Bert & Nasi / Tim Etchells
L’Addition
US premiere
Theatre
L’Addition plays out like a deranged game of telephone, except that the message being passed is a single scene on an increasingly distorted loop: A man at a café orders a drink. A waiter pours the drink. And a waiter pours the drink. And he cannot stop pouring the drink. Each escalation of the otherwise everyday scenario introduces a more outlandish set of circumstances.
Directed by Forced Entertainment Artistic Director Tim Etchells, one of the most influential forces in European theatre in recent decades, and created with the brilliant physical theatre duo Bert and Nasi, L’Addition orchestrates a complex, hilarious, and explosive performance from simple materials. Together, the three of them play with the mechanisms of theatre as much as with power relationships. In the end, someone has to pay the bill.
The Dark: PS21’s fearless winter festival of live performance radiating across Columbia County
The Dark is a new annual festival from PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance that celebrates and elevates the depths of winter. Taking place February 16–22, 2026, the festival will unfold at PS21 and across Columbia County—in theatres, restaurants, libraries, saunas, and outdoor public spaces. Featuring more than 60 international artists and over 80 performances, The Dark offers a packed week of world-class contemporary performance, installation, music, dance, and theatre—all exploring winter as a time of community and solitude, fire and ice, darkness and light. A major new attraction for the region, the festival positions Columbia County as a year-round cultural destination—not just a summer one.
It is a light in the dark—and The Dark is the light.
Secure your Festival Pass to The Dark now which includes tickets to every performance along with a complimentary sauna and ice skating session!
Directed by Tim Etchells.
Devised and performed by Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas.
Commissioned by Festival d’Avignon. Co-produced by Grrranit Scène nationale de Belfort, Centre culturel André Malraux, Scène nationale de Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy, Théâtre de la Manufacture CDN Nancy Lorraine, CCAS, Théâtre Silvia Monfort (Paris), La Vignette Scène conventionnée Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier), Théâtre du Bois de l’Aune (Aix-en-Provence), Théâtre de Choisy-le-Roi, and Théâtre Alibi (Bastia). Residencies at Centre social Espace Pluriel-salle de la Barbière (Avignon), The Coronet Theatre (London),Battersea Arts Centre (London), and Toynbee Studios (London).
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.
In recent years Etchells has exhibited widely, with solo shows at Ebensperger (Berlin), VITRINE (London and Basel), Bloomberg SPACE (London), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver) and Kunstverein Braunschweig as well as large-scale commissions for public space at Royal Festival Hall, London (2023), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021), and Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2021). He has created permanent sculptural commissions for numerous locations, including Deutzer Hafen, Koln (2022), Kunstverein Braunschweig (2021) and Komuna Warsawa (2020). His work has appeared in Frieze Sculpture, London (2022 and 2018), the biennales Manifesta 7 (2008) in Rovereto, Italy, Goteborg Bienale (2009), October Salon Belgrade (2010), Aichi Trienale, Japan 2010, with Vlatka Horvat, Manifesta 9 (Parallel Projects) 2012 and as well forming part of Folkestone Triennial 2014 and The Great Exhibition of the North at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2018).
Selected group shows include The Weight of Words, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, (2023), The Horror Show, Somerset House, London (2022), …of bread, wine, security and peace (Kunsthalle Wien, 2020), Lichtparcours Braunschweig (2020), Re-Creatures, Mattatoio, Rome (2021), Between Us, Kunsthalle Mainz (2019), Was sind die Wolken? (What Are the Clouds?) Kunstgebäude Stuttgart, (2019), The Cipher & The Frame (Cubitt Gallery, London, 2015), MirrorCity (Hayward Gallery, London, 2014), as well as Netherlands Media Art Institute (Amsterdam), MUHKA (Antwerp), Galleria Raffaella Cortese (Milan), Sparwasser HQ (Berlin), MACBA (Barcelona) and Kunsthaus Graz. His work is held in numerous institutional and private collections around the world.
Etchells was Artist of the City of Lisbon (2014) and won the Spalding Gray Award in 2016, awarded by a consortium of U.S. performance institutions including PS122 New York, Walker Arts Centre Minneapolis, Andy Warhol Museum Pittsburgh and On The Boards, Seattle, recognising him as a ‘fearless innovator of theatrical form’. Under Etchells’ direction Forced Entertainment won the International Ibsen Prize 2016. He won the Manchester Fiction Prize in 2019.
In both performance and in art practice my work is often concerned with liveness and presence, with the unfolding of events in time and place. The place where ‘events’ happen could be an LCD monitor or a computer screen, a stage, the space of a page, a gallery, a found site, a street, or some private space – a room or a car for instance – in which a person might listen to the audio or read a text. In each work or project I seek to make something happen – stage an encounter, unleash a process, set an event in motion – which ultimately explores the dynamic relationship between the work and the viewer.
At the centre of many of my projects there is a fascination with rules and systems in language and in culture, in particular with the way these systems can be both productive and constraining. Many of the projects also stage or imply an event, an idea, or an object that is at the same time constructed and unravelled. The mechanisms and economies of this process – of exposure and concealment, construction and deconstruction, appearance and disappearance – are at the heart of what I do.
Bert and Nasi are a contemporary performance duo that met in 2015 and have since created an entire repertoire of shows in the midst of a period of national and international austerity. Their work, in turn, is stripped back and minimalist, whilst dealing with complex ideas and emotions. Their shows lie somewhere between performance, dance and theatre but if you had to pin them down on it, they’d probably say it’s theatre.
Together they have performed their shows on the international stages of PuSh Festival (Canada), Festival de Otoño (Spain), Sarajevo Mess (Bosnia), Adelaide International Festival (Australia), InTeatro (Italy), Avignon Festival (France) as well as MiTsp (Brazil).
While this performance does not have reserved seating, we are happy to accommodate any specific accessibility needs.
Please reach out to Adriana at boxoffice@ps21chatham.org, and she will coordinate with our front-of-house team to ensure your experience is comfortable and enjoyable.
