If All Else Fails

Two performers engage in an absurd test that seems to shift and change as they work their way through it. Fragments of a language lesson. Questions from a personality quiz. Slogans from some future society. The performers laugh, hesitate, ask for more time. The test continues. As the clock ticks it’s not even certain if the subjects of the test are the audience or the performers.

Comical and tangled, If All Else Fails is a new collaboration between Sheffield’s Forced Entertainment and dancer/maker/choreographer Seke Chimutengwende. Performed by Chimutengwende and Cathy Naden, one of the founder members of the group, the piece is a dialogue of speech and movement, questions and answers. Drawing on the artists’ mutual interest in improvisation, and in setting up complex, comical and unstable performance situations, the piece brings together two powerful forces in the contemporary theatre scene to create a perplexing and original exploration of new territory.

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