contemporary urban life. Their work is emphatically a group creation – made through improvisation and discussion and drawing on theatre itself as well as on cinema, music culture, literature and fine art. Now in their fortieth year, Forced Entertainment continue to make work which is engaging, challenging and surprising, and explores the possibilities of what theatre might be.
TIM ETCHELLS is an artist and a writer based in the UK whose work shifts between performance, visual art and fiction. Etchells has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment. Recent publications include Vacuum Days (Storythings, 2012) and While You Are With Us Here Tonight (LADA, 2013). Etchells’ work has been shown recently at Cubitt, Hayward Gallery and Bloomberg SPACE in London, at Turner Contemporary and Compton Verney in the UK, at Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands Media Art Institute (Amsterdam) and MUHKA (Antwerp). Previously Professor of Writing & Performance at Lancaster University, he also was a Tate / Live Art Development Agency ‘Legacy: Thinker In Residence’ Award winner in 2008, Artist of the City of Lisbon in 2014, and he received the prestigious Spalding Gray Award in February 2016.
SOPHIE CALLE is a photographer, installation and conceptual artist born in Paris in 1953, who has achieved international prominence since her first works in the late 1970s. She is renowned for her voyeuristic and detective-like explorations of human relationships, which have led her, in different works, to follow and document the activities of a stranger on a trip to Venice, or to find work as a chambermaid in order to photograph and take notes on the belongings of a hotel’s guests. Exploring the interplay between her own real life, game-playing and fiction, Calle’s work has been shown in such venues as the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museum Boymans van Beuningen (Rotterdam), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo).
Living Land Acknowledgment
The McGuire Theater and Walker Art Center are located on the contemporary, traditional, and ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. Situated near Bde Maka Ska and Wíta Tópa Bde, or Lake of the Isles, on what was once an expanse of marshland and meadow, this site holds meaning for Dakota, Ojibwe, and Indigenous people from other Native nations, who still live in the community today.
We acknowledge the discrimination and violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Minnesota and the Americas, including forced removal from ancestral lands, the deliberate destruction of communities and culture, deceptive treaties, war, and genocide. We recognize that, as a museum in the United States, we have a colonial history and are beneficiaries of this land and its resources. We acknowledge the history of Native displacement that allowed for the founding of the Walker. By remembering this dark past, we recognize its continuing harm in the present and resolve to work toward reconciliation, systemic change, and healing in support of Dakota people and the land itself.
We honor Native people and their relatives, past, present, and future. As a cultural organization, the Walker works toward building relationships with Native communities through artistic and educational programs, curatorial and community partnerships, and the presentation of new work.
Acknowledgments
Producers’ Council
About the Walker Art Center
Media Partner
To learn more about upcoming performances, visit 2024/25 Walker Performing Arts Season.
