Forced Entertainment: Cold Sweat

Figures on stage move to strange rhythms and try to articulate their dreams and desires in a comic, absurd and subversive new work. Cold Sweat is a new theatre work from Forced Entertainment, with original texts and sound from the group’s artistic director Tim Etchells. Layering music loops with AI-generated voices, the figures onstage are in play of some kind. Or a TV soap. Fragments of a drama are bound together by a mood of emotional and physical overload. The figures onstage are channelling confusion, struggling to articulate desires, dreams and uncertainties, looping their way through speeches and statements that shift between revelation and cliché. This a show that is ‘undeniably hilarious but also frankly unsettling in the questions it raises about the crisis of representation in the age of AI.’ (Un Fauteuil Pour L’Orchestre) Digging deeper into the lip-syncing mode they established in 2024’s work 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 piece of contemporary theatre.