“How the Time Goes” is a fragmentary new multi-episode video-performance in seven parts, by Forced Entertainment. It is presented online initially as an unbroken 5 and a quarter hour long broadcast following which its discrete chapters will each be available to watch individually, on demand at no charge.

Emerging from the delirious limbo of lockdown it features the core group of the company in improvised Zoom-interactions with the pianist Marino Formenti, from separate locations including Sheffield, Berlin, rural France, London, Vienna and Budapest.

There are disputes about Quiz answers and talk about the weather and funerals. Someone cooks, another takes a bath. Someone else tries to explain the costumes in a Chekhov play. Times passes in loops. Piano music plays, the same tune again and then again.

Recorded between March and May 2021, “How the Time Goes” extends the pandemic strangeness of the group’s “End Meeting for All” (2020) to create a spiral patchwork of unedited fragments, neither diary nor fiction. Recorded in a single live take each episode lasts between 25 and 60 minutes, offering a mix of wry comedy and melancholic slow-time shenanigans as the group build on the porousness, connection and disconnection inherent in the new online situation to extend their long established modes of live performance and narrative deconstruction.

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