Psalter Lane, four years on

So, this is the fifth in an ongoing series. Four years ago I was asked to write a piece for the Sheffield Telegraph about the closure of "Psalter Lane" - which many people in Sheffield understand to mean Sheffield Hallam University's Psalter Lane Campus - an art school. Sheffield Hallam were moving their art teaching to be part of their city centre campus.

I was sad to see it close. I had attended Psalter Lane as an MA film student, and then did a few visiting lectures there once Third Angel was set up. But I knew it mainly from going to degree shows there - an annual cultural highlight in Sheffield. I was brought up around Walsall College of Art as both my parents taught there, and so I have an ingrained affection for self contained art colleges/campuses. And I live in this area of Sheffield. I felt I was qualified to write something. So I did. I said I was sad to see it close.

And every summer since I've done this. You can see previous entries, including the Sheffield Telegraph article, by clicking here.

This year I chose the one overcast morning of an otherwise sunny week to take my camera with me on my walk to work. As you'll see, there's a planning application in. Perhaps next year, it will look different. But whatever they build, I'll miss the art school that was here, now that it's gone.

Emergency Drinking Water

This month I've been making a show with MA students at Leeds Met University. I have a (very) part time salaried post at Leeds Met, but this project was very much like the "visiting artist" models we deliver in Universities across the country. We make shows with groups of up to 30 students - treating them as much as possible, within the educational framework, as we would treat fellow devisors in our other projects. The difference, of course, being that rarely do we get to work with a cast of that size.

Emergency Drinking Water, which we presented last week, was closest to a normal Third Angel devising process - if there is such a thing - partly because it was a team of just eight devisor-performers.

We re-mount the show in Leeds in September - here's what Version 1 looked like.

EMERGENCY DRINKING WATER

Devised & Performed by

Jane Bellamy

Hannah Butterfield

Louise Hill

Kimberly Maud

Rochnee Mehta

Debbie Newton

Lisa-Jane Pennington

Tina Torrington

Devised & Directed by

Alexander Kelly

Lighting Design &

Technical Management

Matt Sykes-Hooban

Rehearsal photographs by 

Kiran Mehta / Leeds Metropolitan University

The Distance Between Us

I've just received my physical copy of Performance Research: On Foot. It's lovely to get partly because we've got a set of Artists' Pages in it, and although I'd been sent a link to the online version of it, the pdf doesn't quite do it justice, as it is designed to be held as two 2-page spreads.

I saw the call for the On Foot edition quite late, but knew it was something we'd like to contribute to. This is what I pitched to them:

In Third Angel's performance piece 9 Billion Miles from Home, artists Gillian Lees and Alexander Kelly were attached to each other via a pulley system that meant that for one of them to move forward, the other had to move back. 

Barefoot and supporting one another they created a perfect circle of talcum powder, so positioned that although they could both reach the centre spot of the circle, they could not do so at the same time. Once each in the performance they stepped into the circle, leaving (in Alex's case) four perfect foot prints or (in Gillian's case) evidence of ten minutes of barefoot running on the spot. This was a shamanic performance obsessed with travel, return, cycles and distance – distance measured in miles, metres, footsteps, days, years. 

Ten years earlier, in Third Angel's Saved, Rachael Walton stepped backwards through a floor covering of epsom salts in a performance in which the audience were required to remove their shoes in order to feel the salt shift under their feet. Rachael left perfect footprints in the salt, before stepping back and erasing them. 

For The Distance Between Us, Alex and Gillian revisit 9 Billion Miles from Home to discuss the task of performing it, and the physical and emotional memory it has left them with, and Rachael revisits the solo task of walking backwards for anything up to 5 hours at a time, erasing traces of her passing. The paper takes the form of an illustrated conversation, discussing how, in performance, Alex and Gillian would watch, not each other's faces as they travelled about the stage, but each other's feet. How they learned the measure of each other's steps. They compare footstep awareness with Rachael: when to place a heel or toe first; how to measure the transfer of weight. The blisters, scars left by, and the cold of, the different floors they trod on as the work toured. The footprints left in the talcum powder and the salts.

The On Foot edition of Performance Research is edited by Nicolas Whybrow and Carl Lavery. Nicolas asked me what "an illustrated conversation" might entail. I said I wasn't actually sure, but that I liked the sound of it.

Through talking to Gillian and Rachael, the illustrated conversation idea evolved into a kind of performance map, the conversation layout reflecting the performer-journeys taken in the shows.

The Distance Between Us : 9 Billion Miles from Home (detail)

The Distance Between Us : Saved (detail)

It was a really helpful process creating the pages in collaboration with Nicolas and Carl, and I'm pleased with how they've turned out. I am also interested in the process with  both Rachael and Gillian that created them. I wonder if there are more of them to be made.

Performance Research: On Foot (with lovely contributions, too, from Gregg Whelan, Dee Heddon and Stephen Hodge, amongst others) is in shops (and libraries) now. You can subscribe and download individual articles on the Taylor & Francis website, here.

The Story of the Day

Here's the text / notes of what I said as the final summing up / 'story of the day' presentation at the end of the Inspiration Exchange at PSi#18 in Leeds last Saturday. The exchange was open from 9.30am - 6pm, with this happening in the last 20 minutes.

I started off writing 36 cards, thinking that six rows of six cards would work aesthetically. But when I got the table, I realised that five rows of seven worked better. 35 cards. So I had to choose one card not to include.

I chose not to include one that I thought the most general piece of inspiration: SOCIETY DREAMING. This is something that Douglas Rushkoff said on a panel I heard at the Edinburgh TV Festival many years ago. He explained the idea that culture and art are society's way of dreaming, its way of working things out. He talked about the experiments that have been done in which human beings are stopped from dreaming, being drugged or simply woken up whenever they enter REM / dreamsleep. After a couple of weeks of not being allowed to dream, human beings start to go mad. And you can see a parallel, he explained, when societies aren't allowed to dream; regimes that censor and restrict art eventually start to go mad.

This idea has stayed with me since I heard it. But it seemed, in this context, these easiest card to extract.

And then the Exchange opened and no-one came in. The calm before the storm? I hoped so. I wrote some notes.

For the first hour it's only members of the production team who cross the threshhold - people with furniture and lamps.

Other peope look in, most bearing takeaway cups of coffee. They promise to be back later, or just wish me luck for the day. I enjoy the quiet. I use the time to get a double espresso, eat a banana. Rearrange my furniture. Put the foldaway chairs away into the corner, to make it look like I'm expecting less people. I figure out how to use the remote controls for the air conditioning unit and the dimmable lighting.

I start to write the words that I am reading to you now, 7 hours later.

I think about the way my grandma would just slightly adjust the objects on a worksurface in the kitchen. A small notepad, some keys, a pack of pills. Moving them mere millimetres. As a teenager I found it irritating. (Or did I, really? Did I actually find it strange, and did I find things that I didn't understand, irritating? Or did the door it opened onto the loneliness of old age frighten me? Was my irritation just a defence mechanism?) But now I understand, I think. Just to make sure everything is just so.

I watch people walk past the doorway to my self-contained and well signposted room, without looking in. I wonder if I should have asked to be out in the main hall... Occassionally people slow slightly, look in and smile at me. But they don't stop.

I realise that I am expecting someone to interupt me writing these notes, so I can break off and tell a story. To them. To you.

I think about my children.

And then someone comes in and

I swap A PERFECT CIRCLE

for THE PERFORMANCE THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN

a story of sticking at it.

I swap "WHEN WILL THE WEDDING TAKE PLACE?"

for LOCKSMITH: "I WANNA SEE YOUR WORK."

I swap PEOPLE WITH CLIPBOARDS

for ANCESTRAL FRUSTRATION

Then I swap THE PERFORMANCE THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN

for HOW-TO DEMONSTRATIONS

I swap NOT KNOWING WHAT TO THINK ABOUT POLE DANCING

for DO I DRAW THE ACTORS OR DO I DRAW WHAT I SAW?

I swap THE HOUSING BENEFIT CLAIM SYSTEM

for THE HUMAN INSTINCT TO CREATE IMAGINARY MINDS

I swap THE IDEA OF A RETRONYM

for THE ICONS OF FORGOTTEN TECHNOLOGY

I swap 23 POSTCARDS FROM AMERICA, FROM MY DAD

for HIRE AN APOLOGY

I swap AN ESCAPED LUNATIC ON CANNOCK CHASE

for this:

I swap EMPTY BENCHES

for THE FLOOR CARRYING YOU

I swap THE PATENT NUMBER OF A UFO

for ARE CONKERS BABY WOOD?

At some point I say to someone, "Pick one that sounds good." And then I think what a stupid thing to say that is. I think about the disappointment - for them and for me - when someone picks the "wrong" card, and gets a story that they're not that interested in. Particularly if this is a story I've told to someone before and they've really found a personal connection to it, and then this time it doesn't mean much.

I swap HURRY SICKNESS

for SQUIRRELS

in general, and then I immediately swap SQUIRRELS

for A SQUIRREL

in particular.

I swap THE INSIDE OF A SAXOPHONE

for LETTING GIRLS BE

I swap THE EMPTY SOAP PACKET

for QUICK SHAVE

I swap A SWIMMING POOL AT NIGHT

for PROFESSOR MOAN ALOT

I swap "IF IN DOUBT, TAKE IT OUT, IF YOU CAN'T WIN, LEAVE IT IN."

for A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR

I swap AN UNBOOKABLE PIECE OF KIT

for MR. BEEFHEART

I swap AN 84 YEAR OLD AUNT WHO SMOKES 20 A DAY

for RIGOROUS HERBERT

I swap DESIRE PATHS

for I CAN DO THAT

I swap A SQUIRREL

for FU CHU CHOO-CHOO

I swap THE FLOOR CARRYING YOU

for FLAMENCO INCOGNITO
and then swap FLAMENCO INCOGNITO
for 1 - 2 - 3 PALOMA BLANCA

I swap PROFESSOR MOAN ALOT

for MEETING MY FIRST HUSBAND 25 YEARS LATER

We refine the rules and figure out what happens if I'm offered a story first,
and so I am swapped 1967

for A BOTTLE OF MARBLES

I swap RIGOROUS HERBERT

for LIFE BEGINS AT 40...

I swap SOMETHING MY MOM SAID TO ME WHEN I WAS 19

for CUT A STORY SHORT

I swap FU CHU CHOO-CHOO

for A TREE IN SIBERIA

I swap THE ROADS THE BUS DOESN'T TURN DOWN

for TRAVELLING PADLOCKS & A JAR OF KEYS

And then we were out of time.