I was invited by The Culture Vulture to write something for their Speakers Corner page. My recent post about Leeds Met Gallery got me thinking again about how we remember different spaces, and so I decided to expand on that a little.
You can read Memories of Spaces here.
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
Tuesday, 27 October 2009
Words & Pictures: Introduction, Contents, Acknowledgements
Words & Pictures is one of those projects where I find it tricky to pinpoint how/where it began. We’ve been working with the Off The Shelf Festival of Writing and Reading for a number of years now. Third Angel showed Pills For Modern Living as part of the festival (and in conjunction with ArtSheffield) in 2001. Chris Hall and I have made a number of installation and performance pieces for them since then, all of them exploring the significance of writing and reading in our own lives, from postcards to comics to books.
One of those installations, Chapter Titles From The Unwritten Book Of My Life Story (2005), was itself inspired by the making of The Lad Lit Project in 2004. In researching that show I asked men what they would call the chapters in the unwritten books of their life stories, and as part of that experiment I wrote a list of the chapter titles from my own life. When Chris was editing documentation of an early work in progress of The Lad Lit Project, in which titles were written in chalk on to, and then washed off, blackboards, he discovered the speeded up evaporation effect that then inspired our installation piece. We filmed me writing up and washing off all of the chapter titles from my list - with me self editing and re-writing as I went. Chris then removed me completely in the edit suite, leaving a series of vanishing chapter titles to be projected onto a blackboard.
A couple of those chapters had in fact already been written, and I still have the list as a kind of ‘writing to do list’ – or a 'waiting for inspiration and/or time' list. Although they wouldn’t flow together as a narrative whole, I imagine that eventually they would hang together as an autobiography of sorts. Most of them are still to be written (or written down at least), but the idea is there.
On top of these chapters, we have, unsurprisingly, built up a small a collection of text pieces that were written for other projects and didn't quite fit the 'finished' version of the show, even though we liked them. Over the years a few of these have stuck around, kept our interest - but they haven't found a home - yet.
More recently I was talking to Pat at Studio Dust, who designed the Third Angel website, and some of our print. Dust have done some really nice work in collaboration with other artists, producing books and paper/card objects. I really like the fact that whilst they do a lot of work digitally, they also have their own silk screen press in their workspace. Pat and I were talking about the images on our Flickr photostream, and he said, “We should do a book together.”
“Great,” I said, “what would be in it?”
“Your words and your pictures,” said Pat, “and we’ll design it.”
We liked, of course, the idea of doing a book. And it was natural that we would want to work with Off The Shelf to launch it. However, as a way of interrogating the material for the book, we’re doing the book reading first.
**
So, Words & Pictures, at this stage, is a theatrical short story collection, made up of material Rachael and I have produced for a variety of contexts over the last few years.
The Office Texts were originally written during the making of Believe The Worst in 2001, these monologues proved to be a bit too real-world to fit into the dark reality of that show.
Empty Benches and Benchers between them chart the development of an obsession. Starting on our travels for Pleasant Land we began noticing, and then photographing, empty solitary benches. Several years later I found myself collaborating with Paula Diogo, then of Teatro Praga, for their invited-artist-duets project “Shall We Dance IV”. Paula and I continued researching benches and collecting other people’s bench stories, compiling our findings into a performance piece (named slightly confusingly after a different short chapter) Off The White.
A version of Empty Benches was published in the limited edition artist's book, Slow, edited and bound by Ian Abbott; it was performed as part of the Café Scientifique/Art Science Encounters 'How To Be Creative' event, earlier this year. Benchers was reworked from its full length version to be a 6 minute 40 second Peachy Coochy presentation at NRLA earlier this year, and has now been reworked and slightly extended again; Benchers is co-written with Paula and a number of contributing benchers.
It Starts With The Dice was originally written, at the request of Teresa Brayshaw, for May Day Conversations at Leeds Met University earlier this year, specifically an hour of hobby-horses. I took the prompt fairly literally and used it as a chance to get down one of those chapters from the list. A short piece about hobbies, games, friendship, attention to detail and pedantry.
Dark is an extract from a new piece in development.
Dead Jellyfish is a new piece developed specifically for Words & Pictures. It started off as a (very) short chapter from the list. When I presented it to Rachael recently she suggested that there was more to be said about it. She was right. There’s a lot more to be said about dead jellyfish strewn on the shore of a Scottish loch than you might initially suppose.
Songmap is our contribution to our good friends Unlimited Theatre’s ongoing Mixtape project, for which a range of artists are being asked to choose a favourite song and set stage action of some kind to it. Ultimately the aim is to have a “a whole tape’s worth” of performances. We’ll be unveiling Songmap, and revealing our chosen song at the first performances of Words & Pictures in Sheffield and Leeds. Making Songmap has been a really interesting process for us – deserving of its own blog entry, I think, so more on that soon.
So finally, for this post, thanks to Off The Shelf, The Showroom Cinema, Leeds Met Gallery & Studio Theatre, Studio Dust, Unlimited Theatre, and all of the people who have fed ideas into the development of Words & Pictures, either in the making processes of the individual pieces, or as audience members at the work-in-progress showings at Forest Fringe and FIX09 over the summer.
One of those installations, Chapter Titles From The Unwritten Book Of My Life Story (2005), was itself inspired by the making of The Lad Lit Project in 2004. In researching that show I asked men what they would call the chapters in the unwritten books of their life stories, and as part of that experiment I wrote a list of the chapter titles from my own life. When Chris was editing documentation of an early work in progress of The Lad Lit Project, in which titles were written in chalk on to, and then washed off, blackboards, he discovered the speeded up evaporation effect that then inspired our installation piece. We filmed me writing up and washing off all of the chapter titles from my list - with me self editing and re-writing as I went. Chris then removed me completely in the edit suite, leaving a series of vanishing chapter titles to be projected onto a blackboard.
A couple of those chapters had in fact already been written, and I still have the list as a kind of ‘writing to do list’ – or a 'waiting for inspiration and/or time' list. Although they wouldn’t flow together as a narrative whole, I imagine that eventually they would hang together as an autobiography of sorts. Most of them are still to be written (or written down at least), but the idea is there.
On top of these chapters, we have, unsurprisingly, built up a small a collection of text pieces that were written for other projects and didn't quite fit the 'finished' version of the show, even though we liked them. Over the years a few of these have stuck around, kept our interest - but they haven't found a home - yet.
More recently I was talking to Pat at Studio Dust, who designed the Third Angel website, and some of our print. Dust have done some really nice work in collaboration with other artists, producing books and paper/card objects. I really like the fact that whilst they do a lot of work digitally, they also have their own silk screen press in their workspace. Pat and I were talking about the images on our Flickr photostream, and he said, “We should do a book together.”
“Great,” I said, “what would be in it?”
“Your words and your pictures,” said Pat, “and we’ll design it.”
We liked, of course, the idea of doing a book. And it was natural that we would want to work with Off The Shelf to launch it. However, as a way of interrogating the material for the book, we’re doing the book reading first.
**
So, Words & Pictures, at this stage, is a theatrical short story collection, made up of material Rachael and I have produced for a variety of contexts over the last few years.
The Office Texts were originally written during the making of Believe The Worst in 2001, these monologues proved to be a bit too real-world to fit into the dark reality of that show.
Empty Benches and Benchers between them chart the development of an obsession. Starting on our travels for Pleasant Land we began noticing, and then photographing, empty solitary benches. Several years later I found myself collaborating with Paula Diogo, then of Teatro Praga, for their invited-artist-duets project “Shall We Dance IV”. Paula and I continued researching benches and collecting other people’s bench stories, compiling our findings into a performance piece (named slightly confusingly after a different short chapter) Off The White.
A version of Empty Benches was published in the limited edition artist's book, Slow, edited and bound by Ian Abbott; it was performed as part of the Café Scientifique/Art Science Encounters 'How To Be Creative' event, earlier this year. Benchers was reworked from its full length version to be a 6 minute 40 second Peachy Coochy presentation at NRLA earlier this year, and has now been reworked and slightly extended again; Benchers is co-written with Paula and a number of contributing benchers.
It Starts With The Dice was originally written, at the request of Teresa Brayshaw, for May Day Conversations at Leeds Met University earlier this year, specifically an hour of hobby-horses. I took the prompt fairly literally and used it as a chance to get down one of those chapters from the list. A short piece about hobbies, games, friendship, attention to detail and pedantry.
Dark is an extract from a new piece in development.
Dead Jellyfish is a new piece developed specifically for Words & Pictures. It started off as a (very) short chapter from the list. When I presented it to Rachael recently she suggested that there was more to be said about it. She was right. There’s a lot more to be said about dead jellyfish strewn on the shore of a Scottish loch than you might initially suppose.
Songmap is our contribution to our good friends Unlimited Theatre’s ongoing Mixtape project, for which a range of artists are being asked to choose a favourite song and set stage action of some kind to it. Ultimately the aim is to have a “a whole tape’s worth” of performances. We’ll be unveiling Songmap, and revealing our chosen song at the first performances of Words & Pictures in Sheffield and Leeds. Making Songmap has been a really interesting process for us – deserving of its own blog entry, I think, so more on that soon.
So finally, for this post, thanks to Off The Shelf, The Showroom Cinema, Leeds Met Gallery & Studio Theatre, Studio Dust, Unlimited Theatre, and all of the people who have fed ideas into the development of Words & Pictures, either in the making processes of the individual pieces, or as audience members at the work-in-progress showings at Forest Fringe and FIX09 over the summer.
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
The Wealth of Nations
The Wealth of Nations
video still by Christopher Hall
video still by Christopher Hall
When we were making Leave No Trace in 2002, Chris and Barry went to Scarborough for us. Leave No Trace was about a woman who went through a fugue state, leaving the life she knew, travelling happilly, not even remembering her name.
We were struggling with how to present this story - partly because the whole point was that she would not remember the events of the fugue afterwards. It was hard to tell, from our research, what would actually have happened to her. We had an idea that, this being a small island, she would have ended up at the coast, at the sea side. Looking back, though I don't know how conscious this was at the time, it seems appropriate that we asked film makers Christopher Hall and Barry Ryan to go and collect images for us - without us being there. To document what they encountered on their travels.
They brought back an hour or so of rushes of misty seaside entertainments, along with seaside souvenirs. And those souvenirs made it into the show, but the footage didn't, as we gradually moved away from a thought-track of video images to hand drawn animations. (There was some video in the first version of Leave No Trace, but none of the Scarborough footage).
So this tape has been on the raw materials pile for a few years now, waiting for the right outlet. A week or so ago Chris came into the Third Angel space, as he does from time to time, and dug out the rushes. He explained he'd got an idea for something in response to a call out for films for White Night in Brighton.
The resulting 30 second video, The Wealth of Nations, will be presented during White Night as part of Lighthouse's 30 Seconds of Fortune, on 24 October. You can also see all the 30 second films on line, and find out more about the scheme, on Lighthouse's site.
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
Leeds Met Gallery
Last chance to see... Leeds Met Studio Theatre – the space, not the programme – has closed down now. Along with the rest of the building it is housed in, H Block, it is being decommissioned, and this season’s programme, as exciting as ever (and of which we are pleased to be a part with Words & Pictures), is taking place up the road at University of Leeds’ Theatre Workshop. (Full details here).
But round the corner and down the corridor, Leeds Met Gallery – the venue and the programme – is currently hosting its final exhibition in its current space. Or should that be spaces? The final exhibitions (Souvenir, Old Wars New Wars and As Long As It Lasts) really show off one of the things that is unique about this venue; these three spaces - all accessed through the same double doors - all feel so distinct.
When we made Pleasant Land for Leeds Met Gallery in 2004 (co-commissioned by Shooting Live Artists), this gave us the opportunity to make three separate but linked pieces. In the front gallery, with a glass wall, we were able to grow a turf map of England:
It grew really well, apart from a single strip which seemed to correspond to the M1/A1 corridor. The turf map was surrounded by lightbox maps of the travels we had undertaken as part of the project so far:
In the back room - the double height space - we had the space to construct our own room, designed to house the audience, with space surrounding it for window-viewed video pieces, mini sculptural installations and performance.
In the upstairs space, which overlooks the double-height space in places, but can be curtained off to be self-contained, we created a study room where audiences could contribute to the ongoing research for the project.
For a space with such strong character, it is also very flexible, and an important decision for artists occupying it is how separate to keep the three rooms. It can feel pretty open plan, or the three rooms can be made distinct with curtains and partitions, and smaller spaces can be made, of course (as the Gallery provided for Christopher Hall and I when we showed Reading & Writing there earlier this year).
An important experience for me was seeing Forced Entertainment's Ground Plans For Paradise, back in 1994, which used the spaces really well. The photographs of sleeping people that were exhibited at normal exhibition height in the upstairs gallery continued around the walls, over the balcony open to the double-height room, and around its far walls - so you were able to see some of the sleepers close up, but others only at a distance (from the balcony or from the ground). The double-height space was home to the beautiful, glowing balsa-wood city - which could also be explored up close up at ground level or viewed at a distance from above. On Saturdays the front gallery, viewable from inside or through the windows, was site of a durational, eyes-closed performance element.
The current exhibitions, which run until 17 October, use the three rooms differently again, and quietly commemorate the end of their lives as exhibition spaces. If you're in Leeds, or Yorkshire, it's worth making a last visit. Maybe see you there.
But round the corner and down the corridor, Leeds Met Gallery – the venue and the programme – is currently hosting its final exhibition in its current space. Or should that be spaces? The final exhibitions (Souvenir, Old Wars New Wars and As Long As It Lasts) really show off one of the things that is unique about this venue; these three spaces - all accessed through the same double doors - all feel so distinct.
When we made Pleasant Land for Leeds Met Gallery in 2004 (co-commissioned by Shooting Live Artists), this gave us the opportunity to make three separate but linked pieces. In the front gallery, with a glass wall, we were able to grow a turf map of England:
It grew really well, apart from a single strip which seemed to correspond to the M1/A1 corridor. The turf map was surrounded by lightbox maps of the travels we had undertaken as part of the project so far:
Pleasant Land travels lightbox map: Land's End
(click to view full size)
(click to view full size)
In the back room - the double height space - we had the space to construct our own room, designed to house the audience, with space surrounding it for window-viewed video pieces, mini sculptural installations and performance.
Pleasant Land: Queuing
In the upstairs space, which overlooks the double-height space in places, but can be curtained off to be self-contained, we created a study room where audiences could contribute to the ongoing research for the project.
For a space with such strong character, it is also very flexible, and an important decision for artists occupying it is how separate to keep the three rooms. It can feel pretty open plan, or the three rooms can be made distinct with curtains and partitions, and smaller spaces can be made, of course (as the Gallery provided for Christopher Hall and I when we showed Reading & Writing there earlier this year).
An important experience for me was seeing Forced Entertainment's Ground Plans For Paradise, back in 1994, which used the spaces really well. The photographs of sleeping people that were exhibited at normal exhibition height in the upstairs gallery continued around the walls, over the balcony open to the double-height room, and around its far walls - so you were able to see some of the sleepers close up, but others only at a distance (from the balcony or from the ground). The double-height space was home to the beautiful, glowing balsa-wood city - which could also be explored up close up at ground level or viewed at a distance from above. On Saturdays the front gallery, viewable from inside or through the windows, was site of a durational, eyes-closed performance element.
The current exhibitions, which run until 17 October, use the three rooms differently again, and quietly commemorate the end of their lives as exhibition spaces. If you're in Leeds, or Yorkshire, it's worth making a last visit. Maybe see you there.
Monday, 21 September 2009
Polyhedral Dice
Some new photos on our Flickr photostream. These are test shots for the "It Started With The Dice" section of our new piece Words & Pictures, that were used in Edinburgh at the Forest Fringe work-in-progress showings. Next outing for Words & Pictures is at FIX 09 next week - which will probably include the dice...
Wednesday, 9 September 2009
Ghostwriting for Performance
Beginnings, they say, are difficult.
It starts with something my Mom said.
When I left school, I carried on living at home with my Mom for a couple of years. I had a series of crap jobs: in a bar, then a call centre, then a warehouse. And during that two-year period, my social life revolved, almost entirely, around my gang of mates. All of us lads, all about the same age. And we did everything together.
We went to the pub together.
We played computer games together.
We played Dungeons and Dragons together. A lot.
We watched films together.
We watched football together.
We went shopping together.
We hung around each other’s houses, listening to music and talking about girls – together.
At some point during this period, my mom said to me, ‘When you are older and you come to write your autobiography, you will call this chapter “Waiting For The Lads”.’ And ever since my mom said that to me, I’ve had this idea in the back of my head about what I would call any given chapter of my life, even as I’m still living it.
It starts with my mate Boris sending me an e-mail, urging me to read Tim Lott’s novel, White City Blue, because ‘it’s written about us’.
It starts with Boris giving me the book Surviving Sting by Paul MacDonald, which is set in my home town, Walsall.
It starts with an e-mail I sent to Boris in response to that book, expressing enjoyment of the Black Country nostalgia, but commenting how obvious the formula, or recipe, for Lad Lit is in it.
It starts with an idea for a one-to-one performance called What Makes Me Me, What Makes You You?
It starts with an idea for a solo performance for an audience of eight, or ten, or twelve maybe, all sitting round a large table.
It starts with a research project called Matter, a collaboration with photographer Andy Eccleston, who arranges many, many hospital appointments for me and begins to compile a library of footage of me, using as many medical imaging techniques as he can access.
It evolves, in a discussion with Rachael, into a project that ‘isn’t autobiographical as much as about autobiography’.
It becomes as a research project called Writing Backwards.
It starts when we don’t get the money for that research project and we can’t bring in the three performers for me to direct. So, we put me on stage, although not yet alone, and invite many other men, some of them performers, into our rehearsal space to drink beer and wine, and talk about their lives.
It starts, with me asking men what they would call the chapters in the unwritten books of their life stories.
It starts, perhaps, with a previous project, Class of ‘76, in which I tell my own story of attempting to find my 34 classmates from my 1976 Chuckery Infant School class photograph. Telling my story of doing that involves telling their stories, their memories. In Class of ‘76, using a simple slide projection trick, I appear to produce those children next to me on stage. School Hall Magic, I wrote at the time, summoning the ghosts of the living.
**
This is an extract from Ghostwriting for Performance: Third Angel's The Lad Lit Project, which was originally a performed paper that I gave at the Writing Encounters Symposium last year, and has been published this month in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice (Vol 2 Issue 1), edited by Claire Hind and Prof Susan Orr.
There's plenty of other great stuff in it, including work by Claire MacDonald, Rita Marcalo and Dutton & Swindells. It's available from Intellect Books.
Thursday, 3 September 2009
A Perfect Circle
A Perfect Circle video stills by Christopher Hall
I wrote about the the shoot for A Perfect Circle back in January. The film launches this month, along with the work of 10 other Sheffield artists, as part of The Sheffield Pavilion at the 11th Istanbul Biennial. Screenings are on 10 - 13 September at the Büyük Hotel.
A Perfect Circle is one of several pieces of work to emerge from Third Angel’s The Distance Project, an exploratory process obsessed with time and with returning; with circles and cycles, with precision. The initial intention was to document the circle-making ritual that Gillian and I perform in 9 Billion Miles From Home, and combine it with a section from the devising process of that show that didn't make the final cut of the show.
Most of our processes will throw up pieces of material like this - often held on to quite late into the process, and then cut when the show is actually being constructed from the material we've made; it just doesn't fit with the rest of the material, or something has to be cut because the show is just going to be too long. The intention will usually be that this material will then find another life in something else (a long list of irritations survived the process of Saved and turned up in a phone box in Hang Up, for example), but in fact often it doesn't. Out of context these sections can be difficult to transplant into another show or process (the lovely opening and closing sequences of a version of Hang Up that seemed to be about kidnapping were cut late into the process, and never found a home anywhere else).
The orphan material from 9 Billion Miles From Home was a description by Gillian of the world as if all she could see of it were the encoded images carried by the Voyager satellites. It was produced in a simple, task-based way - she saw each image one at a time and then described it: I can see... I can see... I can see... But as the Voyager satellites became a less significant element of 9 Billion Miles, this material didn't connect with the ritual we were creating as the show. So it was abandoned.
Thinking about making a digital short of 9 Billion Miles From Home I was interested in using this text, rather than the semi-improvised journey texts that Gillian and I deliver in the show (I think perhaps I was wary of fixing them in a distinct work, born as they are, each time they are delivered, of a particular time and place).
When we got into Sheffield Independent Film's studio we were still working out what the film was - how the ritual would be different to that of the show. Certain logistical issues meant we were already reconsidering the co-operative nature of the task (in the show Gillian and I are attached to each other via a pulley system), and we were wondering how the solo, personal nature of the text worked with the two person task.
At the very last minute (in fact later than that, the cameras were running and Gillian had started work on the circle) I took myself out of the process. I read an interview with Jack Nicholson years ago in which he observed that improvising on camera was fine because if it didn't work, there's always take two. And I've always believed that, I think. But in this case a single take was going to be 40 minutes long and would require quite a lot of re-setting. But it felt right - it suddenly made sense that this film (well, HD video) version of the ritual was more individual - a solo act of observation, creation and... what, yearning?
Needless to say, not all of the text made it into the final cut, but it is a key element. In the edit suite Chris found himself focussing on the detail of the circle making, losing the visuals from the shots of Gillian speaking completely, freeing the sync sound from the action and combining it with elements of David Mitchell's music from the live work. The connection with 9 Billion Miles From Home is clear if you've seen both pieces, but I think A Perfect Circle stands as a new departure, another outcome of The Distance Project.
Third Angel presents
A Perfect Circle
9min 32sec. HD.
A female human being performs a ritual: an attempt to describe a circle and an attempt to describe the world as if all you could see of it were the series of images carried on the Voyager satellites, the two furthest-travelled human-made objects from the Earth.
Devised by Christopher Hall, Alexander Kelly, Gillian Lees and Rachael Walton
Performed by Gillian Lees
Music by David Mitchell
Camera and Edit by Christopher Hall
Production Assistants: Cristabel Horne and Dan Wray
Commissioned by Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum for The Sheffield Pavilion 2009. Supported by Sheffield Hallam University and Leeds Metropolitan University. With thanks to Sheffield Independent Film. Third Angel is regularly funded by Arts Council England and supported by Site Gallery, Sheffield.
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