Things That Go through Your Mind When Falling

Edited by Adrian Heathfield
Photography by Hugo Glendinning
Performance texts by Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment

Making performance works for four decades, British experimental theatre collective Forced Entertainment has become globally renowned for its singular aesthetic and audacious events, melding narrative fragments with strange acts, broken poetry, audience provocations, and comical failure. With its low-fi theatre, intimate text-based works, and epic durational spectacles the group has profoundly influenced the international performance scene, evoking and testing the politics of contemporary life.

Things That Go through Your Mind When Falling is the definitive book on a remarkable oeuvre: an exquisite anthology of previously unseen images by photographer Hugo Glendinning, collecting interview reflections and documentary materials alongside original texts and critical essays which make a forceful intervention in the discourse on contemporary performance.

With contributions from Robin Arthur, Sara Jane Bailes, Augusto Corrieri, Tim Etchells, Matthew Goulish, Adrian Heathfield, Joy Kristin Kalu, Joe Kelleher, Richard Lowdon, Claire MacDonald, Claire Marshall, Rabih Mroué, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor, Giulia Palladini, Flora Pitrolo, Séverine Ruset, and Theron Schmidt.

Things That Go through Your Mind When Falling: The Work of Forced Entertainment, Spector Books, 2023, 384 pages. ISBN 9783959053853.

Read the essay, Exquisite Catastrophe, below.

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Things That Go through Your Mind When Falling Forced Entertainment, Bloody Mess, 2004. Photo © Hugo Glendinning.
Things That Go through Your Mind When Falling Forced Entertainment, Emanuelle Enchanted, 1992. Photo © Hugo Glendinning.
Things That Go through Your Mind When Falling Forced Entertainment, First Night, 2001. Photo © Hugo Glendinning.
Things That Go through Your Mind When Falling Forced Entertainment, Out of Order, 2018. Photo © Hugo Glendinning.
Things That Go through Your Mind When Falling Forced Entertainment, (Let the Water Run Its Course) to the Sea That Made the Promise, 1986. Photo © Hugo Glendinning.
Things That Go through Your Mind When Falling Forced Entertainment, 12am: Awake & Looking Down, 1993. Live Culture, Tate Modern, March 2003. Photo © Hugo Glendinning.
Things That Go through Your Mind When Falling Forced Entertainment, The Last Adventures, 2013. Maschinenhalle Zweckel, Gladbeck, Ruhrtriennale Festival of the Arts, Ruhr, Germany, September 2013. Photo © Hugo Glendinning.