Tim Etchells Recieves 2016 Spalding Gray Award

The Spalding Gray National Consortium is pleased to announce that theater-maker and visual artist Tim Etchells is the recipient of the 2016 Spalding Gray Award. Named after the groundbreaking monologist Spalding Gray (1941-2004), the award is sponsored by a consortium that includes Kathleen Russo, Gray's widow; Performance Space 122; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis;The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; and On the Boards in Seattle. The Award comes with a $20,000 commission to create a new work and provides for a full production of that work presented by each organization. Past recipients include Richard Maxwell, Rabih Mroué, National Theater of the United States of America, Radiohole, and Heather Woodbury.

Etchells, known for his solo work and as Artistic Director of British theater collaborative Forced Entertainment, creates formative text-driven works that search for identity in a fractured, uncertain world. With the Spalding Gray Award, he will collaborate with Forced Entertainment to create a new performance piece titled Real Magic. Complicated in its layers of simplicity, Real Magic is about the traps we live in and the possibilities of escape. Exploring story and the absence of a story, Real Magic mixes text, music, image, movement and silence - noise and the transformation of that noise.

Ben Harrison, Curator of Performing Arts & Public Programs at The Andy Warhol Museum, says, "Tim Etchells is an artist that certainly embodies the essence of the Spalding Gray award, in terms of being a 'fearless innovator of theatrical form.' Etchells's solo work and that with his ensemble Forced Entertainment crosses several platforms and contexts (theater, gallery-based, site-specific), that plays at the boundaries of contemporary performance, whilst largely creating intimate, text-based work that poignantly speaks to a sense of abjection in an increasingly mediated global culture."

Tim Etchells is an artist and a writer based in the UK. He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as leader of the world-renowned performance group Forced Entertainment and in collaboration with a range of visual artists, choreographers, and photographers. His work spans performance, video, photography, text projects, installation and fiction. He is currently Professor of Performance & Writing at Lancaster University.

"Across the range of my work I use strong, simple, sometimes comical means to get to serious ideas," Etchells says. "My practice shifts from performance to visual art and fiction and concerns itself with questions of contemporary identity and urban experience, our relation to fiction and the media, as well as with the limits of representation, especially in respect of language. Working across different media and contexts opens up new possibilities and allows me to approach the ideas that interest me by different routes, shifting my perspective on the themes and experiences I want to investigate."