During and Enduring: Forced Entertainment's 'Bloody Mess' and the Manipulation of Time in Performance

Abstract

Time is the medium that brings act, actor and audience together in the fleeting moment of performance, and the timebound interaction of bodies here, now, together is believed by Blau, Phelan and others to be a basic ontological characteristic of performance. In this paper, I investigate the ways in which a performance’s treatment of time is tied to its aesthetic and political impact. After a brief analysis of philosophical and performative approaches to time, I examine the experience produced by performances that do something strange to time – repeat, stretch, shrink, fracture and reframe a series of acts in time, prising performers and spectators out of the standard progression of things. I focus on Forced Entertainment’s manipulation of time in Bloody Mess, a piece in which different trajectories of thought and action from the ten performers proliferate, mutate and collide, perpetually deferring the coherent personal, social and political narratives they desire.