SONGMAP: A Gift For GIFT

This weekend is GIFT (Gateshead International Festival of Theatre) weekend. We have had some fantastic times at GIFT: showing our work, sharing workshops, experiencing other artists' work. We are proud to have shown work at every incarnation of this great festival.
This year it's a ‪#‎GIFTGathering‬. Here is our ‪#‎GIFTforGIFT‬, our short film, SONGMAP, made with/for Arab Strap's The First Big Weekend, available to watch for free for this weekend only!

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Programme Notes on the making of Songmap are here:
http://thirdangeluk.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/mixtape-songmap.html

Songmap features The First Big Weekend by Arab Strap. 
Words and music by Malcolm Middleton and Aidan Moffat. 
Courtesy of Chemikal Underground.

Live performance devised and performed by Alexander Kelly and Rachael Walton.
Film version directed and edited by Christopher Hall.
Additional camerawork by Alexander Unwin.

Songmap is Third Angel's contribution to Unlimited Theatre's Mixtape project. www.unlimited.org.uk

The film is available online for 3 days, 1-3 May 2015, as a #GiftForGIFT.

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Supported by Leeds Met Studio Theatre, Off The Shelf Festival of Words & Sheffield Hallam University.
Special thanks to Stewart Henderson, Malcolm Middleton and Aidan Moffat.

Monthly Film: TESTCARD POLAROIDS

Looking back, twice.

In October 1995, Third Angel presented its first piece of work, Testcard. (You can read more about its origins, here.)

A pretty big show for a first project. A 72 hour durational performance for The Workstation in Sheffield. Two performers (Rachael Walton and Phil Richford) lived in the public gaze for three full days and nights; you could visit them live in The Workstation foyer, 9am – 9pm, watch them through the windows at night, as they slept, or check up on the via “CCTV” video links in shops and cafés around the city.

They lived in long thin rooms, with clear plastic walls, separated by a corridor. Each had their own little kitchen area, bed, living room, TV. They watched endless rolling news channels, computer game animations, CCTV footage of each other and the audience; they had newspapers and pizzas delivered.

For one hour each evening, a ticketed, rehearsed performance evolved out of the durational piece, Testcard Stories: new video work, distorted film dialogues, long lists, quiet monologues.

A big project for a first show. We called in all of the favours we had earned in the two years we'd been in Sheffield, and spent a lot of favours we hadn't yet earned. We got a small grant from Sheffield City Council's much missed Community Arts Fund, loads of equipment and technical support from the northern media school, and trust and respect from The Workstation.

Somehow the show caught the zeitgeist and we found ourselves on page 5 of the Guardian, part of the local news questioning if it was art and discussing the possibility of hosting an edition of TV-am - which sadly (?) didn't happen.

Phil’s task was arguably the toughest one. Just live, and watch this weird TV channel we had created for him. Ignore the audience completely. Rachael’s task was to turn the gaze back on the audience, and to document the people who watched her. She took a Polaroid photograph of as many of her visitors as she could over the three days.

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In 2002 Third Angel moved into our own studio space in Brookfield Yard in Nether Edge. Sorting through the hoarded gear from many shows, we came across the collection of Polaroids taken during Testcard. Chris suggested we document Rachael looking through them, remembering what she could about them, and the audience who came to see her.

Strangely enough, we’re now looking back at this film, over a longer time than Rachael was looking back at the Polaroids. A strange, genre-defying piece, at least in part about Chris’ exploration of form, and questioning of what can be documentary/documentation, as much as it is about the original show.

Naturally, I asked him to reflect on the film making itself. Over to Chris:

As you can probably tell, we shot it quickly with not much equipment. What you see was the end to quite a long process of working with the Polaroids and understanding how they could best be represented on the screen. Before we sat down in the rehearsal space in Nether Edge, a few days after the move from the Site Gallery, there had been a few attempts at making a short film based on the pictures. They were clearly all dead ends whilst I was making them and I didn’t show them to anyone else. I shot them on VHS and then degraded the image even further – shot them on dv and then saturated the colours to the point of incomprehensibility. Looking for a way of making sense of the images, their tactile quality and the aesthetic of the Polaroid* that is rapidly fading from our collective memory. 

It was clear, in the edit suite, staring at another dead end of ideas, that memories were the way into the Polaroids.  

I’m on one of the Polaroids and that Polaroid was in the film, then out, then in, then out. I don’t remember the final reason why I went out – it may well have been to keep the time to a certain defined length. 

With much of the film work, they often appear, in retrospect, to be sign posts on the way to somewhere else. Testcard Polaroids has echoes in the most recent piece, Postcards From Florence, that we screened last September in Sheffield’s Light Night. If you know some of the other work then you’ll be able to recognise its imprint on those as well. 

That’s not to say that this was the somehow the progenitor of the memory based pieces, it’s more of an early try out of ideas had been kicked about for a while. 

Watching it now makes me want to make another thing in 4:3 on low grade mini dv, before that aesthetic too begins to fade.

*Alex’s footnote: I remember that we got given a load of Polaroid film at knock down prices by Harrisons Photography in Sheffield. These are the “Party Polaroids” with the balloon borders…

**

Testcard Polaroids

A film by Chris Hall

Featuring Rachael Walton

Testcard was created by

Rachael Walton

Phil Richford

Alexander Kelly

Robert Hardy

Chris Hall

David Mitchell

Hilary Foster

Jacqui Bellamy

Emer O’Sullivan

with a lot of favours from friends and colleagues.

Monthly Film: SENSELESS

This month's film is a delve into the archives. Documentation of one of our earliest durational performances, Senseless, created in collaboration with Arnolfini, Bristol, and The Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield.

This is the text of a talk I've given about Senseless over the years.

Senseless at Arnolfini, January 1998

We build three corridors. They are 30' long and 4' wide. The walls are made of translucent plastic, the ends covered by solid wooden board, the sort you get on building sites.

In each corridor we place a performer. We blindfold them and leave them inside for ten hours a day, for three days. As they move about the corridors, they trigger overhead security lights, like you get outside a house, next to the garage.

We can see the performers through the walls of the corridors: when they are close to the plastic we can see them quite clearly. As they move away, they become out of focus. It's sort of like the frosted glass in a bathroom window.

In the doors at each end of each corridor, set at different heights, are three fish-eye security viewers, sort of like the ones you get in front doors in high-rise flats. Looking through these you can see the performers live, the perspective accentuated by the black and white checked lino on the floor, like in a kitchen.

Corridor One is the Heartbeat Corridor. The performer wears headphones, listening to the sound of their own heartbeat, measuring time. Every hour they put a notch into the leg of their wooden chair with a Stanley knife. Outside the corridor, next to the spy-holes, hangs a set of headphones, allowing the audience to listen to the performer's heartbeat with them.

Corridor Two is the Rooms Corridor. At each end there are headphones, through which we can listen to the performer, who is speaking very quietly into a microphone taped to their face. This is an audio close up to contrast with the wide shot presented by fisheye lenses in the spy-holes. The performer's job is to describe, in as much detail as they can, every room that they have ever lived in, and then to invent their ideal bedroom, bathroom or kitchen. As they describe these rooms, they draw them in marker pen onto the walls of the corridor.

Corridor Three is the Photographs Corridor. The Performer is armed with Polaroid Camera, and a Dymo Sticky Label maker. Each hour the performer takes a Polaroid of their environment, and then, still blindfold, they print out a label for it, letter by letter. They hang the labelled picture in front of one of the spy-holes at the end of the corridor.

It is noon on Friday the 23 January 1998. Rachael, Heather and Jamie are in their corridors. Our friend, photographer Helen Sharma, is in the space armed with a digital stills camera. Every hour we will upload three photographs of the installation onto the Internet. The soundtrack, by Sheffield composer John Avery, begins, combining ambient music with sounds of the outside world: church bells, a police siren, wind and rain, a Tibetan monk singing...

We open the doors to the small audience that is waiting. The corridors glow with security light as the performers go about their tasks. For the next three, ten-hour, days, I watch the audience as much as the performers.

The performers get bored, pissed off, a little hysterical, tearful, desperate for a fag, lonely. On the first day, over the ten hours, two of them use the secret escape password: Is there anybody there? to be let out to go to the toilet. On the second day we prescribe a ten-minute break, five hours in. On the last day Heather and Rachael stay inside all day, but Jamie has to be let out three times.

The audience come and go. They begin touching the performers through the plastic, stroking their heads, playing follow-my-lead games. Unnervingly, quite a few people get into power games with the blindfolded, imprisoned performers: trying to beat them in the hand chasing games, pushing against them through the plastic in some sort of show of strength. The performers, it seems to me, are often treated more like animals than people.

Some people do talk to them, ask them both banal and fundamental questions about the work, or about life. They play music to the performers, through personal stereo headphones. Some of them find cannot leave. Many of them come back, later that day, or the next. One man goes home, downloads a photo from the Internet, and writes us a poem underneath it, prints it out and brings it in for us the next day.

The blindfold drawings of rooms are quite beautiful and the audience co-operate to view this corridor, the person with headphones relaying what is being described to other people watching the drawing ten feet away. But it becomes apparent that this is the hardest corridor to occupy: the pressure is to talk constantly; describing rooms they lived in as children, the performers stumble across memories that are perhaps better dealt with in a less public arena. This corridor has the most tears.

Each day the audience thins out between 7 and 8 pm, and the performers go off duty, coming to rest in their corridors like giant stick insects, bored and hungry. As the end of the day nears, the audience picks up again, people who came at lunchtime, and then after work, come in as part of their night out.

They want to see the performers get released, to see what state they are in, but we don't let them. We close the doors to the public each night, before opening up the corridors at 10pm and letting the performers out. 

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Third Angel presents Senseless

Devised, Designed and Performed by Heather Burton, Jamie Iddon, Alexander Kelly and Rachael Walton
Photography by Kate Boddington, Robert Hardy and Helen Sharma
Directed by Alexander Kelly and Rachael Walton

Documentation by Christopher Hall & Alexander Kelly

Special thanks to Bridget Mazzey

Commissioned by Arnolfini Live and the Mappin Art Gallery. Funded by Yorkshire & Humberside Arts and Sheffield City Council. Supported by Gremlin Interactive, DED Associates, the northern media school, SYM and SIF.

Monthly Film: AN ACQUIRED TASTE

The Dog and Partridge, Sheffield. December 2003.

"I've heard - and it's probably an urban myth - that the best way of acquiring a taste for Guinness, is to drink three pints of it as fast as you possibly can."

A real task, performed for the first time. In a pub, with friends. Somewhere in between documentary and documentation of live performance, An Acquired Taste is a touching film about what we carry with us from our childhood to our adulthood. About family. And about drinking.

An Acquired Taste (2003)
A film by Christopher Hall & Alexander Kelly
Photography by Robert Hardy & Hilary Foster
Sound by David Mitchell & Jacqui Bellamy
Funded by Arts Council England, Yorkshire and supported by Site Gallery, Sheffield.

Programme Notes

ALEX: The idea to do this – the drinking-three-pints-to-acquire-the-taste-for-Guinness idea – originally came up as something to do in a show. I can’t remember what process it came up in for the very first time, but I think the fact that it only made sense to do it once – it only makes sense the “first time” – meant we didn’t pursue it for that project. It felt too stand-alone.

It came in to my mind again in 1999, when I was part of the Legacy Project at Arnolfini and Prema (a brilliant experience with 6 other artists, about which there is more to be written at some point), which was planned to conclude with a one-off, unrepeatable performance. So an action that could “only be performed once” seemed appropriate, and I remember talking to Ju Row Far about it. But that project went off on its own direction, and the three pints idea didn’t fit.

After that I remember thinking that as the action was only significant when performed for the first time, then I should probably perform it for camera. In 2002, Chris and I had recorded me reading a set of postcardsthat my dad had sent me from America when I was a kid, and I thought that a similar set up would work for the Guinness drinking: a bare space, me and the pints, and then, using a workshop/devising task format we find useful, perform the task then immediately talk about the experience - reflect out loud without planning what to say.

I talked to Chris about it and he immediately said yes, we should do it, but that we should do it in a pub and invite friends, and most importantly, get my dad along. It was this instinct of Chris’ that makes this into a film, for me, rather than documentation of a performance event, or live art for camera – though it obviously contains those things.

We went to one of the two (I think) real Irish pubs in Sheffield, the Dog & Partridge, one Sunday lunchtime.

CHRIS: Alex asked me to write about An Acquired Taste for the blog. I like reading about films, I like watching and talking about them and I really like making them. The fact that I’ve written two articles in over twenty years of making them is an indication that I’m not so keen on writing about them. As with Pills, we’ve spoken a fair bit over the last decade about the how and why, so as with the Pills blog entry I thought I’d share some stuff that you may not have heard or read before today.

We shot a full technical rehearsal the day before, on location, without extras using blackcurrant cordial instead of Guinness. I’ve never viewed the tapes, but they’re labeled and stored in the archive right next to the actual tapes that were used in the final film.

ALEX: This is news to me. Was I there?

CHRIS: A sixth camera was used on the day of the shoot but went into auto-shut down mode just before we started, we turned it on again but forgot to check focus. The footage was unusable.

As soon as Alex said “I’ll share it with you, Dad” I knew I had my last line. I tried various endings out during the editing, but always this was the ending with resonance and truth.

There are a couple of trims throughout the film which mean that the main task of drinking the Guinness doesn’t happen in real time.

ALEX: This is also news to me! We set about filming without knowing how long it would take me to do. There used to be a pub in Sheffield with an Eight Pint Club (or something like that), and their best times were up on the wall in the bar. They were all under an hour, most of them under 20 minutes. The fastest something like 4 minutes. I knew I wouldn’t be anywhere near that league, and in fact it was possible that I would hate the taste so much it would take me over an hour. If that was the case, the plan was to exhibit it as a multi-screen gallery piece, rather than short film. (Respect to Arts Council Yorkshire, and particularly Adrian Friedli, for investing in that risk with us).

CHRIS: Like all of the split-screen work that I do I’m always striving to do something better than Scorsese’s work in the Elvis On Tour film.

ALEX: And that’s the second thing, of course, that makes it the film it is.

CHRIS: The sound that you hear of Alex drinking was made during the final sound mix session in a mixing room in London. It’s the sound of a sound assistant drinking a pint of water.

ALEX: Cheating. And the fruit machine is dubbed on, too, isn’t it?

CHRIS: The moment of silence whilst Alex is drinking the final few gulps is there as one of the audience / friends / supporters gave a loud and disproportionately rousing ‘YESS!’, as Alex finished drinking, unbalancing the tone of the climax.

ALEX: Again, cheating. Or rather, shifting the balance of what the film is about. Although the film is clearly, on one level, about (the act of) drinking, to us it was about more than that. We showed a rough cut to our friend Deborah Chadbourn, who over the years has given us some brilliant advice. She said what she liked about it, as a parent, was watching my dad watch me take the challenge. “Just watching to see how your doing.” When Deborah said that, I knew it had worked, that the task had allowed us to make a film about something bigger.

CHRIS: I hope you enjoy it.

ALEX: Me too. And a final note. One of the things I love about this project, is that as well as the friends who joined us for a drink, the whole core team were long term collaborators who had worked with us on our first two projects (the 72 hour multi media performance Testcard, and the short film With The Light On, in 1995 and 1996): Chris making and editing, David Mitchell and Jacqui Bellamy on sound, Robert Hardy and Hilary Foster on camera.

Monthly Film: PILLS 03:20:00

This month (well, three months in that already seems a bit arbitrary, but anyway), the monthly film is an old favourite that always went down really well at our Playing With Time screenings: Pills 03:20:00.

Back in 2000 we were making a number of projects to do with happiness.  I’d been keeping a list in my notebook of “Modern Pills”, just the titles, things that sounded like they would be useful. I took them in to the making process for Where From Here, and Rachael and Jerry improvised explanations of them – like a TV show. It was funny, but it was like a TV show.

Where From Here is constructed around a series of stories and descriptions of the rooms those stories take place in, told by one performer/character in turn, in order to implicate the other. Jerry came in the next day with a short speech that would work as a solo intro to the Pills sequence – suggesting that they were something the man enjoyed on his own.

For a while we experimented with projecting images of the pills onto the white set, but as the show became lower tech projection was ruled out. But we liked the pictures of the pills, so they became a piece in their own right, Pills For Modern Living, with the text borrowing from the show.

When we came to document the whole piece, we made a full length video of it (90 minutes), and then Chris suggested we make another stand-alone short. We asked him what we had in mind.

Over to Chris:

Alex has just asked me to write a couple of hundred words about Pills. There are quite a lot of facts about the how and the why of this film that we’ve shared over the years, at screenings, in articles and within lectures.  

Here are some bits and bobs about the film that I’ve kept to myself until now: 

From the very first time I saw Jerry do the monologue on stage I thought to myself – that’s a good monologue but I could put it into better order. In all of the stage shows since I've actively looked for monologues which I could adapt into something similar. I’ve only tried it once and that film was screened once (it didn’t work).  

With Pills 03:20:00, and the other two films which have their length in timecode as part of their titles, I genuinely hoped would start a fashion for that kind of titling.  

I’ve never known whether they are real drugs or whether he’s taking the piss out of her.  

The sound design is directly influenced by the title track of the Prince album Lovesexy, and the visuals are influenced by an experimental film that a fellow student made at film school, where a mans heads was shot through a lens with a stocking stretched over it.  

For many years if you'd asked me what the main colour was, I would have said yellow. Until a few years ago I was always surprised when I saw it was blue, and then I would remember all the other times when I'd surprised myself by misremembering. 

For the record, the visuals were achieved (I think) in the end by Chris re-shooting the footage of a TV monitor in the edit suite – possibly onto VHS, or even VHS-C. I seem to remember that VHS was in play a fair bit back then.

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Pills 03:20:00

Performed by Jeremy Killick (with Rachael Walton in there briefly)

Text by Alexander Kelly, Jeremy Killick & Rachael Walton
Directed by Christopher Hall, Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton
Edited by Christopher Hall
Soundtrack by Christopher Hall, David Mitchell & Lee Sykes

Monthly Film: BELIEVE THE WORST

Otherwise known as "the one with the filing cabinets". From 1999 to 2002 we made a new touring theatre show that opened in the autumn and toured through to the following spring. We always recorded full length documentation of them, but would often carry on playing with the video material to create what we referred to as Digital Shorts. Sometimes these pushed the material quite a long way from the original show - sometimes they were brief encapsulations of the shows. This is one of the latter, Believe the Worst in five minutes, brilliantly constructed by Christopher Hall, to extracts from the soundtrack by Lee Sykes.

[Full length DVD of the show, and downloadable soundtrack by Lee Sykes will be available soon].

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Third Angel presents
BELIEVE THE WORST

"Somewhere in the near future, deep within the bowels of the Corporation's business empire, three employees inhabit a grubby little office. It is antiquated, under-resourced and smells slightly of damp. They have been passed over for promotion and forgotten in departmental reshuffles. They work so much overtime that they don't even bother to go home anymore. They have been subsumed by the Corporation to the point where they have forgotten how to speak to one another. Until today."

The original version of Believe The Worst toured the UK in autumn 2001. A reworked and re-written version toured more extensively in spring 2002. This 5 minute short utilises footage from that second version.

Devised by the company
Text by Rachael Walton & the company
Performed by Stewart Lodge, Henry Sargeant & Rachael Walton
Designed and Directed by Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton
Lighting Design by James Harrison
Soundtrack by Lee Sykes at Vortex Music
Management by Hilary Foster
Documentation edited by Christopher Hall
Camera by Chris Greenwood & Alexander Kelly

Touring theatre piece, funded by The Arts Council of England, Yorkshire Arts, Sheffield City Council and the Performing Right Society Foundation. Supported by Site Gallery and The Hawth.