Event Details

Lancaster Arts is thrilled to be welcoming back Forced Entertainment for Cold Sweat, with original texts and sound from the group’s artistic director Tim Etchells.

Layering music loops with AI-generated voices, we find ourselves in a play of some kind. Or a TV soap. Fragments of a drama bound together by a mood of emotional and physical overload.

The figures onstage are channelling confusion, struggling to articulate desires, dreams and uncertainties. Digging deeper into the lip-syncing mode they established in 2024’s Signal to Noise, Forced Entertainment’s virtuoso performers map their bodies to the strange rhythms and tonalities that the nonhuman AI voices produce. The result is an absurd, comical, unsettling and poetic contemporary theatre.

Forced Entertainment is an ensemble of six artists that have been touring and presenting their ground-breaking provocative performances across the UK and further afield for 40 years. The work explores and often explodes the conventions of genre, narrative and theatre itself.

Cold Sweat is a Forced Entertainment Production. Co-produced by KONTRÄR, Stockholm, Sweden and created with the support of La Commune, Centre dramatique national d’Aubervilliers, and La Menagerie De Verre, France.

“Cold Sweat, faced with this somewhat anxiety-inducing and soulless future looming over the world of creation and the performing arts, is nothing less than a manifest act of resistance.”

Un Fauteuil PourL’Orchestre, Paris