ARCHIVES 2012 / Tomorrow's Parties

Under a string of Chinese lanterns, in what looks like a fairground stall, a man and a woman try to outdo each other in inventiveness to give the public visions of the future. Tomorrow's Parties uses the minimalist means characteristic of Forced Entertainment whose work is partially based on the acting and improvisation capacity of its actors, to present a swarm of fragmented – but nevertheless tangible and gripping – visions of what the future might be. With the virtuosity of story-tellers, the two performers recycle predictions that we can hear in the media – on subjects as varied as global warming or religious conflicts – as well as in science fiction stories written for cinema and literature. Utopias, disaster scenarios or realistic developments, collective fantasies or individual desires, paradisiacal and fantastical visions or expressions of our deepest fears: Tomorrow's Parties plays with clichés, breaks taboos and humorously questions the speculative nature of anticipation. Sometimes optimistic, sometimes pessimistic, these unending variations on hope present the spectator with a particularly shrewd and critical map of the present. MS