Open Works Festival presents Cold Sweat.

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, we are in play of some kind. Or a TV soap. Fragments of a drama 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. Digging deeper into the lip-syncing mode they established in 2024’s 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 contemporary theatre.

Cold Sweat is a Forced Entertainment Production. Co-produced by KONTRÄR, Stockholm, Sweden and created with the support of La Commune, Centre dramatique national d’Aubervilliers, and La Menagerie De Verre, France.

Part of Open Works Festival