Forced Entertainment: Signal to Noise

Witness the battle to break out of repeating cycles in the UK premiere of Forced Entertainment’s playful and unsettling, comical and deadly serious performance.
 
There seems to be a problem, a problem with the connection…
 
An upbeat spectacle which is slowly breaking apart, Signal to Noise presents a churn of fragmented speech, from altercations to unexpected weather reports.
 
AI voices are enlisted to perform the text, their unreal chatter mixing interior monologues, unfinished jokes and off-topic interviews. It all sounds right – more or less human, more or less real. What could go wrong?
 
The six performers lip-sync all the voices, bringing life to these disembodied speakers. In the process they summon a strange and compelling world where the question of what’s human and what’s not, what’s real life and what’s just pretending is never far away.
 
Etchells’ musical score mixes everything from filmic atmospheres to noise, xylophones to slowed classical strings, beats, trumpets, grunge guitars, and birdsong, but – as ever with the company – the performers are the heart of the work, animating it with the energy and inventiveness that Forced Entertainment have made their calling card.
 
Created as the group celebrates its 40th birthday, the show is a powerful mix of performance magic and deconstruction which opens a space for the audience to reflect on the strangeness of interactions.