Third Angel Blog

Packing the Van

2012-01-29T21:14:00.000Z

Why tell these stories now? Why tell these stories again?

Stock-piling books, DVDs, comics, articles and music to take with me on tour. Stuff that's been on the to-read/watch list for months, some stuff bought especially. Touring luxuries.

Getting a bit done on the next two shows - moving them forward, conceptually and logistically, to a point where they can rest for a month until the latter half of the tour releases the head-space to pick them up again.

Checking the words are still there. Or rather, the stories. Discovering, as usual, on talking-to-myself walks to work that the words are still there - but the numbers aren't. Going back to the text to check dates and quantities.

Going back, too, to the wider research from making the show. Refilling my head with the stuff that is there in the show as spice and flavour, or (to push a metaphor) as stock, rather than as a main, visible, ingredient.

Planning workshops, talks, screenings and schedules. Getting my hair cut.

Asking myself, why tell these stories again, now? Remembering what first grabbed me about this stuff when Jorge told the first three stories. What made me want to tell these stories and find more of them. Thinking about how this project meant we had to look for bad stories, and the awkward contradiction of feeling pleased when we found them.

The What I Heard About The World project has been active in various forms, on various platforms, for almost two years now. That's pretty good service. Why tell these stories again?

I remember being sent a link to a story about a Korean couple who let their three-month old baby die because they were spending so much time playing an online game called Prius, in which they had to look after a (fantasy, magical) child. I thought simultaneously, (as a maker) brilliant, and (as a parent, as a person)...just...well, I don't know. Shock, disgust, disbelief. Anger, in fact.

I've been remembering that this contradiction is one of the things the show is about. It's about how we use stories. How we fit them in to our own agenda. At about the same time a similarly horrific and tragic story occurred in Sheffield - but not with the game element, and not, obviously, taking place in Korea. It seemed to me at the time - and a more recent internet search seems to confirm this - that whilst the Sheffield story was in the papers, it wasn't as widely reported as the story of the Korean family.

We like a good story. We like to repeat a great story - and to be brutal, the Korean baby and the computer game is a great story - partly because of the game, and partly because of where it happened. Korea. And as Chris says in the show,

...the thing about Korea, is, it's a very long way away. I mean, not if you live in Japan, but it's a long way away from the UK.

And, as Chris wrote to me just now, of course comparatively few of us have been to Korea. But we know it's part of our world. It has to exist, because we've heard of it. It's indisputably out there. We can watch its news. We can youtube its game shows and buy its exports. But for most of us, the place itself is just a series of facts, of anecdotes, without the balancing force of direct experience.

I'm thinking about how, on one level, these stories of stand-ins are metaphors; their subject matter reflects the job they do as we carry them in our heads - as a stand-in for knowledge. As a substitute for understanding what it's actually like. Not that all the stories are as dark as the Korean story by any means - some of the stories in the show are ridiculous to the point of being almost unbelievable. A series of fakes, carefully crafted to let us believe we see the real thing.

They're a great stories. They suit our purposes. So we'll tell them again.

Back on tour

2012-01-12T13:18:00.001Z

In February and March we're on the road with both Story Map and What I Heard About The World, along with a programme of talks, workshops and related events. A simple tour list is up on the News Page of the website, but I thought it might be useful/interesting for some readers to go into a bit more detail about what's happening where, when and why. To tell the story of the tour, as it were.

We now think of the two pieces as a companion pieces (more on that in later blog post, I think), and certainly the plan is that in each performance of What I Heard About The World we will include a one different story that we have found through the Story Map research.

photo: Craig Fleming

We kick off with what feels like a combined two-week North-East residency at ARC and Northern Stage, who between them are hosting the complete range of the project plus some other associated projects.

ARC, Stockton on Tees
Story Map: Tuesday 31 January, 10am – 10pm
You can follow it, and take part, online.
What I Heard About The World: Thursday 2 February, 7.30pm

NORTHERN STAGE, Newcastle Upon Tyne
What I Heard About The World: Wed 8 – Fri 10 February, 8.15pm
Plus:
Weds 8: post-show mini-Playing With Time video screening in Stage 3 – we'll be introducing three short films from the Third Angel repertoire.
Thurs 9, 7.15pm: pre-show talk Stories We Didn't Tell. Created for the Society of Cartographers' Summer School and the NASN's Dialogues series, Stories We Didn't Tell explores the development of the show and the three way collaboration between Third Angel, mala voadora and Worldmapper.org. It includes, unsurprisingly, a few of the stories we don't tell in the show, and considers why we don't tell them. (This talk is available for other venues – get in touch).
Also on Thurs 9: post-show talk with the creative team.

Then What I Heard About The World is on tour across England, starting in the North West:

AXIS ARTS CENTRE, Crewe:
Thursday 16 February, 7.30pm
Having worked a lot with the Axis team in Alsager, this will be our frst vsit to the new space in Crewe. We'll be showing two new video pieces, inspired by the research process, again in collaboration with Worldmapper.org, in the foyer gallery space, too.

ZION ARTS CENTRE, Manchester:
Friday 17 February, 7.30pm
We are delighted to be the opening event of the new WordofWarning programme in Manchester – come and celebrate!

And then we head South, with a welcome return visit to be part of the fantastic season at:

THE JUNCTION, Cambridge:
Monday 20 February, 8pm

Followed by two weeks at the brilliant:

SOHO THEATRE, London:
Weds 22 Feb – Sat 3 March (not Sun 26), 7.45pm
plus Saturday Matinees at 3.30pm
It's our first visit to Soho, and we're really excited to be taking the work there - come along, tell your friends! We'll be running a number of workshops whilst we're in London – get in touch if you'd like us to run one with you.

Also, during the run at Soho, Chris and Hannah Jane Walker will be presenting The Oh F*ck Moment, as a late show on Friday and Saturday evenings at 9.45pm. It's a great show, so why not come down and see both...

After that, What I Heard About The World continues, heading to the South West, the South, and, er, the Middle (ish). Trace this last two weeks of the tour on the map... We start with one of our favourite venues:

EXETER PHOENIX
Tuesday 6 March, 8pm

And then a run of really exciting venues that are all first time visits for us:

THEATRE ROYAL WINCHESTER,
Thursday 8 March,8pm

THE BREWERY, TOBACCO FACTORY THEATRE, Bristol:
Friday 9 & Sat 10 March, 8.15pm

There might be a show in BEDFORD around about here – check back soon!

What I Heard About The World tour finishes at
THE CORE at CORBY CUBE:
Friday 16 March, 7.30pm

followed by Story Map:
Saturday 17 March, 10am - 10pm

Then to finish off the whole tour, we head to (South) London with Story Map:

THE ALBANY, London:
Saturday 24 March, 10am - 10pm

photo: Hannah Nicklin

So, a bit more about the project:

Both pieces are devised and performed by Jorge Andrade, Alexander Kelly and Chris Thorpe, and created in collaboration with José Capela and Rachael Walton.

In Story Map we are joined by online-documenter/researcher-corroborator-dramaturg Hannah Nicklin, and throughout the project we have been assisted and documented by Lauren Stanley.

All of this has been managed by Hilary Foster for Third Angel and Manuel Poças for mala voadora.

What I Heard About The World

"A theatre piece with two songs: one original, one karaoke."

There's quite a lot on this blog about the process of making the show:

Here's where it all started.

Here's us refining our brief.

Here are some thoughts on the influence of Worldmapper.

Here's the start of Lauren's rehearsal diary.

Here's a bit about the use of drawing in the project.

Story Map

A 12 hour durational research performance.

You can follow Story Map online, as it runs live. Just visit:

http://whatiheardabouttheworld.co.uk

and/or follow me (@AlexanderKelly) on Twitter.

There are some thoughts from me about the 12-hour nature of the performance, here.

Third Angel and mala voadora present

What I Heard About The World & Story Map

A co-production with Sheffield Theatres and Teatro Maria Matos, Lisbon

In association with PAZZ Performing Arts Festival and Worldmapper.org.

Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Off The White

2011-12-31T11:53:00.000Z

I like that feeling. In the pit of your stomach. After you’ve jumped off something. Not just off a chair, or even a wall. Off something too high. Something so high you’re gonna hurt yourself. Unless you hit water.

Walsall Gala Baths. You weren’t allowed to jump off the diving boards. You had to ask permission to even dive off the highest. The White Board. Colour coded (in Jubilee Year). Red – fairly high; Blue – high; White - fucking high. Strict safety measures in place. A dressing room door, wedged across the stairs from The Blue to The White. Marker pen warning: “NO ACCESS TO WHITE BOARD WITHOUT PERMISSION! That includes you, Wilson”.

The pool looked so small from up there. A whistle. Everyone stops and looks up. No pressure. If you dived badly, (belly flop, back flop) it really hurt. But if you got it right, fantastic. But not the same as jumping. Diving tells your body it’s safe. Head first. You know what you’re doing. That stomach-pit panic doesn’t grip.

Winter 1980 (81?), mid-week. Dark outside. Kick out time. Just you and your mates left. Ask the attendant. (Not life guards. Not in the Midlands). Ask the attendant:

- Can I just go off The White?

- Yeah, alright. If you’re quick.

Pad round the pool side. The water is already becoming still. You used to think it would take half an hour for a pool this big to quiet. But look. It’s only moving gently now. As your trot up the rough wet stairs to the side of The Red. Turn left. Steps up. Pulling yourself up by the hand rails. Left. Onto The Blue walkway. Left. Steps. Up. Over the wedged cubicle door. Top board. The White.

Walk to the edge. Toes curl round the hard concrete. Shivering. Pool shifts slowly. One big ripple. Your mates, halfway down the poolside. You sway. Look down. Instinctively, your hands move. They cup your bollocks.

It could really fucking hurt your balls jumping from this high, and there’s that thing you’ve heard about hitting water so hard it pushes your bollocks back up into you body, but that’s probably like that story that if you are in a falling lift you should keep jumping because if you’re in the air when it hits the ground it will reduce the impact and you might not die.

You jump. You drop fast. Your stomach tightens. The feeling starts lower; moves up your body; towards your chest. You count.

One.

Two.

Thr-

The dark blue of the deep end. You don’t quite hit the bottom. Kick legs. Break surface with a shake of your head. Swim to the side. Pull yourself up the cold metal steps. The attendant... laughing.

Showers. Shouting. Changing room. Chip shop.

***

Afterword:

This short story was included as a chapter in the solo performance versions of Words & Pictures. It was also the piece that inspired the title to the performance of Off the White (actually about benches) and also partly Learning to Swim, both pieces I made with Paula Diogo. Reading this lovely piece by Emma Adams reminded me that I had been meaning to post it here for a while. So here it is.

A Christmas Single

2011-12-16T16:47:00.000Z

When I was six, I got a Bionic Man action man for Christmas. I remember that I knew that that was what it was from the size and shape of the box, when it was still wrapped under the tree. I suspect I was very familiar with the dimensions of its packaging from coveting it in toyshops.

My Mom used to let me open one Christmas present on Christmas Eve – probably, I now realise, as a way of diffusing the extreme Christmas morning excitement which would have seen me waking her up at 5am. So I chose the present I knew was my Bionic Man and was overjoyed. I don't remember much else about that Christmas, but I remember he had a red tracksuit and trainers, and some sort of peel-up-able skin on his arm to reveal his bionics.

If you'd asked me at any point in my life what my Favourite Ever Christmas Present was, I would have said that it was that Bionic Man. Mainly because I wanted it so badly, and the massive helping of joy it delivered when I opened it. But I did love it and played with it a lot for the next couple of years.

A few years ago, though, I was lucky enough to get an espresso machine as a joint Christmas and birthday present. And that brings me a little shot (or two) of joy every morning. If I weigh it up, I suspect, the espresso maker has made me even happier, over the years, than my red-tracksuited bionic man.

And then about six months ago I thought I had lost the watch I was given one particular Christmas, and I went a little bit mad until I had found it again - ten minutes later in a pocket in a bag I hadn't noticed before. "Ah," I realised, "it turns out I'm really rather attached to this watch."

Is 'favourite' favourite now, favourite at the time you opened it, or most important over a longer portion of your life?

Last weekend at the Slung Low Christmas Fayre in Leeds, with help of Hannah Nicklin, and last night at the Inbetween Time Christmas Party in Bristol, I asked people what their favourite ever Christmas present was. I asked them to make cards and write about their favourite presents, and took their addresses so they can all receive someone else's favourite ever present in the post.

People were, as people are, really thoughtful; people had, as people do, some great stories. It was a joy to hear and read them. It was planned as a one-off for the Christmas Fayre, so the invitation to Bristol was a nice surprise – and means I can send cards to/from people in different cities. I'd like to do it again. So perhaps this is a mini-performance equivalent of a Christmas single, and we'll re-release it next year.

Compass Inspiration Exchanges

2011-11-29T10:52:00.000Z

Inspiration Exchange at Leeds City Museum, as part of the Compass Live Art Festival, was the longest run of the piece I've done. It was nice to have the time for ideas and stories to develop and evolve. When it hits its stride, Inspiration Exchange becomes a long, rolling conversation, which people join or leave as/when they wish. Ideas are passed along from person to person, sometimes reappearing several stories later. People plan to tell one story, then hear something that sets of a new thought.

Sited in the "old back-to-back terraced house", also used as a story telling space in the Museum, there were a steady stream of visitors throughout the six hours, some in specially to see the Compass events, some just in to look around the museum.

It got pretty busy mid-afternoon, but I think I kept track of all the ideas and stories exchanged:

I swapped "SUNDAY WAS ALWAYS A GOOD DAY"
for SUNDAY, SEVENTH DAY OR FIRST DAY

I swapped A 6B PENCIL
for A CUP OF TEA
I swapped A CUP OF TEA
for CHILD BIRTH & ROONEY
and I swapped CHILD BIRTH & ROONEY
for MARMALADE PIZZA

I swapped A 94 YEAR OLD SMOKER
for A SMOKING RUNNER

I swapped THE HOUSING BENEFIT CLAIM SYSTEM
for BANKERS WANKERS

I swapped TRACING PAPER
for I LIVE IN YOUR HOUSE

I swapped THINGS STICKING UP OUT OF WATER
for THE HEPWORTH SHOULD BE EMPTIED ONCE A YEAR & OPENED TO VISITORS

I swapped TICK-BOXES FOR SCOTTISH & WELSH
for JOURNEY TO JAPAN

I swapped CLIPBOARDERS
for THE GIANT'S CHAIR
and I swapped THE GIANT'S CHAIR
for PIANO IN THE PARK

I swapped A GOING-BACK-TO-THE-WOMB PILL
for GUINEA PIG DUST

I swapped 23 POSTCARDS, FROM AMERICA, FROM MY DAD
for THE HORRIBLE DREAM.

I swapped IF IN DOUBT, TAKE IT OUT, IF YOU CAN'T WIN, KEEP IT IN
for JUGGLING IN JANUARY

I got a drawing of a STOLEN BUGATTI

I swapped EMPTY BENCHES
for THE SUNYATĀ STONE

I swapped BURNING THE TOAST

for PEOPLE I NEVER KNEW

and then, due to a glitch in the system

I swapped BURNING THE TOAST again,

this time for LARGE GROUPS OF MEN

I swapped DEAD JELLY FISH

for THE DEAD CAT
and I swapped THE DEAD CAT
for THE LUCKY SUNFLOWER

I swapped AIR CRASH INVESTIGATION

for BUILDINGS AS TIME TRAVELLERS

I swapped THREE PINTS OF GUINNESS

for FLEETWOOD MAC

and I swapped FLEETWOOD MAC

for A TALE OF TWO ROVERS

I swapped AN ESCAPED LUNATIC IN CANNOCK CHASE
for COB WALL

I swapped THE INSIDE OF A SAXOPHONE
for THE SIMPLEST ANSWER

I swapped "TAKE IT AWAY, BOYS"

for DEEP END RANCH

I swapped THE VOYAGER SPACECRAFT

for SPACE JOURNEY

and I swapped SPACE JOURNEY

for KICKING THE BASSET

I swapped SPEECH BALLOONS IN PARTICULAR, COMIC BOOKS IN GENERAL

for DANNY GREGORY - 'EVERYDAY MATTERS'.

I swapped 300 CAMERAS A DAY

for THE SANDMAN
and I swapped THE SANDMAN
for DINOSAUR WEE

I swapped 36 DAYS LOOKING FOR STUFF IN THE FRIDGE

for SOUL SISTAH!

Generating Conversation

2011-11-23T20:56:00.009Z

Karen approaches us in the bar, weeks later. She says, ‘I’ve been wondering, why did I tell you the story I told you?’

Making space and finding time. Sitting opposite. Playing conversation - talking and listening.

Over the years, alongside our end-on seated-audience theatre work, Third Angel has returned to the exploration of a mode of performance built on conversation, or interview, with individual audience members. Performance in as much as we know what’s going to happen and they don’t; or, at least, we know more about what’s going to happen than they do. We don’t know what they’re going to do or say. We hope that they will do or say more than they would have expected, had we told them in advance, what was going to happen.

Their interaction is what makes the work. It cannot even be properly rehearsed without an audience member sitting opposite. Making the performance involves making the space in which the audience member is allowed - encouraged - to be active, be open, be creative. A space in which they feel comfortable enough to think about things, talk about things that at, say, 10 o’clock that morning, they hadn’t thought about for days, weeks, even years. A space in which, at the end of it, they feel comfortable enough to say of what they have given you, ‘Yes, that’s fine, I’m happy for you to share that with other people.’

Early last year I was invited to speak at a Cafe Scientifique event called Sing to Me Muse - an event exploring inspiration and asking the old question, where do ideas come from? There was a great panel of speakers, and we were asked to give a short presentation and run a workshop activity. Drawn back to our story-exchanging work, I came up with something that combined the two - a way of swapping ideas that had inspired me with things that had inspired the participants.

It seemed to go well, and in Edinburgh it grew into a four-artist plus host, durational event at the brilliant Forest Fringe. What really struck me was that the really simple format worked as as a chat in a cafe and as a team performance in a festival. This year the format has shifted for a couple of other incarnations, running in the breaks of TEDxYork - bookended by mini TED talks, and slipping back into Forest Fringe for the Edgelands flash-conference in August.

Of all the story-exchanging projects we've done, Inspiration Exchange is the most direct, from the descriptive title to the mechanism of performance. It strikes me that in these interactive pieces, that I think of partly as 'conversation generators', the key is to find a clear mechanism, a simple rule, that allows the conversation to happen.

I'm excited that this weekend, as part of Compass Festival of Live Art, I'll be running a six hour Inspiration Exchange in Leeds City Museum. As well as festival and symposium delegates, I hoping there will be an audience who just find me, tucked away in the 'back-to-back terraced house', and who might be interested to stay for a chat.

Time & Space at Bloc Projects

2011-11-21T22:37:00.006Z

We've got a busy weekend coming up, with work on in Sheffield, Leeds and Coxwold in North Yorkshire. More on the latter two will follow, but in Sheffield we're opening Time & Space, a microfestival of film and video work at Bloc Projects and The Rutland Arms.

The programme at Bloc is a changing series of video installations:

Opening night, with bar: Friday 25th November, 6-8pm
plus Saturday & Sunday 26th & 27th, 12-6pm
FLOORS
by Lauren Stanley & Third Angel

Film-maker Lauren Stanley was intern on the rehearsal process for What I Heard About The World last year: researcher, documenter, tech assistant plus video artist. She made several pieces in response to the process, including this piece, capturing the moment just before the doors open before a performance and using Chris Thorpe's opening song. For Time & Space we're presenting Floors, a response to the atmosphere of the rehearsal room, rather than the activity in it. Lauren writes:

Floors was born from a moment of daydreaming. Following the shadows that Alex, Chris and Jorge made as they paced around on the shiny rehearsal room floor, I noticed the patterns and relationships that were forming in that section of What I Heard About the World were reflected by the floor. They moved around each other, but they stood alone and told their stories separately. The floor was a map of the world, but that meant something slightly different to each of them.

Even a map of the world has a point of view, a reflection of the makers’ location, politics and outlook. Floors has come to represent my map, what I really have heard about the world. Many fragments, tones and single beams of light, all linked to the rest but working separately. Each can easily be lost but all affect the result. And it will probably look slightly different to you.

Monday 28th & Tuesday 29th, 12 - 6pm
THE KAROSHI FILMS
Third Angel

Karoshi, a research process taking its name from a Japanese word meaning "death from overwork", fed into a number of Third Angel projects, from Hurrysickness to Presumption. For Time & Space we are gathering together the video pieces it inspired or fed into:

Realtime A man, waiting, in a waiting room, wants to know if you know just how long a minute is?
Alone Together A documentary response to the 50 performer intervention Standing Alone, Standing Together.
Technology A man tries to understand how technology works, how light-clocks work, how a mug works, and explain it to you.
A Perfect Circle A woman performs a ritual of travelling and returning, and tries to describe life on planet earth, as witnessed by the images on the Voyager spacecraft.

Wednesday 30th November, 12 - 6pm
THE TRAVELS FILMS
Christopher Hall & Alexander Kelly

A series of highly manipulated video pieces, originally made in response to Third Angel's Pleasant Land travels, exploring travel - by vehicle, and by foot, long distance and local - across the UK.

We round the microfestival off at The Rutland Arms at 8pm, Thursday 1st December, with the return of PROJECTOR, our curated short film night, featuring The Very Hard Film Quiz:

The Cost of Training

2011-10-18T10:11:00.000+01:00

We learn from doing, from making work. From a desire to make something new, something the audience has not seen or experienced before, something none of us would have made on our own. We challenge ourselves, to have to learn new things about making work each time – about making that particular piece of work. Setting ourselves new problems to solve. And as one project nears fruition there will always be two or three more developing – sometimes born out of the current project, often a response to, or a reaction against, it. Let's do something different this time. Sometimes we will want to develop an idea, continue down a path of exploration. But usually there will be a project coming up where the unspoken intention is to not be able to use the lessons learned so far. To get ourselves in to new trouble.

I've got a short piece in the latest edition of the Journal of Dance and Performance Training. It's a response to the question "What is the Cost of Training?" My bit is in there with some really interesting responses from Dick McCaw, Charlotte Vincent, Jodean Sumner, Konstantinos Thomaides, Marie-Gabrielle Rotie and Peter Petralia.

You can download it here, but given that it is quite expensive for an individual, it's worth checking if your library already subscribes to the print or online edition. And if they don't you, can click the recommend button and see if they'll subscribe for you.

Cape Wrath Storify

2011-09-25T20:18:00.001+01:00

To Cape Wrath

2011-09-20T15:45:00.001+01:00

As I write this I am on a coach from Sheffield to Inverness, on my way to Cape Wrath.

In September 1988, when I was 19 and he was in his early 60s, my grandad went on a trip, on his own, from Walsall in the West Midlands, to Cape Wrath. Though not particularly eventful, the story of this trip has been retold by my family over the years. This is the version of the story that I remember:

My grandad set off from Walsall with the intention of visiting Cape Wrath. My grandfather was Scottish, Glasgow born and bred. But I don’t think he had ever been as far north as Cape Wrath before. He used public transport as far as he could, then hitch-hiked the last bit of the journey.

He got dropped off by a postman who told him he would be back in a couple of hours and could pick him up if he liked. So my Grandad sat on the cliff at Cape Wrath “and looked at the sea and thought about my life.”

The postman picked him up a couple of hours later, and he went home.

There's more to it than that, of course, but that's the basics. I've often thought about this journey, in the years since, and what it must have been like to do it. So this week I'm finding out. I can't do the journey exactly the same way as my grandad did it, but I'm doing it as closely as possible.

And I guess that at some point, I'm interested in talking about it, one way or another. We'll see.

**

UPDATE: More on the actual journey in the next entry.

12 Hours

2011-09-05T21:10:00.000+01:00

The first couple of hours are the least like performance. The quietest. The most like the devising-room game or task from which the show is born. The most like the three (or now four) of us playing the game by ourselves, with the audience dropping in to see how we're doing.

Mornings are more like a working exhibit for people to interact with. I enjoy the atmosphere of this: the phase where we are still finding our rhythm, getting a handle on the acoustics and layout of the space. We're slowest in these early hours, despite the fact that the smaller number of visitors means we actually have more control over the work-rate. We are working the whole time, we just get through less countries than the 17 or 18 an hour we need to. I'm still getting my drawing-fingers loosened up, Chris is still looking to find his two-word-story-title punning-mojo, Jorge still getting into the groove of the randomised-country-selection-system, and how much he should control the pace. There's more discussion, more digression, more discarded drawings.

It's strange to think of it as 'performance' or 'show' during the morning. It's pre-matinee; pre-lunch. Often, when the audience speak to us in the morning, it is individually, telling just one of us a story - at the drawing table, or across the book, or taking Chris aside by the map - rather than telling the whole room, from their seat.

Although we ran early versions of Story Map for three- and six-hour performances, now we know we can just about get through the whole world in 12 hours, that's the timeframe that interests us. That's what gives us morning starts, and I like the different feel the piece has as we progress through the day.

Lunch time, of course, is when it gets busy. Audience members have food and drink with them. We do, too, going cold behind us. We stop thinking about the time, just keeping the cycle of the piece going. When it gets busy we feel the pressure to entertain, to play to the room more, but we enjoy the shift into doing the task for/with the audience. With the people in the room. And we like, of course, the fact that there are more people to tell us stories.

After lunch people drift away, back to work, out to the shops, back home. By half-past two, three o'clock, it's much quieter. We notice the time again. Have a quick break. Get coffee, have a tidy round after the lunchtime rush.

In the afternoon we're more likely to notice people again as they arrive, welcome them. Families. Kids. We have to think more about the telling of some of the stories, avoiding certain details, making the darker material we have gathered into something more like fairystories. Chris is able to find a role for kids in the stories, or a connection with their own experience.

We pass halfway late in the afternoon, and do our first full count, invariably finding that at the halfway point (time) we are not halfway through (countries). We work out the new hourly rate required for the rest of the day. Someone works out how many minutes per country we have. The dilemma is that we don't just want to charge through, ticking-off countries, the point is to gather, and tell, stories. But we (well, certainly I) do want to complete the task, too. (About) 200 countries in 12 hours. So our concentration does shift; we get quicker at moving on to the next country, we keep the momentum going, and the conversation focussed on the stories of replicas and substitutes that we are seeking.

Tea time. More people come and go. More people dropping in after work. There's a change in the feel of the audience, too. They seem happier to sit and watch, now, only talking when they are certain they have a story to contribute. Perhaps because this is the more normal time for "watching a show", but in early evening, they seem more traditionally "audience"-like.

With two hours to go, the numbers start to build. People who were with us earlier in the day come back. They want to know what they've missed. We get more requests for stories, more stories offered for the countries that are still unclaimed. The show itself is busier now, more theatrical. There's pressure on Chris to tell more stories, whilst Jorge starts to drive us faster, taking over and moving us on. I start to get a backlog of drawings to do. We feel the need here to share/gather stories from the biggest audience, whilst also feeling the pressure to hit the target: we have a very clear minutes/country rate to achieve worked out by now.

And then in the last half an hour we find we have all the time we need. We can slow down. I start to worry that we won't fill the last twenty minutes. We're able to take more story requests. We know the last five countries that we have to do, laid out on Jorge's table, and whether we already have stories about them to share. I enjoy the serendipity of this, how the last country always seems appropriate, somehow.

We name the last name: conventional longform, conventional shortform, local longform, local shortform. We place it on the map. We solicit, or tell, a story. We name the last story. Two words. We illustrate the story and stand the last drawing on the map. Sometimes, sometimes we have a couple of minutes to spare.

Naturally I enjoy the fact that it doesn't end here. People gather round the map, ask what a particular drawing means, which title it relates to; they tell us more stories, ask what will happen to the map.

**
Photographs here are of Story Map at Hull Truck Theatre on 1 September 2011 as part of Freedom Festival, by Hannah Nicklin. More photos (along with videos and audioboos of some of the stories) are up at whatiheardabouttheworld.co.uk, which Hannah set up, and on her Flickr pages.

Story Mapping at Hull Truck

2011-08-31T18:16:00.001+01:00

What I Heard About The World and its sister project Story Map are both back out on the road this autumn. We are translating the English and Portuguese version of What I Heard About The World, that tours in Portugal, back in to English this month, and previewing this new version in Leeds on 5 and 6 October, before a more extensive UK tour at the start of next year. We'll also be presenting the dual language version in Porto in November, too.

But this week we re-launch the research for the project with Story Map, running from 10am - 10pm on Thursday 1 September, in the upstairs foyer of Hull Truck Theatre. As ever we'll be mapping the world from memory, placing post-it note countries on the map, deferring to the CIA as to what actually constitutes a country, and collecting stories of fakes, replicas, substitutions and stand-ins. The stories we collect are pinned with a title and an icon, and then re-shared throughout the performance. If you're in Hull, pop in at any time, choose a story or help us fill in one of the gaps by sharing a story with us. Stay for as long or short a time as you wish - it's free.

If you're not in Hull, you can follow the show online, and contribute stories to the map. Chris, Jorge and I will be joined by Hannah Nicklin, who will be documenting the map as it grows throughout the day at whatiheardabouttheworld.co.uk, and on Twitter using the hashtag #whatiheardabouttheworld.

Pills For Modern Living at Edgelands

2011-08-23T12:03:00.001+01:00

edgelands (67 of 76), originally uploaded by hannahnicklin.

Some nice photos of the Edgelands event at Forest Fringe by co-curator Hannah Nicklin up on her Flickr stream. Include pictures of our Inspiration Exchange and the Pills For Modern Living installation along with all the other great stuff that happened...

Third Angel artists in Edinburgh

2011-08-07T22:36:00.001+01:00

Although we're not "doing Edinburgh" in the taking-a-show-for-a-full-week-or-longer sense this year, there's still plenty of Third Angel work and related activity on offer.

We'll be showing our preview of tomorrow's medicine cabinet, the light-box installation Pills For Modern Living with the brilliant Forest Fringe, around the Edgelands event (co-curated by artist, activist, tech-enthusiast and Third Angel board-member, Hannah Nicklin) on 21 August, at which I'll also be running an Inspiration Exchange from 4.30pm. Come along on the 21st and swap something that has inspired you for something that has inspired me.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to mentor The Other Way Works' lovely and intimate Avon Calling. It's on in Edinburgh for just three shows: 23, 24 & 25 August 2011, 7pm (75 mins). There are only 10 places available for each show. It's just £10 (pay in cash on the door) and that includes a glass of fizz! To book your place at the party email Ric Watts on ric [@] ricwatts.com and he'll let you know the secret home location near the Pleasance.

Also, Third Angel artists are showing work in Edinburgh:
Lucy Ellinson is Do-er in Residence at Forest Fringe, making and showing intimate new pieces each day, from 15 - 27 August. Lucy's curated series of One Minute Manifestos were brilliant last year, so I'm excited to see what she does this year. Lucy will be performing in Metis Arts' 3rd Ring Out from 18 - 21st, though the show is on for a full two weeks. More details here. And she'll also be previewing a new piece, Where We Meet, with Chris Goode, which sounds fantastic - more details here.

Chris Thorpe is already up and running in Edinburgh with The Oh Fuck Moment, which he has devised and written with Hannah Jane Walker. It's on as part of the great looking programme at Remarkable Arts, and I'm really looking forward to seeing it later this month.

Gillian Lees is in Edinburgh with Proto-type Theater's Third Person: Bonnie & Clyde Redux. Their last two shows were really lovely, and again, I'm looking forward to checking this new(er) piece out. You'll find them at Gryphon Venues from 22 - 27 August, as part of the British Council Edinburgh Showcase.

Our good friends Action Hero, who we have mentored, off and on, over the last few years, are also part of both the British Council Showcase and Forest Fringe with Watch Me Fall. It's a brave and thrilling piece about stunt men and macho culture, in which Gemma probably performs the most impressive feats. Go see 'em.

And last but not least, James Harrison will be running tech-support for Forest Fringe, notably for Edgelands and Action Hero. Do say hello if you see him. I owe him a bottle of Malbec.

TEDxYork Inspiration Exchange talks

2011-07-31T21:38:00.005+01:00

Here are videos of the two presentations I gave at TEDxYork earlier this month, as detailed previously. These are the two six(-ish)-minute talks that bookended the Inspiration Exchange I ran during the day.

Part One:

Part Two:

Thanks to the Marcus Romer and the Pilot Theatre team for taking such care in getting them up online. The whole day was full of inspirational speakers, and I can really recommend checking all the talks out on the TEDxYork YouTube playlist.

Songmap Sketch

2011-07-21T22:43:00.006+01:00

Songmap sketch1, originally uploaded by third angel.

Going through images from Words & Pictures this evening, I came across this, a scan of an early pencil drawing of how Songmap might work, using the Arab Strap song The First Big Weekend. It's obviously more detailed than the drawing I'm able to do in the performance, when I only have the length of the song to draw the song. It's reminded me that I want to get back to doing more drawing with pencil.

There's more on how the project developed, in this earlier post.

Inspiration Exchange: Phoneboxes

2011-07-12T11:33:00.002+01:00

I was invited by Marcus Romer to present at TEDxYork last week. It was a great and inspiring day, and I was pleased to get a chance to talk about the Phoneboxes, as part of an Inspiration Exchange.

First off, here's a [slightly longer] version of what I said about the phoneboxes.

---

I'm inspired by telephone boxes. Now I know that 'inspired' might seem like a strong word when it comes to something as everyday as phoneboxes, but they intrigue me. They make me feel, well, a bit excited, when I come across one.

And it started here.

01369 870 212

This is Glen Striven in Scotland, on the western shore of Loch Striven. (No doubt you've recognised 01369 as an Argyll and Bute area code.) It's actually the end of the public road - the gates, and some others you can't see, are to private estates. When I took this photograph about 12 years ago, it seemed to me that the main users of the phonebox were the three-man crew of the LNG Lagos, which at that point had been laid-up there for eight years. Chatting to one of the crew, I found out that each morning one of them would take their small motorboat across the loch to check their postbox and make a few calls. They did have a mobilephone on board the Lagos, but this was back when mobile calls were very expensive and they weren't allowed to use it for personal calls. So I took a photo of the phonebox and wrote down the number. I don't know if I imagined I was going to give them a call or something.

Of course, in some ways, it started before this. It started with a phonebox on Glossop Road in Sheffield. One evening I was on a bus: it was dusk, the phonebox was lit up, and there was a man inside. I obviously couldn't hear what he was saying, but in the six or seven seconds it took me to pass him, I could see from his body language, and his hand gestures, that what he was talking about was important.

And it started before that in a phonebox at Nether Edge crossroads in Sheffield. It was a Friday morning, and I was standing inside it, whilst my girlfriend stood outside, watching me make calls, rearranging my weekend plans, making new travel arrangements. Because half an hour earlier I had got a phonecall on our incoming-calls-only-landline in our shared house, 5 minutes walk away, telling me that I needed to go home to the midlands, and that I needed to do it today, to go to the hospital today, in case any later was too late.

And it started before that on Milking Stile Lane, in Lancaster, where I lived as a student. Because we were poor, and our landlord was crap, we didn't have a phone. So we would give out the number of the phonebox outside our front door as our own phone number, thinking that Greg or I, who had the front bedrooms, would hear it ring. But of course we never did, and we would sometimes open the door to slightly bemused knocks from passersby telling us that we had a call. Our friends and family were only sporadically successful in getting though to us, often finding themselves saying, "Yes, I know it's a phonebox, will you please knock at the door of number 1 for me?"

And on a teenage camping trip with my dad, I remember pausing each night on the way back from the showerblock to look at the telephone box, now free of its tea-time queue, lit up and surrounded by insects.

So the interest started in all of those places, but there in Glen Striven, is where the cataloguing started.

0114 270 0008

0207 278 5424

01298 85211

01663 762073

0114 236 0387

PAYPHONE REMOVED

0114 236 1184

0114 236 6550

01369 870245

01904 643310

01298 871395

I like their potential. I like the fact that with the right combination of numbers and enough loose change, you could, potentially, speak to, what, 80% of the world's population?*

And I like the fact that they are located, not by a map, but just by their own set of numbers. On Flickr I just tag them "red" and " phonebox". You can work out where they are from the area codes if you want to. Sometimes people tag them with their location, but I quietly remove such geographical information.

But of course I am also aware that there aren't just any phoneboxes in this collection. None of your modern, flimsy phonebooths. I'm mainly interested in classic K6, red, cast-iron phoneboxes. I like their solidity, their permanence. When I come across a new one, I have a sense that it has been waiting. When I picture them, I often picture them in the rain. Thinking about them this week, I have realised that one of the things I admire about them is their loyalty. They're always there.

So, yes, I'm inspired by telephone boxes.

---

*a bit of research tells me that this was quite a good guess.

---

This talk was the kicking-off point for an Inspiration Exchange, that I ran throughout the rest of the day, in one of the great Pods that are part of The Ron Cooke Hub, where TEDxYork was held.

I swapped Inspiration cards with visitors, and then at the end of the day I reported back on what I had been told.

I swapped:

EMPTY BENCHES for

DOGS WITH SQUASHY FACES

SOMETHING MY MOM SAID TO ME WHEN I WAS 19 YEARS OLD for

A SILENT APPLAUSE

DEAD JELLYFISH for

RACING PIGEONS ON SKYE EDGE

BOTTLES OF MARBLES for
A BOX OF MARBLES

VOYAGER 2 for
PICTURES OF EARTH - WATCHING EARTH FROM THE SPACE STATION

MY GRANDAD SITTING LOOKING AT THE SEA for
"CAN'T GET USED TO LOSING YOU" BY THE BEAT

A SWIMMING POOL AT NIGHT
for
BEYONCE

A VENN DIAGRAM OF ALL MY FRIENDS
for
NEVER TOO OLD TO LEARN

THREE PINTS OF GUINNESS
for
"DON'T ACT POSITIVE FOR MY SAKE, BE POSITIVE FOR YOUR OWN SAKE."

AIR CRASH INVESTIGATION
for
THE MISSING RUG

COMIC BOOKS, INEVITABLY
for
I'VE GOT SOME PIES

Thanks to everyone who came to hang out in the Inspiration Pod, you were brilliant.

Psalter Lane, three years on

2011-06-28T14:09:00.004+01:00

Number four in an ongoing series.

Three years ago I wrote a short piece for the Sheffield Telegraph about the importance to us of the Psalter Lane campus, as it closed down and the provision housed there moved into the city centre.

I still sometimes pass the old campus on my walk to work, so a year later, the proposed redevelopment having fallen through, I posted this.

Last summer, the demolition had begun, and so I posted photos of that.

After the demolition was finished, the old library building stood solitary in the newly levelled grounds. Part of me thought it was a shame that that situation hadn't fallen within the "yearly update" rules I had apparently set myself.

So, almost a year later, it is with mixed feelings that I get to post these. I miss it now it's gone.

Story Map at Transform

2011-06-23T12:32:00.001+01:00

12 hours. 201 countries. 120 stories. Minutes to spare: zero.

We had a great time at Transform at West Yorkshire Playhouse. A really varied audience, including kids for the first time, who we got some nice stories from. One of my favourites was "Waterloo Bear". The girl who told us the story has a friend who is really keen on Paddington Bear - so keen in fact that he has eight Paddingtons. To differentiate them from each other, he has renamed seven of them, but always after a London train station. So one of the bears took his place on the map:

There's a really nice response to the piece, and other Transform work, by Clancy Walker, on the Culture Vultures blog, here.

There are more images of the piece over on our Flickr page, here.

Story Map

2011-06-08T12:10:00.002+01:00

This Saturday we're running Story Map as part of West Yorkshire Playhouse's fantastic Transform season. Story Map started life as one of the research engines for What I Heard About The World, and has been through a number of incarnations, and names, on its way to become a stand-alone piece.

In the early devising process we referred to it simply as 'Map Game', and it was a way of getting existing research material/knowledge out of Jorge, Chris and me: we would set arbitrary journeys around the world, landing at seven or ten countries, and connect stories between them. This evolved into an exercise we could play with other people in the room which we presented as an 'in progress/research performance' - which we called Research Table - with Forest Fringe in Glasgow in Edinburgh. We ran this for two, 3 hour blocks at The Arches, and then calculated that we could probably map the whole world in 12 hours, which is what we attempted at the Forest Cafe last summer - making it with four minutes to spare.

In Edinburgh we worked alphabetically from the CIA World Factbook - agreeing on 201 countries and collecting over 100 stories. When we remounted a smaller, six hour, version at the Society of Cartographer's Summer School in Manchester last September it occurred to us that now we had set the countries on the map in alphabetical order, it would be too easy to do it that way again. So given that we had an audience of mapmakers we decided to make it more difficult for ourselves by choosing the countries 'bingo style'. I say more difficult for 'ourselves' - I mean more difficult for Chris, who's job it is to actually place the countries on the map. The means of representation - every country represented by post-it notes of the same size - are deliberately restrictive, but it was fascinating watching cartographers help Chris to get the Caribbean islands just right.

As noted previously on this blog, the stories we seek in Story Map (and online, via Twitter and Facebook for example) are stories of fakes and replicas - not deceptions, but rather stories of substitutes or stand-ins used knowingly in the everyday. And the stories from Story Map do become part of the theatre piece: if you've seen What I Heard About The World, the Natashas story was given to us at Forest Fringe in Edinburgh by someone who had been on the bus with them, and the Dead Man's Suit story was emailed to us during the run in Manchester.

But Story Map is more than just a research engine for the theatre show - it has grown to become a stand alone element of a multi-platform project; it explores some of the key themes of the project for us. In the theatre piece the idea of mapping is much less obvious, and it was important to us to make a piece of work in which we name every country in its own language.* The theatre piece is not as specifically concerned with the inauthentic, either - it has become about something else, about the impossibility of holding the world in our heads, and the tools we use to nevertheless attempt to do so.

Story Map attempts to gather stories and to label them with a two word title, pin them to the map with a single image - and to get the names and colours right on the map. It's about the task of cataloguing the stories, and telling them, and re-telling them. It's about the stories, whatever our agenda, that you want to tell us.

So, if you're near Leeds this weekend, or online, please join us:

Third Angel and mala voadora present

Story Map: What I Heard About The World

Transform Festival, West Yorkshire Playhouse

11am - 11pm, Saturday 11 June 2011

Twitter hashtags: #whatiheardabouttheworld #wyptransform

Devised and performed by Jorge Andrade, Alexander Kelly & Chris Thorpe in collaboration with José Capela & Rachael Walton

Story Map is a companion piece to the theatre show What I Heard About The World, co-produced by Sheffield Theatres and Teatro Maria Matos, in association with PAZZ Festival and Worldmapper.org.

Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Third Angel is Regularly Funded by Arts Council England, Yorkshire.

There's loads of other great stuff on as part of Transform, including Melanie Wilson's Simple Girl this week, Geraldine Pilgrim's epic Handbag on the same day as us, and Chris Goode's remarkable new project, Open House next week. Well worth checking out.

*Of course, what we actually do is name the countries in English and then what the CIA says is their local language.

People on Fire, People in Love

2011-06-01T12:57:00.003+01:00

People on Fire, People In Love from Third Angel on Vimeo.

To celebrate the return of What I Heard About The World this week, here is People on Fire, People in Love.

Our intern whilst we were making the show last year was film maker Lauren Stanley, and as well as working as researcher and rehearsal-documenter, Lauren also made a number of pieces of her own work in response to the show and the process.

This is the first of them - People on Fire, People in Love - a short film of the opening song of the show, written and sung by Chris Thorpe, filmed during the run at Sheffield Theatres in October 2010. I like the way Lauren actually dwells on the moments just before the audience come in.

Lauren's new blog is here: Organised Dust.

So you'd like a placement? Please do your homework.

2011-05-23T12:42:00.001+01:00

Hello, this is Hilary, General Manager, dropping in to ~~get a few things off my chest~~ pass on some tips about maximising your chances of getting help, information or a placement out of us.

It's dissertation season, which always triggers a little rush of emails from students asking us for information, and some after work experience. We do our best to help students as much as possible, but we're a tiny, overworked company and despite our best intentions just can't meet everyone's requests by return. So, I thought I'd put together a 'how to get our attention' guide to asking us for something. In a spirit of friendly helpfulness, you understand, rather than a moan. Mostly.

1. Re: [blank]
No subject line and from an address my computer doesn't recognise? Chances are it'll go to my junk folder and never see the light of day. Game over. Go on, stick 'dissertation question' or 'Do you have any placement opportunities?' in there. Doesn't take a second.

2. Dear Sir/Madam/to whom it may concern
If you're genuinely keen to work with us or get that killer quote for your essay, you need to show us that. Addressing an email as if it's a circular from a stationery company just makes me sigh and delete. A quick rummage around our website will reveal the names of company members, so if you don't use a name it just looks lazy, and frankly a bit rude.

3. Here's my dissertation title. Please could you write it for me?
OK, that's probably a bit unfair, but only a bit. Very big or very general questions ("how do you make your work/how do you run a company?") that need 6000 words or more to answer will be filed in the 'to do' folder, and may never be seen again. When we're up to our eyes in tour booking or funding applications or in the rehearsal room (as we nearly always are) this is what we are able to respond to: succinct, focused questions that go beyond what's already available on our FAQ page (go to About and scroll right), an idea of context, and a ballpark deadline by which you need us to reply. Then if we can't help we can at least let you know in a timely fashion. Or help another way, with a 10 minute phone interview for instance.

4. I'll do anything
If it's work experience or a professional placement you're after, we need to know exactly what you're hoping for. We've all done placements or worked for free, and we know how depressing it can be when it doesn't live up to expectations, so you need to be just as clear about what you need to gain from your time with us, so we can be clear about what we can or can't help with. It's no good saying "I'll be happy to just sweep the stage", because a) I won't believe you and b) no stage needs that much sweeping. Yes, of course a willingness to do the small rubbish jobs is an admirable (essential?) quality - we do them ourselves every day - but tell us what you really want. Do you want to sit in on rehearsals? Learn how to market a show? See life on the road? This is important stuff, because we do have 'fallow' periods when there's nothing much to see at Third Angel HQ except a couple of us typing. And I'm guessing that's not what most people have in mind when they imagine a placement at a performance company.

5. I'm great in Panto
What's the last show you saw that left a big impression? What are you reading that excites you? If you've seen our work, tell us what you thought. If you haven't, tell us what has drawn you to us. If you have a CV full of workshops with contemporary artists and site-specific shows then that clearly demonstrates your interest in our kind of work. If your CV is more panto and Shakespeare, you'll need to tell us more about why you've approached us (rather than the RSC), otherwise it looks like you've just fired off an email to everyone under 'theatre' on yell.com.

6. And finally
The little things count. If there are five people after a placement, the one who has sent a well-written, enthusiastic email that's been proofread, spell-checked and shows they've done their homework on the company, automatically goes to the top of my 'reply to' list. If five people are trying to get information to feed into an essay at the same time, the one who demonstrates some knowledge of our work, and passion for their subject, will be up there too.

All of which is a very long way of saying "do your research and check your grammar". But it works. Really. And demonstrating initiative goes even further. Consider the gauntlet thrown...

First person to spot a typo gets a pack of Pills for Modern Living postcards.

Making Tea

2011-05-16T23:24:00.002+01:00

Photo by Stuart Boulton, courtesy of the Northern Echo

There's a longer post to be written - soon I hope - about the mentoring work we've been doing with other artists and companies recently. But this isn't that post. This is more like an additional programme note to Tea is an Evening Meal, by Faye Draper, and me, currently touring as a collaboration between Northern Stage and Third Angel.

If you've seen any of a particular strand of Third Angel's work over the years, or if you've been to a workshop we've run, you will have detected a passing interest with furniture. That furniture might be domestic (it often is) or might be street furniture, and it speaks of a fascination with the spaces in which people meet, spend time, relate to each other.

Last year Sheffield-based, Lancashire-born artist Faye Draper was commissioned to create a piece of work as one of forty 'conversations about Northerness' to celebrate Northern Stage's fortieth birthday. The commission included money for "a mentor", and Faye approached me; when she told me the idea, I immediately understood why.

A couple of years ago I ran a three day workshop as part of the fantastic A:CT (Access: Contemporary Theatre) programme at Leeds Met Gallery & Studio Theatre. As a way of creating a trajectory from the Friday evening to the Sunday afternoon, I worked out a plan that all of the exercises would be linked to a table in some way. Faye was one of the participants on that workshop, and so thought that I might be interested in working with her on her show staged around a large dining table, with her, the performer, sitting in amongst the audience at the table.

She wanted to talk about the way her family meet at dining tables, and had already begun gathering stories from other people, too, with the aim of exploring regional differences and identity. It felt like rich territory to me and I was keen to be involved. Now, this might be one of those things that is much more interesting to those of us involved in making the work than anyone coming to see it, but it is significant to me that we deliberately avoided defining in advance what my role would be. We called it "mentor" for contract purposes, but Faye and I agreed we would just let it be quite organic.

The project had the money for me to be involved half-time, and Third Angel was able to support Faye with rehearsal space, allowing us to keep that half time flexible and responsive. Somedays I would be in quite a lot, watching material, suggesting things to tryout, giving feedback; other days I'd be in for coffee and a chat in the morning and then leave her to it. A combination of co-devisor, director, mentor and (of no-little significance when making a piece on your own) company.

Tea is an Evening Meal is undoubtedly Faye's show, and I am proud to have helped her to realise it. But I also think that if you know our work, then you'll find a flavour of Third Angel in there - or at least see why Faye felt we were the right company to approach to help her make this piece.

After a successful run at Northern Stage last year we came back to the piece a couple of months ago in preparation to tour it. It is often telling when you come to revive a piece after a break from it - in really basic terms the question is, "Is it as good as we remember it?" We were really pleased that we felt just as strongly about it, and I was really eager to see with an audience again. I always find it difficult re-rehearsing work that has been in front of an audience previously, it feels restricted to not have that live energy to play off. This was even more the case with Tea, as the audience of just thirteen sit in for various characters in the show.

But it was also really enjoyable to do a bit of fine tuning: to formalise the physical score ever so slightly, clarify the rules of "casting" the audience - or their chairs - in to the different stories, and to update Faye's perspective on the content almost a year later - a year in which she has had a baby, and so has a new relationship to meal times and, particularly, cups of tea. One day in Sheffield we were joined by Erica Whyman and Mark Calvert, Artistic Director and Creative Associate, respectively, of Northern Stage. It was a real joy to discuss the work with such invested and talented collaborators, although three directors to one performer was maybe a bit much. Directors. Yes, this time my role has been more clearly directorial, because that's what the project needed now.

Opening the show at ARC, Stockton, it was great to play to two such different audiences (Faye is usually doing two shows a day on the tour). The first was clearly a group of people who largely knew what to expect. The second was a mainly female audience who had come along because they liked the sound of it but had no idea what to expect. It's always useful to remember that no matter how welcoming a performance is, nor how gently the audience involvement presents itself, sitting at a table for a performance, where they can be seen by other people, and are talked "about" occasionally by the performer, is a massive step for some audience members. A few of them were obviously out of their comfort zone by some distance at the start of the show, but tea, biscuits and a very friendly show meant that they had a good time, and ended up participating more actively than they were "required" to by the end.

Faye is still collecting stories and opinions about tea (the drink) and tea (the meal) - feel free to join the discussion here. And a full list of tour dates is here.

The First Domino

2011-04-15T22:40:00.002+01:00

This will probably be shorter and less in depth than the relationship deserves, but it feels important to post something today.

Back in 1996, when Rachael and I were planning our first tour, of The Killing Show, we compiled a list of venues we wanted to approach. Within that list we had a set of 10 venues that to us, from the touring schedules of other companies, we felt were the most important in the country for presenting the sort of work we wanted to make. That top ten included Leeds Met Gallery and Studio Theatre, and Manchester's greenroom. The Killing Show was actually much trickier to tour than we had anticipated, but the following year we were at both Leeds Met Studio and greenroom with Experiment Zero.

Experiment Zero at greenroom, as part of the Jungehunde festival, was the worst gig we've ever had. Major technical problems on just the second night of the tour threw us, and we struggled in the first half of the show to make it work. We got through it though, followed by a post-show discussion and then "no holds barred" feedback session called kaffeeklatch the next day. It was a fantastically important experience.

Two years later they had us back with the next touring show Hang Up, then the year after with Where From Here...and, well, it's all here on the greenroom united website. Last year we had a fantastic gig there as part of the 10th Anniversary tour of Class of '76. We were hoping to take What I Heard About The World there this October.

On March 30th this year, Arts Council England announced its new National Portfolio of funded companies and organisations. Third Angel is not part of it, and neither is Leeds Met Gallery and Studio Theatre, nor is greenroom (along with another 200 Regularly Funded Organisations). Nationally there was relief, celebration, dismay, anger; and then it went quiet for a bit. Those of us contemplating the transition from "RFO" status to, well, whatever is next, have all been frantically busy addressing the future, asking for further explanation of the decision, and carrying on with all the activity that we had planned for this month.

And then today, greenroom announced that it will close at the end of May. They are funded for the rest of this financial year, but of course wrapping up an organisation of that size costs money. So no autumn season.

The thing about greenroom is that the people there, all of them - management, technical team, box office and bar staff - care about the work they show. They have helped give a start to so many companies and artists, and their closing will have a huge knock-on effect on the contemporary theatre and live art sectors. Yes, we've lost a gig in the autumn, but how many artists won't get support next year, the year after, the year after?

Anyway.

My favourite greenroom memory? At a Method Lab showcase (I think) in about 2001, performance poet Shamshad Khan gave a beautiful solo performance, made in collaboration with Mark Whitelaw (I think). Meditating on the loss of friends, she observed that life is like a party, and it's just that "some people leave early to beat the traffic."

National Portfolio Funding Statement

2011-03-30T11:30:00.000+01:00

Third Angel found out this morning that we have been unsuccessful in our application for National Portfolio Funding from Arts Council England. We are, obviously, extremely disappointed, as we were very excited about our planned programme of theatre, live art, digital and video work and creative learning projects.

We will now work with our partners to find ways of delivering a reduced version of that programme.

Alexander Kelly

Co-Artistic Director

30 March 2011

A bit cross, actually

2011-03-15T16:18:00.001Z

I've just overheard, via Twitter, someone at a conference telling artists and/or the creative industries not to whinge about the impending cuts because, remember, necessity fosters creativity. Now, he might have been paraphrased inaccurately, or misquoted, but the truth is I've heard this so much recently that it hit a nerve for me in a rather clumsy-dentist kind of way. I was just about to start a rant on Twitter in response, but then realised that I would have to paraphrase the argument, clumsily, so much that it would not make sense.

So, here I am.

Do some people really think that artists are unaware that a lack of funding doesn't mean they can't be creative? How do they think artists get started? For the first few years of their careers most artists work for nothing. The biggest subsidisers of the arts are artists. And later into - probably throughout, in fact - their careers, most artists will do work they don't get paid for.

Rest assured - there is plenty of necessity in the creative process. Our imaginations always outstrip our budgets. We would all rather have more time on pretty much everything we do, more money to spend on materials, facilities, space. Great art comes from ideas and from craft. Both require time. Early in our careers artists are willing, and able, to put in lots of unpaid time - because we want to. Don't get me wrong - we really want to - being an artist is a great occupation. And an important one; but let's not get into the hospitals and schools argument here, suffice it to say I want to live in a world with free healthcare, free education and art - and I don't believe it's an either/or choice.

But another reason that we put a lot of hours (weeks, months) in for free is because we have the ambition that when we get into our 30s and 40s, and maybe have families, we will actually be able make a living making art. I got asked once, "So, is the goal to get onto TV?" No, the goal is to carry on doing it - just a bit more comfortably.

"Comfortably." The enemy of creativity? No. It doesn't help me make a show to be worrying about paying the rent for the home my children live in. It helps my creativity to know I've actually only got two weeks left to make the show, and I have a formal device and some text that I like individually but that don't seem to work together; that helps my creativity if I have time to think about it and work on it. That problem does not help me, though, if I am having to work another job at the same time as making a show.

When I wrote the post last year about VAT on art contributing more to the economy than the arts receive in subsidy, a few people told me that we shouldn't be fighting that fight - that we shouldn't recognise the argument. Art's job isn't to create income for the government or society. But I think that it is not so binary. I think the arguments are intertwined.

I believe art is essential. Culture is the way we communicate, the way we dream, the way we argue, as a society. Therefore I believe we should support it. Some art - because of its form - finds it easier to be self sustaining - because it is reproducible, for example. Some art doesn't. But all of it is important. Some art (and yes, I'm thinking specifically about live performance now, but it applies to other forms, too) becomes unaffordable to a large portion of the potential audience if the full cost of making and showing it (and telling people it is on) is passed on to the audience. That's not about whether it's any good or not. Live performance that is created for an audience of just a couple of hundred people a night, or fifty people a night, is not going to be affordable if the cost is divided between 200 or 50 each night. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be being made. Quite the opposite in fact.

And so I want to live in a society where the funding of art from government is greater than the amount of tax that art gives back to the state. It's a principal, and for me, the two arguments are intertwined. Culture is essential. So it should be funded. Cut funding to it, and you cut it. There will be less of the art, less of the culture, that needs subsidy, in the next four years, because we, as a society, are giving it less money. So artists, with years of experience, expertise and insight, will stop being artists. Some younger artists who would have gone on to be great artists, to have created great work, will stop making art before we see those great pieces.

And I can't help but think that these cuts are being made by, and because of, people who can very comfortably afford non-subsidised culture. People who will not experience the damage they have done.

Rant, written in haste: over.
Crisis: just beginning.

Pip Pip

2011-03-07T10:42:00.001Z

For World Book Night Site Gallery hosted Ex Libris, the first in a series of 'Exchange Dinners', curated by Site's new Director Laura Sillars and Tim Etchells, and hosted by P.J.Taste, who run the Site Canteen. Those of us attending were invited to donate a book to a new library at Site - the first volume of which is Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game, donated by Site's Patron, Jarvis Cocker.

I donated my well thumbed copy of Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, by Jay Griffiths. Pip Pip was recommended to me by good friend of Third Angel, Karen Smith, whilst we were engaged in the Karoshi research process (that fed into Hurrysickness, Realtime and 9 Billion Miles From Home amongst others). Particularly following on from reading James Gleick's Faster, Pip Pip had a profound effect on the way I think about time, not just in my work.

For the event we were asked why we were donating the book. That's easy. I said:

It has helped me understand stuff, think about stuff I hadn't thought about before, and articulated stuff I've known but not been able to explain.

It's a book not to be read at a sitting. A book instead to be savoured, dipped in to, revisited. And it is beautifully written.

We were also asked to quote a couple of favourite sentences. Normally what I would have done is go to my notebook of the time, and find a couple of the many quotes I remember transcribing into it.

But not long after I had finished reading Pip Pip I had my bag stolen in a bar in London, containing a just-filled notebook, and a new one, 20 pages or so filled - so I lost a lot of my notes from my Karoshi reading and thinking. Which I did plenty of moaning about at the time, so I'm not getting in to that here.

But when I took it down from the shelf I found my well-thumbed copy of Pip Pip had got three page corners folded down - so I just took that as my lead. These are passages that leapt out at me from those marked pages:

Although time varied between the west and east of the country, train timetables needed a uniform time; so London Time was decreed in 1840 to be that standard. The Great Western Railway printed its timetables accordingly, introducing London Time at its stations. Plymouth and Exeter hated this expression of the capital's political dominance and refused to accept it for years. London Time finally became law in 1880. The clock at Bristol Corn Exchange has three hands; an hour hand and two minute hands because they register both Bristol and London time, Bristol eleven minutes behind GMT. [p 148]

And whose natural state was iridescent disorder? Who were even more unpunctual than the poor? Who by nature were living in a state of such disgraceful enchantment that they thought the hour of now the only possible time? Who – unforgivably – insisted on seeing the purpose of life to be not work but play? [p 158]

But the important part is not perhaps the discovery but the desire to test people for such things. And the question is if society had already used such tests, who would have run the risk of permission refused? [p 247]

Now I've donated that copy, rest assured that I will be buying another.

The whole event was a great evening, suggesting exciting times ahead at Site. Whilst we were eating, the librarians were studiously cataloguing the donations, which are now available to readers.

Notes on Twitterbug

2011-03-01T21:39:00.000Z

Last Sunday I was in Stoke for DATFest, to host the live presentation of Twitterbug. These are some initial thoughts on the process and outcomes of the project.

Although this was the last day of Twitterbug, it wasn't intended as a culmination of it. It was one output of a 'multi-genre, multi-platform performance writing project' (as I described it in a tweet). We didn't necessarily understand that that was what it was, at the start, and that was one of the great things about the project, set up by Catherine Edwards – it was an opportunity to play and explore.

I've heard it reported that the guys who invented Twitter have said, “it was like we put the bat and ball in the room, and the users invented baseball.” This is a really nice analogy I think, although it's maybe more like one of those games played by kids down the park – in different parks all over the country – that is somewhere between baseball and cricket and the exact rules and conventions depend on where you're playing it.

Twitterbug felt like a miniature of this. The project introduced writer/performers Jarrod Cooke, Eve Steele and Danielle Henry to Twitter and other social media platforms under the guidance of Hannah Nicklin, and then we all got to ask: Well, what can we do with this? What opportunities for character, narrative, performance, art, intervention, does this give us?

Jarrod, Eve and Danielle's brief was to create a character/persona/avatar and spend two weeks exploring that character's situation/attitude/narrative on Twitter and at least one other platform. Then, at the end of the two weeks, to present a short, script-in-hand presentation of that character. During the two weeks, Catherine and I threw in extra daily tasks, to create formal connections between them, and to give 'what if' discovery opportunities – ask at least 6 questions, prepare for an evening out and report back, relate a conversation.

Some of the earlier discussions and questions are blogged about in the last entry here, and by Catherine, here, and Hannah, here. Here are a few more questions from my notebook:

Who do we follow on Twitter and why? I follow interesting characters. I follow good company. I don't follow people for narrative – but I might deliberately follow a story unfolding via a hashtag – using Twitter for the news.
Can we have “unpleasant” characters on Twitter? Following someone you don't like is very different to, for example, spending time with Begbie in Trainspotting.
Who is listening? People using twitter like the inner monologue in detective fiction. The outsider/observer.
Walking is our base unit of travel – this has come up a lot in our discussions. Allows for observation, as does public transport. Both allow for 'live' tweeting.
Do the characters know each other in real life? On Twitter? How much can/should they respond to each other?
How much can/should they respond to other people online – some of whom will not know they are “fictional”?
How plot driven? Life's narrative isn't structured.
Locating character/playing with form/more cryptic?/genre influences?
How serious? How playful? How silly?

What was really interesting to me was that Eve, Danielle and Jarrod, all starting from very similar experience of social networking and responding to the same brief, were able to use social media differently and then present written pieces that were formally different to each other, and worked with/against their online lives differently, too. Unsurprisingly, Catherine and I felt a compulsion to play along, and I found myself using the opportunity in a different but related way, too.

The two-weeks 'live window' was a comparatively short time to develop a work online, and we found that the characters did become more plot driven towards the final weekend – the brief also included taking the characters to Stoke at the same time as the performers, who were charged to turn the location settings 'on' on their tweets.

Danielle's character was the most fictional: @Honey_henry, a honey-trapper, cynical, world weary – a contemporary take on the private detective archetype. She advertises her services online, and tweets observations on human relationships, perhaps as a way of dealing with any compromise she feels about her job. Danielle's live presentation, the most poetic and stylised of the three, recounted @Honey_henry's feelings on the occasion that her status quo is challenged – the night she falls for one of her marks - and the consequences. So the present-tense of @Honey_henry's live presentation took place on a number of occasions in the proceeding two weeks.

Jarrod's character, @zombiejarrod, lived Jarrod's own life, as if he were a member of the formerly living. Played comparatively straight, @zombiejarrod, a very nice guy by all accounts, was also looking for a date to a wedding in Stoke. Jarrod's presentation found his zombie-self standing outside the church, stood up by his date - an opportunity to retell his character's story, putting in more detail and background than we got from following him on Twitter. The text was therefore positioned at a specific point in the timeline of the previous two weeks – in the 5 minutes leading up to the sending of a tweet hashtagged #worsttimestobestoodup, on the afternoon of the last Saturday.

Eve's character, @_evka_ was the most real world of the three – a slightly reframed version of her own life, focussing in on one way of responding to that situation. The actions in the real world (going on protests, for example) were all done by Eve and @_evka_ simultaneously. It was only in the final two days that @_evka_'s timeline became fictional, as she deliberately didn't collect her kids from her ex-husband on the Saturday morning (preventing him from going on holiday) and went to stay in a hotel in Stoke. As some of @_evka_'s followers didn't necessarily know that she was a character, Eve was keen to make it clear that she wasn't abandoning her kids indefinitely, just having a weekend away to recharge her single-mum batteries. Eve's text for @_evka_ was a series of video messages sent to her kids and their dad over the weekend, which stood alone, but could also be fitted into her online narrative if you'd been following that.

I'm interested in how these characters each felt like they were referencing another genre, whilst still exploring what social media could do for them. I noticed that the avatar I created to try things out alongside performers, @stagcaptain, started as a fairly conceptual way of exploring ideas about routine and ritual, and quickly evolved into a Lad-Lit short story – a genre I am fairly familiar with.

Over the two weeks up to last weekend, the online characters had largely been in the same place as their writer/performers. At the time of the presentation this was clearly not the case, so I asked them, live, where, in their online timeline, their three characters 'were now'.

@Honey_henry was still holed up in her unexpected love-nest. @Zombiejarrod was on a train back to London. @_evka_ had just finished sending her final video message from the cafe of the Museum we were in, and was about to get the train home to Manchester, to pick up her kids...

Beyond that, I don't know if those particular characters will continue online, but I'm pretty sure that this initial exploration has sown the seeds of future projects for some of us.

Twitterbug

2011-02-16T11:36:00.002Z

A couple of weeks ago I was approached by Catherine Edwards, who we've worked with a couple of times before at the Birmingham Rep and Script, about a project exploring the possibilities of theatre/performance/story-telling and social networking (in general) and Twitter (in particular).

Catherine had set the project up partly in response to the RSC/Mudlark's Such Tweet Sorrow project and the discussion it provoked. I had dipped in to Such Tweet Sorrow, but my thinking about it had been provoked mainly by Hannah Nicklin's blog post about it (which you can read here). Catherine was asking me to come on board in an advisor/director figure, and I was pleased to hear that Hannah was advising on the project, too.

We would be working with three writer performers, Danielle Henry, Eve Steele and Jarrod Cooke, to explore performance writing/presence on Twitter and other social media platforms. I wasn't sure that 'director' was a helpful job description in the context of the project, but was happy to join in as facilitator/collaborating artist, using Twitter as I do, in my role at Third Angel. I had been really struck, recently by Dan Rebellato's groundbreaking use of Twitter during the Raoul Moat story, and very interested in Daniel Bye's discussion of this area on his blog. (It is exciting to learn that Dan and Dan will be collaborating on a Twitter project for Pilot Theatre, too).

So we gathered in Manchester last week to begin exploring the possibilities opened up to writer/performers by social networking, for the telling of stories. You can read more about the background to the project and the start of the process on Catherine's blog here.

The brief for the project is a two week online exploration of character/persona, narrative and interaction on social networking sites, leading up to a live reading/presentation in response to that exploration at the DAT Fest in Stoke. We had no specific formal outcome set for us, which is very exciting, as it allows the writer/performers to really explore their personal responses and interests.

I don't want to say much more, really, as we're now just at the start of the online exploration. But our questions are around the development of character, how much characters can interact with other people online, how narrative can emerge from the day-to-day use of social networking, and where we can place characters on the spectrum between real and fictional.

So if you would like to join us on our explorations, then please follow some or all of:
Twitter.com/zombiejarrod
Twitter.com/_evka_
Twitter.com/Honey_henry
Twitter.com/stagcaptain

You don't have to be on Twitter to see what they're saying - just click on any of the above links to see what they have been tweeting recently, and follow links to their other online platforms. But signing up to Twitter is also easy - just click on one of the names and follow the Sign Up link. And if you're already on Twitter, well, you already know what to do.

**

UPDATE (20 Feb 2011): Hannah has posted a really interesting blog entry about her thoughts on the start of the Twitterbug process on her site, here.

Performance Education

2011-02-05T20:54:00.001Z

Earlier this week I was lucky enough to be at a Valedictory Lecture at Leeds Met University by Professor Noel Witts. Noel has been instrumental in setting up the Performing Arts provision, which is led by Teresa Brayshaw, at Leeds Met - but that's only the most recent in a very long list of achievements. To explain Professor Witt's importance to the world of contemporary performance education would take a much longer blogpost - or in fact, a book.

I first met Noel when we were both on the selection panel for the New Works Festival in Leicester in the late 1990s. What impressed me then, and still does, is that despite (or, in fact, because of) his extensive experience, what he's most interested in is what you think - what you've seen recently, what you thought of it, what you're making, why you're making it. It was entirely typical that in his own Valedictory Lecture, he gave about half of his floor time over to showcasing performance by his colleagues and students at Leeds Met - from first year undergraduate to Principal Lecturer.

I am lucky enough to benefit from Noel's experience at both Third Angel, where he is on our Board, and at Leeds Met where I am an Associate (very part time) Senior Lecturer. Noel's lecture was in part a riposte to Simon Jenkins' attack on Universities in The Guardian last year, and in preparation for the lecture he asked some of us to share a few thoughts on the importance of Performing Arts being present in Higher Education.

I was flattered that he included my brief response (alongside that of Oliver Bray and Teresa Brayshaw) verbatim. And as this week I also started making a new piece with second year Art Event Performance students at Leeds Met, it feels appropriate to post them here.

It's important that the performing arts are in Higher Education, the way we deliver them [at Leeds Met] anyway, because the provision is better than being professional. At least better than starting out on your own. In a three year BA degree you get to make, what, 18 shows/projects, with over 30 different collaborators, and taught/directed/led/mentored by 10, 12 different practitioners and artists.

You wouldn't get that environment if you just became a self employed artist 'straight from school'. In fact, you wouldn't get such an environment until much later in your career, if you were lucky. So the environment we provide is actually better than the profession in some ways - better than vocational.

And an educational institution, particularly a University, should reflect the society it is part of, and, surely, try to be better than it. And where does a society do much of its thinking, discussing, dreaming? How does it try to understand itself? Through its culture. So a University should be home to those voices.

There is, of course, a much bigger discussion to be had about this, but for now, I just wanted to mark Noel's Valedictory lecture - and say: Thank you, Professor.

One Minute Manifesto

2010-12-31T20:39:00.002Z

Back in August at the wonderful Forest Fringe, the marvellous Lucy Ellinson curated a series of One Minute Manifestos - three 60 second texts every day, delivered to the audience gathered for one of that evening's performances. Delivered from halfway up the stairs, they were timed strictly and you were stopped on 60 seconds exactly. They were both fun and terrifying to do, and it was a great project. Mine was posted on the Forest Fringe blog at the time, and I meant to post it here, too. But, in the end, New Year's Eve feels like the right time.

**

This is a true story.

Two friends stand admiring something.

I’m not actually sure what they are admiring. I think that it is a building – a Gothic Cathedral, stone arches, buttresses and towers soaring.

But it could be a bridge. I’m picturing Clifton Suspension Bridge, though it could be the Forth Road Bridge.

Perhaps it is a machine, or an engine. I know that one of the friends likes vehicles.

It could equally be a painting, maybe something by Pollock, or Picasso’s Guernica or anything by Paula Rego. Or a sculpture – perhaps the figures on Crosby beach.

Let’s say that it is a building. And they are admiring it.

The first friend says, “It’s amazing, isn’t it, to think that this was built by ordinary people.”

“Yes, but,” says the second friend, “everything is done by ordinary people.”

**

Working Drawings

2010-12-07T11:07:00.005Z

If you've seen What I Heard About The World, you'll have seen me, or Jorge and me (depending on which version you saw) draw a picture of a donkey, and then turn it into a zebra.

I/we do this live each night. We know we have to modify the drawing of the donkey to become a zebra, because that's what they do at Gaza Zoo, so we draw the donkey from scratch as well. Other drawings in the show are redrawn afresh in advance of each performance (the paper plane) or are reused each night (a lifesize flat daddy and a set of haircuts). But it feels right to draw the donkey live.

This connects to the Research Table performance that is part of the whole What I Heard About The World project, in which we draw icons for all of the stories we gather throughout the piece. Drawing the donkey is much easier of course, as I know what I'm going to draw, and I've now had a lot of practice.

During the run in Sheffield we were invited to contribute some work to the exhibition Working Drawings, which has just opened at the Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery. Pam Bowman, the curator, was interested in us representing how we use drawing in the work, but also as part of the process for projects that don't necessarily feature drawing by the time they meet an audience.

In the end we're showing a selection of finished work and documentation. We were asked, naturally, to provide an artist's statement about the work. I asked how long it should be. Pam said, "As long as it needs to be - you know, there's more context needed for your work. I mean, why do you draw live in front of an audience?"

This is something that has come up in discussion with a few audience members, so I've been thinking about it this last week or so. I'm not sure our artist's statement fully answers that question, but it certainly explores our use of drawing. Here it is.

Third Angel
Drawing Projects

Third Angel is an internationally renowned touring performance company based in Sheffield. We make work that connects the territories of theatre, live art, film & video, photography, installation and digital media.

The work is devised by the artists working on each project, led by Artistic Directors Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton. The devising process is one of discovering and developing the form and content of the work, and drawing is one of the tools we naturally use.

Drawing is, unsurprisingly, used to develop early ideas, work things out, and to share thoughts: how the space might work, what a performer relationship might look like, how something might be constructed. But it is also used as part of the aesthetic and action of some projects. We’d rather use a hand drawn straight line than a ruled one. We would (usually) rather use a traced map or diagram than a photocopied one. We would (usually) rather use handwriting than projected type. If an image or text needs to be big, we would (often) rather draw it small and blow it up – to see the imperfections that make the line unique.

And drawing is one of the tasks we have been found ourselves returning to in a number of our live performance projects, something to do in front of the audience, rather than something to be prepared earlier. The work is full of narrative, character, fiction, mixed in with autobiography and factual research. The mode of presentation utilises text – character dialogue, personal narrative and explanation – along with the performance of tasks. Real actions are part of the performance: carrying all of the furniture required on from the wings; balancing your own weight against your fellow performer’s through a pulley system, whilst creating a perfect, three metre circle of talcum powder on the floor.

Sometimes this live drawing is of diagrams and maps. Sometimes it is illustration. Often it has a restriction placed on it – a simple time limit, or the fact that it has to be done with eyes closed. Restrictions that might seem to say, Don’t worry, of course the drawing won’t be very good in these conditions, when of course, we include the drawing, and the restrictions, because in fact we believe the opposite.

For Working Drawings we are showing a number of pieces:

Mixtape: Songmap (2010)
Video piece / documentation of live performance. 7 mins.
Music: The First Big Weekend by Arab Strap.
Performance devised and performed by Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton.
Filmmaker: Christopher Hall.

The brief, for Unlimited Theatre’s Mixtape project, was to create stage action to accompany a favourite song. We didn’t want to tell a different story to the one in a chosen song, and we didn’t want to act it out. We talked about cataloguing and mapping. Originally the drawing was going to be done much bigger, on a wall, by both of us. But actually our presence, along with the view of our backs, was not helpful. We’d used the drawing table for writing ‘chapter titles’ in the show The Lad Lit Project (2005), but the devising process for that piece had involved a lot more drawing. So we changed the scale of the Songmap drawing and found we had this.

Pleasant Land – Lightbox maps (2003)
Hand drawn maps with text and photographic images.
Commissioned by Leeds Met Gallery & Studio Theatre and Shooting Live Artists.
www.pleasantland.org

It began with the Census. There wasn't a 'Scottish', 'Welsh' or 'English' box to tick. Only 'British' or 'Irish'. People in and from Scotland and Wales wanted their own boxes. We noticed that Scottish and Welsh friends referred to themselves as, surprise, Scottish and Welsh.

Between April 2003 and March 2004 we travelled around England, meeting people, asking them about their own Englands and asking what Englishness is these days. Every month we sent digital postcards from our travels. In October 2003 Leeds Met University Gallery hosted a Gallery installation and performance, responding to this travelling research and the responses to Pleasant Land Online.

We’d been keeping diaries and taking photographs. We had planned our routes, but then been distracted and diverted. Or just got lost. In trying to work out, retrospectively, exactly where we had been, we began tracing our route from the road atlas. We became infatuated with these new maps that charted a very selective version of England – the England we had travelled through. It felt important that the lines of the map should remain hand-drawn, and the text be in handwriting, to recognise the personal, partial, nature of the record.

We asked people if they knew the difference between England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Often, they didn't. We asked ourselves what our England was, what we liked about our country, what we didn't? We wondered if other people would recognise Our England, or we, theirs.

Presumption (2006)
In association with Sheffield Theatres.
Performers: Lucy Ellinson & Chris Thorpe
Directors & Designers: Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton.
Performance photographs by Mark Cohen.

A bare stage. Bare, that is, except for the white lines marking out the (sometimes multiple) placements of a domestic environment. Furniture. Objects. Stuff. A table, six chairs. Precariously carried, precisely placed. Begin the scene, post-dinner party. Guest have gone. Stop. More furniture required.

Presumption is a show about love – love after the initial thrill of passion has gone. Everyday, what shall we have for dinner, love. The performers attempt to enact scenes from the lives of a couple, but continually come up against the obstacle of missing furniture or set, which they have to carry on from the wings. The positions that the furniture will occupy is marked out on to the floor in (hand drawn) white chalk paint. Somewhere in between a (1:1 scale) floor plan and crime scene.

Parts For Machines That Do Things (2008)
A co-production with Sheffield Theatres.
Devised by Alexander Kelly, Jeremy Killick, Gillian Lees & Chris Thorpe.

A show about aircrash investigation, about cause and effect. The performers piece together the narrative through extracts of text – monologue and dialogue – whilst also constructing, on camera, model-kit passenger airplanes.

The three projection screens were treated as a triptych, frames in which images were constructed as if they were drawings – sometimes explanatory diagrams, sometimes more abstract imagery.

What I Heard About The World – Research Table (2010)
A collaboration with mala voadora, originally presented with Forest Fringe.
Devised & Performed by Jorge Andrade, Alexander Kelly & Chris Thorpe.
Photographs by Isa Maubach.

A durational research performance that gathers, and re-tells, stories from the audience. True stories of fakes, replicas, stand-ins and substitutes. The world is mapped out, alphabetically, using post-it notes over the course of 12 hours. We attempt to collect a story for each country from the audience, or from our own memories. Each story is then labelled with a two word title, and illustrated with a hand-drawn icon to stand on the map.

What I Heard About The World (2010)
A co-production with mala voadora, Sheffield Theatres and Teatro Maria Matos, in association with PAZZ Festival and Worldmapper.org.
Devised & Performed by Jorge Andrade, Alexander Kelly & Chris Thorpe,
in collaboration with José Capela & Rachael Walton.
Rehearsal photographs by Clive Egginton.
Show photographs by Craig Fleming.
Plane photograph by Alexander Kelly.

A theatre performance intertwining stories gathered from the Research Table durational performance and other sources. The live drawing technology from Songmap was in the rehearsal process for some time, particularly to represent the specificity, subjectivity and fallibility of maps. As we moved away from maps to focus on the stories we had gathered, the drawing remained, but as physical objects – as stand-ins – for real things, with one drawing done live to tell the story of donkeys in Gaza zoo being painted to look like zebras.

The ‘prepared’ drawings play with the scale of representation: a life-size ‘flat daddy’ is blown up from a small illustration; life-size haircuts are drawn actual size; a hijacked passenger airplane is drawn in miniature 3D.

**
www.thirdangel.co.uk

Third Angel is Regularly Funded by Arts Council England, Yorkshire. All of the projects presented here were also supported by funds from the National Lottery via Arts Council England.

Testing the Hypothesis (v4)

2010-11-17T06:02:00.026Z

This is a version of a talk I gave a few times earlier this year, originally for Hybrid - now the Northern Arts and Science Network - and then at the University of Huddersfield's Research Festival and at Leeds Met University. Some elements of this talk have appeared on this blog before, or in other talks, or even in the shows discussed, so please forgive any repetition.

"As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organization of 147 member states who represent almost all of the human inhabitants of the planet earth, I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of the immense universe that surrounds us and it is with humility and hope that we take this step." Kurt Waldheim

It starts in the mid 1990s when I am at film school, studying editing and art direction. I hear, somewhere, about the Voyager Interstellar Mission and the Golden Record. Two space probes each carrying a gramophone record, and accompanying needle, bearing messages from the people of Earth, in many languages, to whoever, to whichever extra-terrestrial intelligence, might find it.

The record also carries 116 encoded images of life on Earth - in the 1970s - as selected by Carl Sagan and his team at NASA. The record is enclosed in a circular golden case, on the front of which are a series of diagrams and maps, including instructions as to how to decode the images on the record.

To enable users to understand that they are decoding the images correctly, the first image is this, a perfect circle:

I find out that there is a book about the Golden Record, by Carl Sagan, with the beautiful name, Murmurs of Earth. It is out of print, so I go to Sheffield City Library to try to find it. The librarian has to go down into the basement to find it for me which definitely means that it is Reference Only, and I’m not allowed to take it home. I flick through it, as I don’t have much time, and then photocopy two pages – the diagrams on the cover of the case of Golden Record itself, and the message from Kurt Waldheim.

I take the photocopies back to college and stick them up on the wall of my workspace, where they become invisible through familiarity.

**

In 1999 Third Angel was approached by German company Drei Wolken about collaborating on a show for the Transeuropa Festival. By way of introducing themselves they sent us a translation of the text of their most recent show, The Long Distance Piece. Amongst a variety of evocative explanations and statistics, there is a section about Voyager 2, and it’s journey away from Earth.

I thought: "I would like to make a show about the Voyager space probes."

And then we carried on making our show about phone boxes, Hang Up.

Juliet Ellis in Hang Up. Photo by Rob Hardy

Hang Up is a show set in four replica red telephone boxes. Six weeks in to the eight week making process we were stuck. We had two shows. We had the start and end of a great show about kidnapping, with the performers bound and gagged trying to escape from phone boxes, and then the performers trying to bind and gag themselves and lock themselves away. In phone boxes.

We also had a lot of material that was more about conversation rituals, phone boxes as venues for illicit encounters, the opportunity to disguise who you are. Our phone boxes had miniature infra-red videocameras built in them, connected to projection screens above each box, but at this point we were also spending a lot of time on stage outside the boxes.

John Rowley in Hang Up.

We didn’t know what the show was. One lunch time someone asked me why we were making a show about phone boxes. I said:

"It’s because when I pass a phonebox at night, when it is lit up, and there’s someone in it, particularly if you’re passing in a car or a bus, that fleeting glimpse makes me feel…something. Something hard to pin down. The person in that phonebox could be anyone, could be talking to anyone in the world, about anything. They could be pretending to be anyone. But I’ll never know – I just have an image, a few seconds of movement and body language and the way they are dressed to make a guess about. It’s about all of that possibility contained in a phonebox."

"So," someone said, "we should never come out of the phoneboxes then, in the show."

We went back into the rehearsal room that afternoon and compiled a list of all the material we had, in an order, and the performers' instruction was to perform that material without ever leaving their individual phoneboxes. If the material didn’t work restricted to the booths, it was out.

And that afternoon, albeit in broad strokes, we made the show. We saw what fitted, and what didn’t. We understood what the show is, what the task of it is. From that point on we were able to see where the gaps were, and what material needed to be found.

In 2000 Third Angel made Class of ’76, a show in which I stand up and talk about what I found out when I set out to try to find the other 34 children from my infant school photograph, producing their photographic images in the air next to me, one at a time. School hall magic, I wrote at the time, summoning the ghosts of the living.

Early on in the process we invited a few people in to see some ideas for the work. After watching the material, which included several digressions, formally and thematically, from the task of talking about my class mates, Claire Marshall, indicating the task of producing the image of each child next to me and talking about them, said to us: “Trust that. That’s what your show is.”

**

In 2002 I made a piece with 18 students in Scarborough called Of Course It’s A Journey, in which we explored themes of scale, distance, absence, travelling home, doing things apart and doing things together. It included a group text, inspired by Drei Wolken’s The Long Distance Piece, and the NASA website, that charted the history of Voyager 2’s journey through the solar system. This text included a line which told you, as an audience member, how far Voyager 2 was from Earth on the day that you heard it.

Abigail Davies and Rachael Walton in Leave No Trace.

In 2002, whilst we were making the show Leave No Trace, I read the book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick. Gleick’s first book, Chaos, was about the genesis of Chaos theory, and on the cover there was a quote from Douglas Adams, something like “I read this and felt like someone had found the light switch”. When I read Faster, I felt like someone had found the light switch.

As with all projects, the process of making Leave No Trace had its own unique challenges. The show is about a woman who suffers from a fugue – a mental condition where you lose your memory and then travel, away, but are not alarmed by your lack of memory. It’s difficult to research because the cases of fugues are impossible to document as they are happening. People only really remember the moments before the fugues, and the moments coming out of them.

The show is a conversation between Alice, the woman who experienced the fugue, and another woman, who may or may not be her therapist. It took us three versions of the show to understand that what the show is a conversation, in real-time, between Alice’s original personality and the fugue personality, at the moment she hands back control of the body to Alice. It might seem strange, or disingenuous, now, but it was really a case of us realising who the second character is, as we re-wrote and re-rehearsed for the third version of the show – which sadly never got performed in the UK.

All three versions of the show included a section we called 'Hurrysickness', in which, drawing on Faster, Alice lists all of the feelings of time pressure she had been experiencing up to the point of her mind flipping its safety switch and her leaving the life she knew.

This short speech of Alice’s was actually taken from a longer text, also referred to as 'Hurrysickness', which was actually pretty much me explaining aspects of the book, Faster, that meant the most to me.

**

Jerry Killick in Realtime. Video still by Rob Hardy/Christopher Hall.

In 2004 we began working with three psychologists, Dr Peter Totterdell and Christine Sprigg of the Institute of Work Psychology in Sheffield, and Dr David Sheffield, then at Staffordshire University, on a research project called Karoshi. Karoshi took its name from the Japanese word meaning ‘death from overwork’, and aimed to explore the psychological and physiological effects of time pressure. In tandem with the research project we were commissioned to make two pieces for the exhibition Wonderful: Visions of the Near Future, by Arnolfini in Bristol: a video piece and a performance lecture.

Partly in response to timetables and scheduling, we decided to make the video piece before working with the psychologists, and using it as a way of kick-starting the process with them – a way of starting the conversation. We set out to make a video of the Hurrysickness monologue that I wrote as a theatre text, with Rachael and I in various appropriate real world locations. But this idea reminded us too much of that Fast Show sketch (Brilliant!), and Rachael took the text off me saying she’d “like to have a go at it.”

She came back with an entirely re-written text, now called Realtime, and said “you’re not in this anymore, and neither am I.” We cast our regular collaborator Jerry Killick as a man in a waiting room. He addresses the camera, talking to the audience, as if in a theatre. But the film plays with the fact that on screen you can manipulate time, slow action down, pause it, rewind it. It does things you can’t do live. That’s what this piece is, Rachael has understood, it’s a film.

We showed the film to Peter, Christine and David, and began a multistranded exploration process that threw up the possibility of many different projects. We were quickly struck by how, despite the so-called art-science divide, we actually all talked in a very similar way about making work. We fell in love, a little bit, with the precision with which “our” scientists talked about their work.

For example, they don't talk about being tired. They talk about cognitive fatigue. I think you are much more likely to get a way with taking the day off work if you phone in with cognitive fatigue one morning, rather than saying you're a bit tired. They don't talk about keeping a diary. They talk about time-sampling. When they get unexpected results in an experiment they don't say something's gone wrong, they say: "the data isn't behaving."

During these conversations it struck me that devising a show has a lot in common with the way scientists approach experiments – testing an hypothesis, trying to prove it wrong.

When devising work we are continually asking ourselves, is this what the show is? Or, is this what the show is? No. Not quite. Okay, change that. Change this. So, is this what the show is? Closer.

We talk about finding out what the task of the show is. Defining, testing, rebuilding, trying again. Figuring it out. Making discoveries.

**

Hurrysickness became a performance lecture, with barely any trace of the original monologue I wrote, inspired of course by our work with the three psychologists. A mapping of a territory; a reporting back. The show has ‘experiments’ in it – ad hoc surveys of data gathered from the audience. It culminates in us suggesting to the audience that in order to ease their own hurry sickness, they begin to live a lunar day, instead of a solar day, to give themselves an extra hour [well, technically speaking, an extra 52 minutes] a day to fit everything in. We demonstrate how the astronomy of this works using a melon and a lemon on sticks.

But during the Karoshi research process we also planned a much bigger show, a piece that was to be at once an art project and an experiment. But that bigger idea never arrived, and instead the Karoshi research into time fed in to many of the projects that followed:

In Standing Alone, Standing Together, we attempted to slow down the public passing through the avenue in Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery on a Saturday afternoon, with 50 identically dressed performers occupying the space.

[You can watch a short video of Standing Alone, Standing Together here.]

Lucy Ellinson in Presumption. Photo by Mark Cohen.

Presumption is a theatre piece in which the two performers have to build their own set in order to carry on with the scene they are presenting. It is a show about love – not romantic, thrill of passion love, but domestic, what shall we have for tea love. In its final third, the show becomes obsessed with the future, how every hour of a relationship is less significant than the one before because it is a smaller proportion of it… How the first hour of a relationship is the relationship in its entirety, but an hour 7 years in is less than 0.02% of it. The show becomes distressed with the thought that we spend, apparently, 36 days of our lives looking for stuff in the fridge, and that there will come a point, though we might not know it, when one of us is going to die soon, and leave the other one alone, and we will have little more than a month left together and I will have spent more time than that, in my life, looking for things in the fucking fridge.

This section of the show often gets a laugh at that pay off, which initially struck me as strange, because the thought terrifies me. But maybe that’s why it’s funny.

**

Meanwhile, I still harboured a desire to “make a show about the Voyager space probes”.

Whilst touring the one-man show The Lad Lit Project, on my own in a white van, across what felt like the entirety of the UK, I used my Voyager text in a piece for Three Minute Wonders in Bristol with Alex Bradley, that I called simply Distance, and at a BAC lunchtime scratch in Edinburgh that I call The Distance Project. In this version I combined the Voyager 2 text with an improvised description of how I would travel from the spot I am standing on back to the place I was born. The juxtaposition of the spiralling journey into the solar system and into the future, and the more mundane journey by public transport seemed to work somehow. Someone told me afterwards that it made the bus ride to Bloxwich Maternity Home seem epic.

Although I was determined that The Distance Project wasn’t to be a performance lecture, I did imagine that it was the next one-man show. But as soon as Rachael and I began work on it, preparing for a work-in-progress showing at Leeds Met Studio, she got up and started doing stuff. Performing. In the show. And it seemed perfectly natural. Because the Voyagers carry messages from the human race. I understood one of the things that the show is: a show to be performed by a male and female human being.

From 2005 to 2007, the making of The Distance Project is deliberately part-time and extended, with several showings and try outs of material. We continually feel like we have some of the material, but not the form.

- we represent the Sun with melon, and the Earth, to scale, with a pepper corn 78 ft away.

- we read the Voyager text remotely, by walkie talkie.

- we describe more journeys by public transport.

- we change the title to 9 Billion Miles from Home.

- we create a field of beautifully lit papier-mâché spheres, but we’re are confused as to whether these are stars or planets.

- we fill the spheres with rice and rock salt, that is allowed to pour out over the stage.

- we record the binary message from the Arecibo Telescope as a spoken text: zero zero zero zero zero one zero zero…etc

- we imagine two human beings in a post-apocalyptic future, living on tinned food, and receiving images from Voyager somehow.

- we attempt to describe the world as if all we can see of it are the images on the Voyager satellites.

- we see a video of a man on YouTube, who can draw a perfect circle freehand on a black board.

- I draw this picture in my note book:

- we talk about a stage structure in which, when you are ‘in the circle’ you are inside Voyager, and inside the Voyager material, and when you are outside of the circle you are outside of Voyager, and are able to explore other material.

- we realise that Rachael will not be able to make and tour the show, and invite Gillian Lees, a performer we know is as interested in doing as she is in saying, into the process to perform the show with me.

- we begin to shed the material that Gillian does find a connection with. Editing. Cutting.

- we replace the walkie-talkies with tin cans on string. We like the fact that we have to keep the string taught for them to work. But we don’t like that this feels like we have to keep away from each other.

- we replace the string with a pulley system, which means that to keep the line taught we have to give each other our weight, and we have to allow each other to move.

- we talk about the work of Marcus Coates, particularly his project Journey to the Lower World, in which he performs a full-on shamanic ritual in a condemned tower block in Liverpool. We talk about the fine line he treads so well, between acknowledging the absurdity of what he is doing and taking what he does absolutely seriously.

- we talk about Shamanism.

- we talk about rituals performed to heal one person, in order to heal everyone.

- we talk about the Clock of the Long Now, and Brian Eno’s original idea of the Big Here.

- we feel like we have found our focus – in amongst all of this research and development, these are the things that both Gill and I are most interested in.

- we talk about leaving, returning, reporting back.

- I meet the astrophysicist Dr Simon Goodwin, who is very generous with his time. During a three hour conversation which, it is no exaggeration to say, changes the way I perceive the solar system, he pretty much convinces me that there is no other technologically intelligent life in our galaxy, and probably not in the Universe. He tells me how, when he talks about this in public, one or two members of the audience always get very angry with him when he tells them that.

- I am struck with the idea that therefore the messages on the Voyager craft are not messages to other intelligent life, but back to the people of Earth, to the future generations of our planet. Messages to us here, now.

- we replace the spheres with circles.

- we change the rock salt to talcum powder.

- we realise that what we need is a perfect 3m diameter circle of talc on the floor. Whilst discussing the making of this circle as a task to be done as part of the set up, I say, “Getting this circle precise is going to be really fucking hard.” Gillian says a great thing; she says, “If it's going to be really hard to do, we should be doing it in front of the audience.”

- we admit to each other that we want to perform a double shamanic ritual that might enable Gillian and I to help each other – Gillian to live in a longer now, myself to live in a bigger here – in order to help the audience. Or witnesses, as we start to think of them.

I realise that my journey is to be something like an out of body experience, to Voyager One – at the outer limit of the explored solar system – 9 billion miles away. I have lists of statistics and measurements, of the various distances from the surface of the Earth of different types of cloud, of satellites, of the International Space Station, of airplane flight paths and their beautiful names like Blue Six and Gold Nine.

Rachael often says to me, gently, sometimes, or exasperatedly, or firmly, Rachael says: "Put the notes down. Do it without notes. If it’s in your memory then it’s significant to you."

One evening I leave my note book in the bag, and sit on the floor in the spare room, I close my eyes and I imagine my journey. I don’t try to describe it, I just try to see it. I travel, and I return. I’m aware how this sounds. I’m not saying I had an out of body experience. But I did sit quietly and see something very clearly in my imagination. Falling away from the earth and seeing everywhere I had ever been mapped out below me in a line of light. Falling back to Earth and seeing all of the people who are close to me, scattered across Europe.

The next day I sit on the stage with Gill and I describe what I saw. "That’s it," she says.

We realise that if this is my journey, Gill’s has to be through time – through her past and into her future. We also realise that as mine is a moment of stillness, her’s has to be hard work. And that we have to do it for real each time.

[There's a short video of 9 Billion Miles from Home, here.]

**

Once we’ve made a performance project we always document it, but we’re always interested, even at this point in the process, in developing and exploring the ideas we are working with further.

We need to create full length documentation of shows for our archive, for promotion, for education. But we also make video work inspired by the documentation of live work – and have produced, over the years, a number of video pieces that take just a moment of a live performance, or the feel of it, or a strand of it – and rework it, develop it or kick against it, in order to make something new. At the moment of fixing a live work in a video document, we feel a strong urge to continue devising, to make something different.

As soon as Christopher Hall, a film maker who is part of Third Angel, saw 9 Billion Miles From Home, he knew he wanted to shoot it from overhead. That was never possible in a live performance, as there is a lantern directly over the circle.

After documenting an early performance of the show, we were invited to submit an idea for The Sheffield Pavilion – an exhibition and DVD publication of video works from Sheffield, that responded to the idea of ‘Pavilion’ – a temporary structure or exhibition space. We persuaded them that the Voyager space probes were pavilion-like in their intent and temporal existence. What constitutes temporary, our proposal asked, in the infinity of time and space?

We successfully proposed a video piece called A Perfect Circle. This small commission allowed us to set up the ritual to perform specifically for camera. We had quickly realised, writing the proposal, that we didn’t want to use any existing live performance documentation along with the overhead shot, but to shoot everything afresh.

I was also interested in revisiting one piece of Voyager material that we had lost from the process very late on, because it didn’t fit with the structure and task of the show. This was Gillian performing the describing of the world as if all she could see of it were the images from the Golden Record.

Setting up in the studio we were already faced with having to make a smaller circle, as we couldn’t get the camera high and wide enough to get it all in at 3m wide. We had moved on from the pulley system for this version of the ritual, too – the tension of this did not translate to camera in an interesting way.

We set up ready to perform the circle-making task, and turned the cameras on – to shoot the whole process in real time. As Gillian began to make the circle, it occurred to me, standing out of shot, that given that it would be Gill’s voice describing the world, it made sense for it to be only Gillian describing the circle. This was a solo ritual. This was about something else. I told Chris and Gillian that I wasn’t going to take part, removing myself from this final stage of a journey that had begun with my obsession with the Voyager craft.

In the edit suite Chris realised he wasn’t interested, visually, in the shots of Gillian describing the images, but he kept her voice, and mixed it with music from 9 Billion Miles from Home by David Mitchell – music made, in fact, out of the sound of stars, as recorded by radio telescopes.

On my first visit to the edit suite I asked Chris if we were in fact making a dance film. Chris said, "That’s right."

**

Afterword

There is more information about all of the Third Angel projects mentioned here in the Archive Section of the website [click].

Writer and artist Philip Stanier visited the process of The Distance Project several times and his account of that process, The Distance Covered, which includes some outcomes not detailed here, is published in Devising in Process, edited by Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart.

And finally, you can now follow Voyager 2 on Twitter.

What I Heard About The World - dress rehearsal photos

2010-11-16T15:22:00.002Z

These are photos from the dress rehearsal of What I Heard About The World at Sheffield Crucible Studio Theatre, October 2010. Thanks to photographer Craig Fleming for letting us post these.

The Dust Archive: Second Printing

2010-10-21T14:40:00.000+01:00

I am really pleased to say that copies of the second printing of The Dust Archive by Annie Lloyd and myself are now available direct from Annie. Full details are below, and images are available here in an earlier post, here.

The Dust Archive: A History of Leeds Met Studio Theatre
Alexander Kelly and Annie Lloyd

A collection of memories from every performance at Leeds Met Studio Theatre. The Dust Archive book is a beautiful object in its own right comprising hand drawn images on tracing paper each referring to a particular moment from a particular show. Most of the significant UK performance makers of the last two decades are featured, including Forced Entertainment, Lone Twin, Curious, Reckless Sleepers, Stan’s Cafe and Third Angel. The book attempts not so much a comprehensive memoir as an imagistic and emotional recall condensed from hours of video of Alex and Annie in the act of remembering.

Not only does The Dust Archive celebrate the importance of a significant venue on the progressive theatre scene, its form and structure provide a valuable contribution to discussions around memory, archiving, engaging with the past and presenting recalled information. The tracings on the page coming up through the pages beneath add complexity and layering to the sense of fragility and unreliability in the notion of memory itself. This book is a work of art.

Alexander Kelly is Co-Artistic Director of Third Angel with whom he performs, devises, directs and designs new theatre and live art. He is Associate Senior Lecturer in Performance Practice at Leeds Met University.

Annie Lloyd is an independent producer who was Director of Leeds Met Studio Theatre from 1990 to 2009 where she championed and nurtured progressive performance work from the UK and beyond.

The Dust Archive is available for £15 + £2.99 p+p.

To order, contact Annie at: alloyd50 [@] gmail.com

Whatsonstage Interview

2010-10-18T15:38:00.001+01:00

There's a new interview with me by Joanne Hartley on the Whatsonstage website, talking about the process of making What I Heard About The World. You can find it here.

Rehearsal Blog 9

2010-10-18T13:20:00.002+01:00

Here's Lauren's report on week 6 of rehearsals, the final week in the Lyceum Theatre rehearsal room before moving to the Crucible Studio Theatre for production week. A week of some quite big decisions and changes.

Rehearsal Blog 9: When the World Became Very Big, and Then Very Small

So, the last week of rehearsals. Perhaps not perfect timing for a complete redesign of the show, but a feeling that it was necessary seemed to be shared by the group. Rachael suggested a new running order, and that the 'playing space' should be changed to be very wide and shallow. Props and furniture were scattered across the stage, each piece having one function but not being moved once its used. This forces the performers to move about and create 'business', making it more visually interesting for the audience.

Chris also suggested the idea of literally tracking the journey of the stories; for example the first two stories in the show are from Singapore and Liberia, so they could describe how you would make that journey in real life (since it was me that did the research I can tell you it involves three international airports and bribing a helicopter pilot).

The 'Massacre' section includes material that has remained virtually the same since the performance at Forge almost six months ago, plus a new lengthy text, but it was finally decided that it needed to be shortened. This was a running theme for all the texts that remain in the show, with most of the texts being tightened up, both to shorten the running time, and to improve the flow and dynamism of what remained. For the same reason, some changes were made to who performed the texts, also to ensure that no one performer dominated certain sections of the show.

Rehearsals continued in this vein, but something still didn't feel quite right...so on Wednesday there was another development in terms of the staging, with the playing area reduced to a more intimate size. This obviously had implications for what the set looked like and how the performers interacted. Rachael had invited Julie Horan to work for a couple of days on the art direction, and between her and the group, a domestic feel to the staging began to emerge. The stage now read as a living room that the performers lived in, so this meant that it made more sense for them to tell the stories as much to each other, as 'out' to the audience.

A run-through on this basis with an audience of a few invited guests was performed on Thursday evening, which threw up some interesting points for the performers to consider, including the reading by some of the audience that Alex and Jorge are Chris' imaginary housemates.

One problem that needed solving at the end of the week was defining Chris' role; due to the nature of his texts, it wasn't clear if he was purely a commentator or a fellow storyteller aswell. Since neither the text or the set configuration was final until we moved into the Studio the next week, it was difficult to decide. Hopefully with a new venue and a new set, it would be one of those problems to which the solution would emerge in the space.

Rehearsal Blog 8: Forgive Them Father

2010-10-14T12:12:00.000+01:00

Catching up with the rehearsal blogs from Lauren... this is for the latter half of week 5 of devising/rehearsals:

Post 8: Forgive Them Father, for They Have Sinned.

The rest of the week was spent developing each story section individually, with a view to having another run-through of everything on the Friday. This focussed on what the performers will actually do whilst telling the story, especially if they are the narrator.

Most intriguing of these sections came from Jorges’ experience of confessing to a priest when he was young. This links to a ‘sin line’ in France, which we were surprised to discover still exits and was immediately worked into the show.* Since a lot of the stories are told in the first person, it didn’t feel like a problem that one of them is actually a personal experience, but it was also attempted with Chris confessing to Alex.

On Friday the performers did a run-through of all the developed material, in a rough order without any transitions or ‘connecting’ sections and it came to almost two hours. This was a little more than the performers were expecting, but didn’t see this as a problem as they felt the show would shrink with further rehearsal. In discussing it in the afternoon, some sections were agreed on as needing big changes, but no-one was prepared to rule anything out entirely at that point.

There was still a hesitation about the role of the screen and live drawing, but it was left until further development was done to make the final decision. It was also thought that Jorge needed more 'normal' things to do and say, as there was a danger that he would be seen as the 'clown' of the trio by the audience.

At this point, some stories that were on the ‘in the show’ pile had been left undeveloped, and would probably remain so as there was already a lot of material written or prepared. The week ended with the performers feeling pretty happy with how the material was coming to life, and were hoping for more of the same next week.

*If you feel the need to confess any sins to an automated Frenchman, the number is: France 0982 463 438

Rehearsal Blog 7: What We Think About The World

2010-10-01T22:23:00.002+01:00

Here's Lauren's report from the first half of last week - which was Week 4 of the devising/rehearsal process.

Rehearsal Blog 7: What We Think About the World?

The first task of the week was to do further work on the opening of the show, as it felt important to use the introduction as an implicit statement of intent, and to have it decided in the performers’ heads. This didn’t quite go to plan however, as discussion drifted back to the intentions of the show as a whole.

The material at times feels like the results of a fact finding mission (this perhaps reflects the methodology of getting the stories in the first place), and it was thought that maybe this should be embraced; the show is a snapshot of the world, the performers have heard about it and are ‘reporting back’ to the audience. This allows for the idea that the world the performers describe can only be their interpretation of it, as well as using Portuguese and native tongues when naming countries.

Alex’s ideas about the show changed a lot over the weekend, and some of them were discussed and tried out. He suggested there should be 24 stories, one for each time zone (though this isn’t mentioned to the audience), and that they should be placed on a map but not a literal one, perhaps one made from spotlights. The stories should be character focused, although not necessarily the central character(s). There was debate about whether having a map on stage all the way through would create the same problems that using lots of flat daddies would. Perhaps markings on the floor could suggest a map?

Sifting through the material already generated, and choosing other stories to make a total of 24, quickly made it obvious that this was too many. There were also big geographical gaps in story locations; it wasn’t decided definitively if this was important or not. It was agreed that the rest of the week should be spent developing each of the stories not yet touched on, with the aim of putting it all together on Friday for a run-through. For the time being connecting the stories was not important.

On Tuesday, the Brand Awareness, Radio Silence and Emergency Exit stories were looked at in more detail, which bought up thoughts about the physical aspect of the show. What should performers not actively involved in a story do; should they be on or off stage, should they be setting something else up for a future story, should they just disappear for a bit? Minimising the number of props used, and using them several times was thought to be a cleverer way of dealing with telling some stories. For example a radio is being used during Radio Silence, but could also be used for Massacre, Night Flight and Sin Line. This way all the props could be on the stage all the time, in line with the store room aesthetic the group have been discussing.

The development of Radio Silence induced an interesting debate, as it tells a story where sympathy for an Israeli family could be inferred as taking sides in a particular, complex conflict. Should the way the stories are presented be influenced by the performers’ opinions; does this make it not What I Heard About the World, but What We Think About the World? Some discussion about whether the show was obligated to mention Palestine in the interests of balance, or whether this was too much comment, and the show should just to present the world as they have found it. The performance is a version of the world, and the audience should be allowed to take from it and create their own, new world.

Rehearsal Blog 6: “The Heartbeat of the Show”

2010-09-23T22:08:00.000+01:00

Taking us up to the end of Week 3, here's Rehearsal Blog 6 from Lauren:

Post 6: “The Heartbeat of the Show”
A new day bought new enthusiasm and fresh ideas to the group. Chris had written a text entitled A Series of (Very) Short Pieces About What People Are Doing Right Now, essentially a (very) long list of one sentence summations of stories, both previously collected and new inventions. Alex, Jorge and Chris were (very) excited at this new development, believing it to be potentially the “heartbeat of the show”.

Various improvisations were tried, with Chris reading the text and Alex and Jorge trying ‘interruptions’ to flesh out certain stories if they came to mind. This felt like an promising structure for the show, and in the afternoon was tried again with the order of the list randomised, and shared between the three of them. I think everyone went home feeling a lot of progress had been made that day.

On Thursday, a need to develop shorter versions of the stories was felt, as all the texts up to that point had been at least five minutes long, and whilst they were liked by the group, it would have made for a very long show if all the stories were fictionalised at such length. This new brevity was mingled with the text developed so far, in a repetition of the ...What People Are Doing Right Now improvisation later in the day. Interruptions were both pre-planned and improvised with certain sentences triggering certain set pieces that have previously been developed.

This was the first attempt at performing an entire show with the material, so some things worked well and some didn’t; Jorges’ wailing was a personal highlight! The performers were generally pleased with how well it went for the first try, and how well it seemed to flow. Overall another good day.

With some overnight perspective, the group discussed the run-through and agreed that the content was good, but that they needed structure and to inject more emotion. There was a lot of pacing around thinking what to do next rather than feeling it was ok to sit to one side, and the function of the live drawing needed to be clarified.

A possible introduction idea was developed by all three; that of relating Sheffield to the rest of the world, and of Jorge speaking in Portuguese and Chris attempting to translate. This was developed for the rest of the day, as well as an exercise where Alex attempted to draw a photograph based on Chris’ description of it.

On Friday we were also joined by Clive Eggington, photographer and co-founder of Archive Sheffield, an organisation hoping to: “create new photographic images to depict and preserve the diversity of the cities population”. He is hoping to take photos right through the process, and everyone is happy to have him onboard, and are also hoping to star in one of his stories! It feels a bit surreal to have two levels of documentation going on in the room, but I’m sure we’ll get used to it...

www.archive-sheffield.org

Rehearsal Blog: All These Events Are Happening Now

2010-09-20T20:47:00.005+01:00

So, here's Lauren's blog post from the start of last week - Week 3. This takes us up to the point where we had to confront the fact that the idea that we were so excited about in Week 2, whilst visually very strong, was actually getting in the way of performance.

These can be tough decisions. Rachael reminded me of an early version of 9 Billion Miles From Home at Chelsea Theatre, in which we had a field of suspended stars or globes, each beautifully, individually lit. They looked great. But getting up to do anything in amongst them was confusing and impractical. They didn't last into the next stage of the process, but they informed the circular obsession of the version of the show that followed. It is proving to be the case here, too, I think...but, anyway, over to Lauren.

Post 5: “All These Events are Happening Now”

The start of the third week saw the move to the Lyceum rehearsal space, which gave the performers more space and room for a bigger screen, so that the projection aspect of the show could be developed more effectively.

With Rachael in rehearsal at the start of the week, it was seen as a good time to check everyone was happy with the progress made so far, and to compare notes regarding what the performers thought the show was at this point. There was a feeling that the format needed to be decided upon soon, to have as much time as possible to refine the content, as the set design was very simple.

Discussing their ideas of what the show is, proved a point the performers are making in What I Heard; we each have our own version of the world in our heads, never exactly the same as anyone else’s. There were debates regarding the differences in each others’ visions; stories versus characters, nations versus individuals, the function of the stage props and what they represent, whether the show should have discrete sections or should appear to flow as one narrative.

One point agreed on was that the show needed to convey that all the events they mention are happening everywhere, all the time. At the moment there were long texts about one story, but there needed to be ‘micro-narratives’ featuring others, to make the world the performers are creating richer and more textured.

In the afternoon, Alex, Jorge and Chris read through all the text that had been written so far. Reacting to this, Rachael wondered whether the show was actually commenting on the world it was describing. There was disagreement about this, as the tone in which some stories are told in could be thought of as commenting on them.

On Tuesday, the performers met with the set & prop builders, and this forced the performers to clarify their thoughts regarding the use and number of ‘flat daddies’ in the show. They seemed important to include because they have been the hook for getting many people interested in the project from the start, but including many of them may have spatial problems on stage.

These doubts were cemented with the deconstruction of the ‘hijack’ text, again with Rachael and Capela offering feedback. Working out what all three were to do whilst the text is performed by Chris quickly exposed weaknesses in that 'set piece', but also the need for more brevity in dealing with most of the stories in the show. To remedy this Rachael suggested an exercise, in which all three should write material where stories are told just through dialogue, or in the third person.

At the end of the day, energy felt very low and there was a bit of mental panic about throwing out another set design, but as always, tomorrow was another day...

Lauren's photos of the rehearsal process are on her Flickr page, here.

Society of Cartographers Summer School

2010-09-13T20:41:00.005+01:00

Lauren's report from Manchester...

Post 4: What I Heard About The World - Research Table at The Society of Cartographers Summer School

On Thursday 9th, the What I Heard team took a day off from rehearsals, to take part in the Society of Cartographers’ 46th Summer School in Manchester. There was some concern, given the previous day’s breakthrough, that the day in manchester might be a bit of an interruption to the devising process, but in the end it turned out to be worthwhile for everyone.

The research table had been run a few times before, so Chris, Alex and Jorge were familiar with the format, so they decided to introduce countries to the map at random rather than alphabetically. Chris then had to place the post-it note representing that country from memory, Jorge read aloud the long and short form of the country’s name in its native tongue, then any stories were collected. Where nothing new came up, or there were no delegates present, pre-gathered stories were re-used.

The delegates seemed to enjoy the improvised, ‘lo-fi’ nature of the map, and had no hesitation in telling Chris to rearrange his post-its when inaccurate (FYI, St Kitts and Nevis is North of St Lucia, not the other way round...). The nature of what a country is has been discussed by the performers before, but it became especially prescient in the company of experts, and there were many interesting discussions about mapping, borders, the history and politics of dividing up the world. We even learnt a new word: exclave.

Alex gave a talk about the development of What I Heard in the afternoon which was warmly received, and we received several new stories from delegates, which will be looked at further next week, and perhaps worked into the show.

Photos can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurencstanley

AudioBoos of Alex’s talk can be found here: Part 1 and Part 2

Rehearsal Blog 3

2010-09-13T20:11:00.005+01:00

Here's Lauren's report on Week 2's work in Sheffield:

Post 3: What I Heard About The World Rehearsals Week 2
The start of the second week saw the first weekly visit by Rachael Walton, co-artistic director of Third Angel, and we were also joined by José Cappela, co-artistic director of Mala Voadora with Jorge. This gave the performers the opportunity to hear the opinions and ideas of people new to any developments in the rehearsal space.

Through analysing their progress, it was decided by everyone that greater clarity was needed on what the show is about, and how the stories that have been collected will be deployed. Jorge, Capela and Rachael focused on investigating possible connections between stories, whilst Alex and Chris wrote some potential text for the show, which also developed the way the stories will be blended into one coherent whole.

This naturally led onto discussion as to the role the table/stage will play. Once props were introduced, do they stay there or are they removed? Do performers stay on the stage throughout, or get off it when they are not playing an active part in the show? Should the stage be sloped or flat? Do we even need a stage? This was a source of much debate through the week, but on Wednesday there was a breakthrough that Alex, Jorge and Chris were all excited about (something that I obviously can’t tell you without spoiling the show, sorry!)

It felt important that from now on the performers should set out how they will use their devising time at the start of the day (e.g. improvise around a text for an hour, think about set design for a morning), rather than working where their thoughts took them. This ensured there was tangible progress at the end of each day, which in turn maintains motivation and energy levels through the process, and staves off panic of course!

We all have our own idea of what the world is (like the old adage that if you ask people to imagine a tree, everyone pictures a different tree), so the performers needed to clarify each others’ perception of the world, and that the world the show describes is the performers’ collective version of it. The ‘real’ world and the performers’ world have a relationship with eachother, but they are not the same thing. The performers’ description of the world they have heard about allows the audience to imagine and question the version of the world they hold in their heads.

Overall, a lot of progress was made in the second week, and whilst what a lot of what was developed in the first week has now been scrapped, I think everyone is more satisfied with what has replaced it.

Rehearsal Blog 2

2010-09-08T22:16:00.004+01:00

Here's the next update from our Intern Lauren Stanley, for the latter half of Week 1 of devising.

Post 2: What I Heard About The World: Rehearsals Days Three and Four

Over the next couple of days, further ways of developing the source material were explored. Alex, Jorge and Chris devised a “There’s a place...” exercise, in which they took it in turns to summarise stories of their choosing in short statements. The statements applied to a specific story, but were not allowed to be explicit about the country they referred to. Telling the listener about a country without naming it discourages them from defining places by glib facts or stereotypes, something the performers were determined to avoid. Some examples were:

• There’s a place where you can’t chew gum.

• There’s a place that's disappearing.

• There’s a place where you’re only allowed one of sixteen haircuts.

• There’s a place where choirs mime.

• There’s a place where soldiers are made out of cardboard.

• There’s a place where you can buy a ticket for a plane that never leaves the ground.

• There’s a place where rich people live in containers.

• There’s a place where people are paid to cry.

Again this highlighted which stories are most familiar to the performers, and which they feel have the most potential, but they felt it was an effective, inspirational exercise. It forced them to be concise and get to the heart of the stories, but does this mean that they are being oversimplified because the performers are so familiar with them? It was decided that this was a nice way to make the stories epithetical and memorable, but what will the audience take from them if they are unfamiliar with the wider story?

The show needs a sense of a journey, a sense of having been somewhere, and returning at the end of it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the show follows a coherent narrative, just that it can’t be a list of stories strung together, leaving the audience to make of them what they will. The idea of using one story to start and end the show was raised again, and that a framework for the form of the show needs to be decided early to better inform the rest of the devising process: “We need to sit down and make decisions!”

Ideas were then suggested for stories that could be linked. The realisation that 71 stories would not fit into the show quickly followed, and wondering how much the stories could be mixed together. With this there is a danger that the show becomes about one character with hundreds of wacky anecdotes to tell. Instead there should be a mix of Alex, Jorge and Chris performing as themselves, the person they heard the story from, the people within the story, or a fictional person that reacts to or is linked to the story.

The connections exercise was then repeated, but this time only narrative connections were allowed (for example you can’t link two stories because they both mention planes). This threw up some great connections, with stories told in a mix of first and third person. There were moments of humour without forcing gags into the narrative, and the beginnings of ideas of how to tell the stories with drawings, props and interactions between the performers. This felt like a real confidence boost that the material was good, and that the stories were worth telling.

Rehearsal Blog 1

2010-09-06T20:25:00.008+01:00

Our intern on What I Heard About The World is Lauren Stanley, film and installation maker and graduate of Sheffield Hallam University. She's looking after video tech in the rehearsal room, and documenting the process for us. It's interesting for me to see how the process reads to someone new to it. Here's her first response to the work.

What I Heard About The World
Rehearsal Days One and Two

So, Day One. A bit of a first-day-at-school feeling, very new territory for me if no-one else, and a sense of not being sure what was going to happen. After setting up the stage/table, Alex, Jorge and Chris starting sifting through all the stories they had collated through previous Research Table events and requests from the public, deciding which they wanted to incorporate into the show. This raised some fundamental questions as to what they wanted the show to say, and what form it should take. It was believed that through discussion of the individual stories an overriding message would emerge. It felt important that although the show is fictionalising, they had corroborated information through asking for stories. The stories are largely about fakes and deceptions, but the stories themselves are factual, and that should be highlighted in the show.

There was also an acknowledgement of the danger of describing the world through stories to patronise or even be derogatory, the 'aren't foreigners weird' angle needs to be avoided, or at least mentioned in the show as something they wanted to avoid. One possibility was to take a story, such as Caterpillar Milk, and analyse the underlying presumptions the audience might make about others based on it.

On Day Two once all the stories they were potentially interested in had been decided on, Alex, Chris and Jorge started generating material through improvisation exercises and further discussion. At this stage rules were set on the improvisations to force them to think more laterally about how to use the stories. First was the connections exercise, where the they all picked six stories at random, and took it in turns to connect them.

They then tried a character exercise, in which one person chose a story at random, and asked one of the others to improvise a monologue, from the point of view of a character involved in the story. This threw up some new perspectives on the stories (my personal highlight being Jorge’s uncanny wax baby...), and potentially more interesting ways of telling the story to an audience.

These exercises made them aware of which stories they were most familiar with, and cemented a belief that the show should be one ‘shaggy dog’ narrative, made up of elements of lots of stories, perhaps with one framing the whole by starting and ending the show.

Finally, the 'it's about' exercise helped to clarify what the three of them wanted the show to explore. Some ideas were:
• trying to understand what authenticity is
• how in order to to know where you are, you have to have an idea of where everything else is.
• a story standing in for somewhere you’ve never been
• bringing a far away thing closer.
• 6 and a half billion people
• the difference between history and story
• the difference between biscuits and cookies...

If it covers all that, it should be one hell of a show!

Research Table at Forest Fringe

2010-09-01T20:41:00.009+01:00

What I Heard About The World - Research Table at Forest Fringe, Edinburgh, 21 August 2010. 11am - 11pm, Afghanistan - Zimbabwe (with 4 minutes to spare). Performed by Jorge Andrade, Alexander Kelly and Chris Thorpe.

Thanks to everyone who came in and spent time with us, and/or contributed a story, and particular thanks to Andy Field, Deborah Pearson, Ellie Dubois, Freya Millward and the whole Forest Fringe team of volunteers and the Forest cafe staff. It was a great day.

Photographs by Isa Maubach (thank you Isa).

Empty Benches

2010-08-30T20:13:00.009+01:00

I've just posted the 50th and 51st Empty Bench over on our Flickr photo page. I've been collecting them for a while, and have recently been gathering a few close to home and work that I haven't gotten around to. Of course it's not just any bench. There are some rules. So here's where it started.

This is a text in wrote in response to our travels for Pleasant Land in 2004. A version of it was published in the artists' book Slow, edited by Ian Abbott, and then I performed it as part of the Art-Science Encounters event How To Be Creative last March. That led to it being included in Words & Pictures last year, too. It explains where the bench obsession comes from.

***

EMPTY BENCHES

I’m taking a photograph of a bench [1], trying to line it up centre frame, and worrying about whether I should have the bench or the sloping pavement level in the viewfinder. Beyond the bench is a small tree, a road, an industrial estate and a factory. Behind me is a queue of traffic, crawling towards a roundabout. It’s a hot sunny day and windows are down.

“What is there to take a picture of there, mate?”

The passenger of a car right behind me is leaning out of the window trying to find out if there is something I can see that he can’t.

“Why has someone put a bench looking at the the view?” I ask him.

“I don’t know,” he says, as the car pulls away, “I’ll have to think about that…”

We [2] are travelling around England, researching a project about Englishness [3]. We are visiting places we have never been to before, and revisiting places we have been to, to look at them afresh. We are talking to people in the street, at bus stops, in chip shops, and taking photos of things that interest us [4].

I have begun to notice benches. Not park benches [5], or town square benches or any congregation of benches. Solo benches; individual benches placed in a specific position by someone [6].

How [7] are the positions for these benches decided? Some are clearly to look at a particular view. Others are in places where people might need to break their journey, to rest. Some are dedicated to someone who has passed away, who used to visit that spot. Occasionally [8] the positioning defies logic.

But what I particularly notice is that these [9] benches are always [10] empty. Again, not park benches, which are [11] often used as a lunch venue by people who work nearby, and are therefore locations that people choose to use to pass time.

No, these solitary benches, placed facing ‘a view’ [12], placed en route from one place to another, are always [10] empty. At first what bothers [13] me is that these benches have been placed to look at a view and no one ever [14] stops to see that view.

I start taking photos of [15] benches and their views.

But after a while [16] what begins to bother me more is that whilst park benches [5] are used at lunch times [17], solo benches aren’t used at all. No one justs sits on them. No one stops. No one stops, sits, thinks. No one rests. No one waits. No one does nothing. [18]

I decide to start putting instructions on benches [19].

[1] In Hexham

[2] Rachael and I

[3] www.pleasantland.org

[4] This is 2004

[5] Or ‘destination benches’, as I will come to think of them

[6] A town planner? An architect?

[7] I wonder

[8] It seems to me

[9] Solo

[10] Okay, nearly always

[11] As comes up in a discussion with friends

[12] Or rather, a nice view

[13] Intrigues

[14] Okay, hardly anyone

[15] Empty

[16] How long is a ‘while’? In Sheffield they don’t say 9 to 5, they say 9 while 5.

[17] To facilitate another activity: eating, reading, smoking, filling a lunch hour

[18] Alright, hardly anyone

[19] How to use this bench: Stop a moment and sit. Do nothing for a bit. Rest. Think. It’s okay. You have enough time.

Inspiration Exchange

2010-08-16T20:06:00.002+01:00

Back in March of 2009, whilst we were making Homo Ludens, I was invited to talk at an event called How To Be Creative, as part of Sheffield Art-Science Encounters. Given the impressive line up of fellow presenters (Dr Kamal Birdi, Dr Rachel Falconer, Dr Tim Richardson, Professor Peter Styring and musician John Ball), and the elusive subject matter of the brief, it was a mildly intimidating event to be part of. I gave a response entitled Scratch the Itch, Roll the Dice, Walk to Work, inspired partly by the work we were doing on playfulness and inventiveness, and talking about the bench obsession that later resurfaced in Words & Pictures. All of the other presentations were really enjoyable, and three of us ran activities for participants afterwards.

Feedback on the event was great, so we were invited back this year to talk even more specifically about our Muse. Unable to pinpoint a single muse, I ran an Inspiration Exchange, swapping stories about things that had inspired me over the years, with things that had meant something to audience members...

Colour Combinations
NOISE
A recording by John Williams
A PALE BLUE DOT
Interaction
her hands in my hair

It proved to be a great conversation generator, and I mentioned on Twitter how much I'd enjoyed it. Andy Field from Forest Fringe got in touch to ask if something similar would work at the festival this summer. Given the wonderfully collaborative atmosphere at Forest Fringe it seemed to me like a great idea. So I'm delighted that this week, before we run the What I Heard About The World - Research Table (on Saturday 21st), it's going to happen.

On Friday 20th, 12 - 5pm Forest Fringe will host Inspiration Exchange, with Laura McDermott, Deborah Pearson, James Stenhouse and myself. We've had one devising session via skype, and will meet up in Edinburgh the day before; I'm really looking forward to it. If you're going to be in Edinburgh, why not drop in and swap something that has inspired you for something that has inspired us?

At the Research Table

2010-08-02T10:29:00.019+01:00

photo by Mark Cohen

What I Heard About The World was born during a conversation in Jorge Andrade's flat in Lisbon in 2007. Since we had met in 2004 we'd been talking about making something in collaboration with Jorge's company, mala voadora.

As is often the way, we had had a moment of realisation that this collaboration wasn't going to happen unless we actually, you know, started it. So we met for coffee, each bringing a few ideas to the table. Jorge told me about several stories that had caught his attention recently: the US military's programme of providing servicemen's families with 'flat daddies' whilst they were away; a survey that claimed that the number one pastime for off-duty western soldiers in Iraq was play war-sim games such as Medal of Honour; demonstrators-for-rent in Germany. I pointed out to Jorge that all of the stories he had been collecting were about fakes, stand-ins, replacements.

The conversation moved on to maps and mapping, and how a map is a fake, or a stand-in. We began discussing a project that located these stories of the inauthentic on a giant map, a map that morphed and shifted between different projections and purposes. By the end of the conversation we had the title, and enough information for a project proposal.

Something that looks like chocolate, but that isn't chocolate.
Something that looks like cheese, but isn’t cheese.
Something that makes it look like a house is built out of stone, when the house is still built out of brick.
Something that is like a person, for you to have sex with, but isn’t a person, but is still for having sex with.
Something that is like a person, but isn’t a person, that is used to measure the damage that a real human being would suffer in car accident.
A machine that makes waves like the sea, but in a pool.
A machine that lets you do something that is like going for a run, but is actually staying for a run.
Cardboard boxes originally used for protecting machines whilst being delivered to their new owners, used to protect sleeping humans.
On the internet, and in the published press, fictional characters commentating on real world politics.
In 2009 the amount of digital storage capacity surpasses the amount of information in the world.
A grown woman lies in bed, unable to sleep, listening to generative lullabies on a phone application invented by a man who was once famous for making music.
To make models’ lips look more kissable they are injected with collagen, to the extent that the make up artist is told to only use the softest lip brush, and the gentlest of touches, lest the models’ lips explode.
The bible being translated to a phonetic language that some people think cats would speak like, if they could speak. srsly.
A well paid football player, who works on possibly the best tended grass in the country, has his own lawn replaced with astroturf for his children to play on.
camera perfect.
disaster capitalism, selling futures.
collateral damage and friendly fire.
longterm relationships with a girlfriend simulation service.
cut flowers. here you go, watch them die.

Fast forward. Jorge and I have been joined by Chris Thorpe as co-devsior/performer, and have been kicking ideas around with the generous team at Worldmapper.org. We are in the process of making two discreet pieces, one of which is a research engine for the other.

The theatre piece What I Heard About The World opens with a three week run at Sheffield Theatres in October, before transferring to Lisbon for a Portuguese tour. The research process for that piece has been running since the start of the year, online, in conversation and at work-in-progress showings in Sheffield, Glasgow and Oldenburg.

The work-in-progress showings have produced a stand alone durational project, that we refer to as the Research Table, and which we will be running for 12 hours at Forest Fringe in Edinburgh, on Saturday 21st August, 11am - 11pm. Chris, Jorge and I will be attempting to map the world, alphabetically, using post-it notes; we'll be discussing, no doubt, what territories are, and are not, actually countries. And we'll be collecting stories, hopefully one for each country. Stories of the fake being used in place of the real, stand-ins, replicas and replacements. We'll be retelling those stories throughout the day, labelling each story with just two words, and illustrating it with a single hand drawn image.

Those stories will then feed in to our bank of material for devising the theatre piece during September and October. If you can't make it along in Edinburgh, you can still contribute to the research process online. You can comment here on the blog or email us at alex[at]thirdangel.co.uk. We're also running the research on Twitter; you can find me @AlexanderKelly, or simply tweet something with the hashtag #whatiheardabouttheworld. We'd love to hear from you.

Psalter Lane, two years on

2010-07-28T17:25:00.010+01:00

So, it's gone. Well, a lot of it.

Two years ago I posted this entry about Psalter Lane Campus in Sheffield, and the neon pink message painted above its closed doors: You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone.

One year ago, I posted this update along the lines of: still here, but empty.

This Summer, as I've been walking past on my way to work, I've seen Psalter Lane slowly dismantled - all but the old library building. Here are some photos I've taken over the last six weeks.

Do You Mind If I Ask You a Few Questions?

2010-07-14T20:49:00.009+01:00

We get the cheap suits and matching haircuts in Sheffield.

The hairdresser – my hairdresser – is visibly distressed when I tell her what we want. She’s been slowly nursing me away from my very long hair for several years now, with the promise that she will eventually get to cut something other than ‘not short’ into it. But this isn’t what she was hoping for: short back and sides, side parting; the squarer we look, the better. She cuts me first. I look suitably geeky. The she gives Jerry exactly the same cut. He looks cool.

The suits are £40 each, machine washable. We want to look like we are at work. Dressed for work. The regular discussion about outfits and clothes instead of costume. Our reference point is the people who stop you in the pedestrianised bit of the city centre with a clipboard, who want to know if you wear deodorant or like crisps. It’ll only take ten minutes. They are mostly women (on Sheffield’s Fargate, at least), and the few men amongst them are a bit stuck as to what to wear. A suit, in order to look smart – they’re Dealing With The Public, after all – but they’re outside all day, might need a coat over the suit, it’s going to start to look shabby. They don’t want to wear their best suit, or buy a new expensive one. So forty quid machine washable is just the job. I look like an estate agent. Jerry looks like a spook.

Glasgow. We set up our research space downstairs in the Arches, in a pair of rooms I think of as Franko B’s rooms, having taken part in one of his one-to-one performance experiences in there the year before (with Aktion 398). We kit the space out on the Thursday: table, two chairs, desk lamp, evidence book, questionnaire forms (duplicate), mini-disc recorder. On the walls are a series of blown up A-Z map squares with a single red dot on each one: This Is Where It Happened.

Our research project is called Where Have They Hidden All The Answers? We start work on the Friday. Wearing our suits, carrying clipboards through the Arches café bar, I am surprised by how much attention we attract. Lois Keidan, who I will later watch painting Michael Mayhew in his own blood (in A Sequence of Actions That Matter), looks genuinely shocked by our attire. How do you cause a stir at the National Review of Live Art? Turn up in suits and ties.

Downstairs we get to work. One of us out in the corridor, marshalling our participants, managing the list; the other, in the second room (the first room acts as a sound lock), conducting ten minute interviews. We are sharing stories: trying to convince our participants, who experience the work one at a time, that a particular urban legend is true, then recording an urban legend from them, or, in fact, any story that they want to tell us.

I am often struck by how keen they are to get the story right; taking a moment to think it through, correcting themselves, retelling a key moment. After we have taken their story they sign the questionnaire and take the top copy for themselves. We show them out of the room through a different door, into a narrow corridor that leads them back to the café bar.

We find out later that on at least one day, our interviewees gathered around a table in the bar; you weren’t allowed to join them if you hadn’t ‘been in yet’. An evolving group, sharing their experiences. What story were you told? What story did you tell? Of course we never see this group. But it is gratifying to find out afterwards that not only were we collecting stories, we were helping to spread them, too.

**

We made Where Have They Hidden All The Answers?, our first one-on-one performance, for the National Review of Live Art in 2002. This year we were honoured to be asked to contribute something to the NRLA 30th Anniversary Catalogue, which is what the text above was written for. The Catalogue itself is a thing of beauty, edited by Dee Heddon, Nikki Milican and Jennie Klein, with contributions from so many massively influential makers of Live Art it would be churlish to mention just a few. Originally available only at the NRLA earlier this year, the last few copies are available online from the New Territories website.

**

We went on to present Where Have They Hidden All The Answers? at several UK venues, and remade it in Portuguese for the Site Festival in Coimbra, and in French for Center Culturel Suisse in Paris.

Learning to Drown (Part 2)

2010-07-07T02:26:00.000+01:00

[see previous post for Part 1]

Dear Paula

There’s an interesting thing I forgot to mention earlier. The “quick” in quicksand does not mean “fast”. It means “alive” – as in the phrase “the quick and the dead”. That feels important to know.

So.

The man shouts for help. He is panicking, shouting as loud as he can, suddenly and unexpectedly; very quickly his throat is sore and he is out of breath. As he stops to breathe he realises that this is stupid: it is the middle of the night and there is no-one around to hear his cries. If he loses his voice from shouting now, he won’t be able to call for help later, when someone might be awake to hear.

So he waits.

How long, he wonders, should he wait. It is Sunday morning – when will people be around? Not early, he thinks. He is aware that he is still sinking, just very slowly. He tries not to look at his watch. Despite his discomfort, the tiredness begins to set in and he even feels his head nod a couple of times, and he has to jerk himself awake.

Slowly the sky brightens he can gradually distinguish between the sky and the sand, and between them, a thin sliver of sea, a long way away, across the vast, puddled expanse of beach that stretches out in front of him. He is completely sober now. He thinks about time, and about tides, and he realises what is about to happen. He begins to shout again.

The man’s cries are heard by a farmer, out in his field on the hillside overlooking the bay. Now, the farmer is not usually out in his fields at daybreak on a Sunday morning, and in fact, as he will later tell incredulous newspaper reporters, this is the first Sunday this year that he has been out at dawn on a Sunday. Normally he has Sunday mornings off. But he has been ill for the last few days, and has work to catch up with, and so, just by chance, he is making an early start this particular Sunday. And as he is walking across his field he hears a man’s voice crying for help, coming from the bay below him.

He makes his way down the hillside, towards the shouting voice.

The man has been shouting for some time, perhaps half an hour or more, by the time he hears the farmer calling to him. The farmer has ventured out on to the sand, following the man’s own tracks, but will still not come too close to the quicksand. When the man stops shouting, the farmer tells him that he has called for help, and that the fire brigade are on their way. The farmer tells him not to worry.

The wait begins.

They say that in Morecambe Bay the tide comes in “as fast as a horse can run”. The man watches in horror as the tide, so distant at first, rushes towards him across the vast stretch of sand. As it gets closer, he feels his body begin to struggle involuntarily, causing him to sink a few precious centimetres further before he regains control of himself.

He hears himself cry out as the first shallow waves rush around him. He begins to cry. The farmer is shouting at him, but he isn’t really listening. But a minute or two after the water has reached him, he hears the sirens piercing the air in the distance.

Exactly what happens next is unclear – jumbled, panicked memories conflict with each other trying to recall and explain it - and it all happens so fast. But piecing it together, these are the events that must happen:

The farmer runs back to the road to wave down the fire engines and point the firemen towards the stranded man.

The first fireman hauls a set of metal-work “planks” across the sand. He lays the planks down in the water and onto the sand around the stricken figure, in a triangular formation.

The water is now at shoulder level to the submerged man, and the fireman stands astride him, feet on the safety of the metal, takes his head in his hands and lifts. His job is to keep the man’s face out of the water to allow him to keep breathing. His job is to keep the man alive long enough to be rescued.

Two other firemen make slower progress across the sand with their air pumping apparatus. They get as close as they dare to their colleague and the man, the water now around his neck, the waves splashing his jaw. The pump is attached to a hose, which they stab into the sand and pump air down into the quicksand.

As the waves lap over the man’s face, the air bubbles up from the hose, breaking the viscosity of the quicksand and two of the firemen heave the man up and out. They drag him across the beach, wading knee high through the tide, half carrying him in fact, their pump, hose and other equipment lost to the incoming tide.

I often think about that man, when I am on a beach. And I wonder if he ever goes near the sea any more?

I’ll write again soon,

Alex

Learning to Drown (Part 1)

2010-07-02T16:19:00.003+01:00

Dear Paula

There’s a story I’d like to tell you. It’s a true story.

On the North West coast of England is Morecambe Bay – a large expanse of almost flat sands, surrounded on three sides by land. Because it is so flat the tide come in very fast.

But when the tide is out it is actually possible to walk across the narrowest part of the bay (about three kilometres). It is possible, but extremely dangerous. Morecambe Bay is riddled with shifting areas of quicksand. Each year the patches of quicksand have to be re-mapped, and the local guides have to learn the new routes across.

It is understood locally that you do not attempt to walk across Morecambe Bay at any time other than on a guided walk, during daylight. To attempt to cross the bay alone, particularly at night, you would have to be very foolish. Or drunk.

Summer 1992, Saturday night. It is gone midnight and a man, a holiday-maker, finds himself looking across the bay from the south, from Arnside towards Grange-over-Sands where his caravan is. He has been drinking, but the pubs are now closed, and for some reason he is alone. He could walk round the bay, but that is a walk of over six kilometres, and means walking along railway bridge. The tide is out and the moonlight reflects invitingly on the flat, wet sand. It looks solid enough. Why not walk? Surely it would be fine, it’s a clear night, he can see what he’s doing. Safer than the railway bridge. It doesn’t occur to him to stay where he is, to not make the journey.

Foolish, or drunk, or both.

He sets off across the sand – at this part of the bay it is really the estuary of the River Kent, and he is almost surrounded by land. The sea is literally kilometres away.

But, sure enough, it’s late, he’s had a few drinks, he’s tired, he’s guiding himself by moonlight and anyway, you cannot tell the difference between quicksand and normal sand just by looking it. That’s why it is so dangerous. Two hundred metres out onto the sand. His foot sinks to his knee almost instantly, and he topples forward, hands sinking into the sand, too. Instinctively he rights himself, pulling his body up, and his trailing leg forward.

Adrenaline floods his body, and that, combined with the sudden cold, helps to sober him up to some extent, and he realises that he is in danger. He knows this is quicksand, and he knows something about quicksand. What he knows is that the more he struggles, the deeper he will get. He’ll simply wriggle himself into the sand. He holds his body as still as he can, one leg thigh deep, the other knee deep, in the wet sand. He’s not sinking. Good. Slowly he tries to reach round to the solid sand behind him – it cannot be more than a metre away can it? But just twisting round that much is enough to loosen the sand around him and he is pulled deeper, the cold seeping through the crotch of his jeans.

He begins to shout for help.

**

We’ll have to leave him there for now, but I will write again soon.

Love from Alex

Not about running

2010-06-23T10:41:00.011+01:00

It's not about running,
It's not about pushing,
It's not about shouting,
It's not about bombing,
It's not about petting,
It's not about ducking.

I'm currently working on a project in Lisbon called Learning to Swim. I've contributed some text and officially I am offering "dramaturgical support". We sometimes refer to this as "sticking an oar in".

The project is being made in a derelict swimming pool - Piscina Municipal Do Areeiro. When I was here two weeks ago, it looked like this:

(there are more images of the pool in it's found state on our Flickr pages here).

Learning To Swim started life in the early discussions for Off The White, a piece I made with Paula Diogo as part of Teatro Praga's Shall We Dance project. Slightly confusingly, Off The White took its name from a short story I wrote about jumping off a high diving board - because Paula liked it - which later turned up in Words & Pictures. However, Off The White, the performance, was not about diving boards but instead inspired by my obsession with Empty Benches. An edited version of it also turned up as a chapter in Words & Pictures, under the title Benchers.

(This is an extreme example of the confusion that can occur when a title has to be committed to some time in advance of making the work.)

In discussing themes for what our Shall We Dance piece might be about by email, we hit on the fact that Paula has never learned to swim. And as Off The White went off on a tangent to be about benches, we knew that there was another show we were interested in making. The texts I have contributed to Learning to Swim are my half of a series of letters to/from Paula about that initial discovery, and thoughts about water, swimming, dancing, learning, teaching, leading and following.

When I arrived at the piscina that we are making the show for on Tuesday evening, some of the performers were assembled in the pool playing a song. Listening, I was thinking that it sounded familiar, wondering if it was a cover version. Then I realised that it was one of the texts that I had written, adapted into lyrics. I was surprised how well they scanned.

When I was in the process two weeks ago, we were juggling material created at several different stages of making the work, in both swimming pools and rehearsal studios, and responding, naturally, to the environment of this particular pool. The material that felt the strongest was that which seemed to be born out of the actual site, whilst exploring our original themes.

It felt like we had a really strong opening (a tour of the site coupled with a found text of the rules for using the pool, now strange and melancholy when heard amongst the debris of the vandalised site) and ending, a generous invitation to the audience to join in a (water-free) sort-of-pool-party. In between these two was a shifting playlist of texts and material, all of which we were interested in but weren't quite hanging together. We were exploring what behaviour works in this empty pool - do we still try to treat it as a pool (like some sort of leisure-activity-reenacting society in a water-scarce future), or respond to it more as an interesting split level space which allows performers to disappear and reappear using the pool steps.

I particularly liked a moment where, all leaping in, they treated the pool as a pool, but on foot, running lengths and widths, going off at diagonals to find the steps, hanging out in the deep and shallow ends, their whooping voices echoing off the hard surfaces. We talked about allowing the audience to watch as if they were indeed spectators in a public pool, letting their attention wander across many activities happening in front of them. Finding their own points of focus. The issue was that just six performers struggled to produce enough activity for this to work.

Lessons worth learning more than once: It is always interesting being an occasional visitor to a devising process. Watching a run through on that first evening back at the pool, it felt like the show has come into focus. That they have found what it is. There's not that much that's new. In fact, there's less material there. Within the material we had, they have found the frame of the show, and stripped away the material that doesn't work within it. The work is much simpler now, purer, and responds much more clearly to the space; but also, it feels to me, that it responds more definitely to the original impetus.

They've made a few interventions into the space, cleaned just the pool itself, refined the opening tour. And they treat pool as a pool. Without water. As Paula said to me before I watched my first full rehearsal, "It's a lot about running, now."

ARENA Festival - 20 Years

2010-06-13T22:29:00.002+01:00

Back in 1999 we took our show Shallow Water to the Arena Festival in Erlangen, having been seen at the Diskurs Festival in Geissen the previous year. Both are international theatre festivals produced by students, and my experience of both, particularly considering that the team that runs each festival changes each year, is that they are fantastic. Both festivals boast an impressive alumni of international theatre makers.

In 2001 I was invited back to Arena as a member of the jury, which was a great experience. The 20th edition of Arena opens this week, and I was asked to contribute something to a book of memories of the festival. Here's what I sent them:

I remember that it was hot that week – and the hotel staff thought I was mad to want to go in the sauna after I had been out for a run. The evenings were warm, and our jury discussions were usually outside.

I remember that every show we saw was distinct – a different genre and a different venue. I remember that I liked all of the shows. I remember the five – I think it was five? - of us sitting around a high café bar table, wondering how on earth we could choose a “winner” out of such a varied selection. We decided that our criteria would be the show that best passed the test it had set itself. We wondered if we were “allowed” to give the prize to the co-production between Akhe and the Arena team. But we had been sent to see it, and, by the criteria we had chosen, and in fact by most criteria we could come up with, it was the “winner”. And it was a great show. I still remember the thrill of the moment the seating bank moved for the first time, and realising that this weird Russian welding show we were watching was just the first part of something much bigger.

I think back on that week fondly. A great festival.

Work in Progress at Pazz

2010-06-09T11:16:00.003+01:00

This is a short interview and documentation with me, about What I Heard About The World work-in-progress at PAZZ Festival, from Artmetropol.tv.