Tim Etchells’ workshop “Words in the Eyes”
From June 8 to 10, the New Theatre Institute of Latvia (NTIL) in cooperation with artist, writer and performer Tim Etchells organized an online workshop “Words in the Eyes”, which was attended by 10 artists who are interested in working with theatre text and text phenomena in theatre.
By reading and analysing texts from a variety of sources (from newspaper texts and listener conversations to texts by writers, artists and poets), the workshop explored the speed, clarity and expressiveness with which a language can convey a story, image or idea. Also, the inherent tendency of language to create wide fields of unpredictability and uncertainty. “Words in the Eyes” offered a playful and practical way of exploring language as a tool for artistic expression and learning about some of the strategies and considerations that have underpinned Etchells’ work for more than thirty years.
Tim Etchells is the founder and artistic director of the renowned British theatre company “Forced Entertainment” which was established in 1984 in Sheffield by theatre students at the University of Exeter, and is known for its six-, twelve- and even twenty-four-hour performances, videos, installations, photo exhibitions, online campaigns and philosophical essays. Etchells, along with “Forced Entertainment”, has consistently created interactive online works, cultivating this practice long before the pandemic, when many turned to the search for new online formats.
Apart from Forced Entertainment, Etchells is also known in contemporary art as the author of visual media solo works – they have been exhibited and shown in many countries around the world, included in various exhibitions, festivals and other events Ebensperger-Rhomberg (Berlin), VITRINE and Bloomberg SPACE (London), Vancouver Gallery of Contemporary Art, Kunstverein Braunschweig, etc. Etchells works with a variety of media, including theatre, video and photographic arts, performative text projects, installations and fiction. He is currently Professor of Performance and Writing at the University of Lancaster. It is important to emphasize that LJTI also has a successful previous cooperation with Etchells. For two years, the program of the international new theatre festival “Homo Novus” included guest performances created by Etchells – “QUIZOOLA!” In 2011 and “The Notebook” in 2015. But in 2013 he also visited the festival “NoMadI” with the show “Silent Volume”.
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