How Goes the World

How Goes The World, Tim Etchells’s contribution to the series Histoire(s) du Théâtre, is based on a quotation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The performance summons the history of theatre as a restless, uneasy and absurd orgy – breathing, whispering, yelling, watching and remembering in darkness – as the world beyond the stage vibrates in a state of perpetual and present uncertainty. 

Remembered performances. Remembered scenes. Remembered agonies. Remembered joys. Remembered costumes. Remembered narratives. The sound of breathing and sighs in the half-light. Facing the audience, this audience here, and another audience – the dead and the living inexplicably combined. The blurring of the real and the unreal, the past and the present, the stage and the auditorium, the actors and the spectators accumulated over years. The space is restless, haunted, uneasy. There is music from another room or another world. Voices whisper. The eyes in the darkness stare back. Watching and being watched. 

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Tim Etchells is a British artist and performer, born in 1962. He co-founded the company Forced Entertainment in 1984 and has been its artistic director ever since. In the past decades, Forced Entertainment became renowned all over the world for its renewing, minimalist, humorous and tantalising theatre. In 2016, the collective was awarded the prestigious International Ibsen Award.

Etchells' work often explores themes such as language, communication, and the relationship between performer and audience. His performances have been presented on major stages and festivals worldwide. Invited by NTGent, Etchells now creates the fifth part of the series Histoire(s) du Théatre. The Brit follows in the footsteps of Milo Rau, Faustin Linyekula, Angélica Liddell and Miet Warlop.