The Dust Archive: Second Printing

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

Words & Pictures: Second Printing

Words & Pictures has been through several versions now - two different work-in-progress formats at Forest Fringe and Fix, and then the "finished" presentations in Sheffield and Leeds last October and November.

In the work-in-progress versions we were just trying out different sections, and not worrying too much about the format, or frame, of the show. When we presented the work as part of Off The Shelf in Sheffield, the format borrowed from the idea of a short-story collection, bringing together new material with elements that had been previously "published" elsewhere (as discussed in this earlier post). In the context of a Festival of Writing and Reading, this quite disparate evening of readings worked quite nicely, with the different modes and voices giving the evening variety.

But once we moved this version into a touring theatre context as part of the Leeds Met Studio Theatre programme, we found this eclecticism to be more problematic. The show felt a little ramshackle - we no longer understood what the frame of it was. Despite our introduction explaining that there was no connection between the different sections, audience members told us that they couldn't help but look for connections and themes.

Presenting the work at Prema last month, coupled with an improvised writing workshop, allowed us to rework the piece in a new context. The new version - revised and updated, if you will - now borrows more from the form of an (unfinished) autobiography rather than a short story collection. It goes back to the solo version of the work presented at Forest Fringe last summer, but also draws much more conspicuously on the installation Chapters From The Unfinished Book Of My Life Story.

This structure, which allows for some new material, also feels leaner and more cohesive, and makes more sense to us. This is the version we'll be showing at the National Review of Live Art this week. I'm looking forward to it.

The Dust Archive

I've written a few times recently (on this blog, and on The Culture Vulture blog) about the closing down of the spaces that I think of as Leeds Met Gallery and Studio Theatre.

This time last year, Annie Lloyd, Director of the Gallery & Studio Theatre, and I completed a book called The Dust Archive: A History of Leeds Met Studio Theatre. Earlier this year I quoted my introduction to the book here.

Tonight we finally launch the book, and it will be available for purchase after Christmas, I believe. To mark the launch, here are few pages from the book chosen at random. You don't get the full effect without having the book in front of you, but if you click on the images you'll see them in more detail.

Although the future of the Gallery & Studio Theatre programmes is still uncertain, I hope the book stands as celebration of an amazing body of work, presented within the Studio Theatre and beyond its walls.

Memories of Spaces

I was invited by The Culture Vulture to write something for their Speakers Corner page. My recent post about Leeds Met Gallery got me thinking again about how we remember different spaces, and so I decided to expand on that a little.

You can read Memories of Spaces here.

Words & Pictures: Introduction, Contents, Acknowledgements

Words & Pictures is one of those projects where I find it tricky to pinpoint how/where it began. We’ve been working with the Off The Shelf Festival of Writing and Reading for a number of years now. Third Angel showed Pills For Modern Living as part of the festival (and in conjunction with ArtSheffield) in 2001. Chris Hall and I have made a number of installation and performance pieces for them since then, all of them exploring the significance of writing and reading in our own lives, from postcards to comics to books.

One of those installations, Chapter Titles From The Unwritten Book Of My Life Story (2005), was itself inspired by the making of The Lad Lit Project in 2004. In researching that show I asked men what they would call the chapters in the unwritten books of their life stories, and as part of that experiment I wrote a list of the chapter titles from my own life. When Chris was editing documentation of an early work in progress of The Lad Lit Project, in which titles were written in chalk on to, and then washed off, blackboards, he discovered the speeded up evaporation effect that then inspired our installation piece. We filmed me writing up and washing off all of the chapter titles from my list - with me self editing and re-writing as I went. Chris then removed me completely in the edit suite, leaving a series of vanishing chapter titles to be projected onto a blackboard.

A couple of those chapters had in fact already been written, and I still have the list as a kind of ‘writing to do list’ – or a 'waiting for inspiration and/or time' list. Although they wouldn’t flow together as a narrative whole, I imagine that eventually they would hang together as an autobiography of sorts. Most of them are still to be written (or written down at least), but the idea is there.

On top of these chapters, we have, unsurprisingly, built up a small a collection of text pieces that were written for other projects and didn't quite fit the 'finished' version of the show, even though we liked them. Over the years a few of these have stuck around, kept our interest - but they haven't found a home - yet.

More recently I was talking to Pat at Studio Dust, who designed the Third Angel website, and some of our print. Dust have done some really nice work in collaboration with other artists, producing books and paper/card objects. I really like the fact that whilst they do a lot of work digitally, they also have their own silk screen press in their workspace. Pat and I were talking about the images on our Flickr photostream, and he said, “We should do a book together.”

“Great,” I said, “what would be in it?”

“Your words and your pictures,” said Pat, “and we’ll design it.”

We liked, of course, the idea of doing a book. And it was natural that we would want to work with Off The Shelf to launch it. However, as a way of interrogating the material for the book, we’re doing the book reading first.

**

So, Words & Pictures, at this stage, is a theatrical short story collection, made up of material Rachael and I have produced for a variety of contexts over the last few years.

The Office Texts were originally written during the making of Believe The Worst in 2001, these monologues proved to be a bit too real-world to fit into the dark reality of that show.

Empty Benches and Benchers between them chart the development of an obsession. Starting on our travels for Pleasant Land we began noticing, and then photographing, empty solitary benches. Several years later I found myself collaborating with Paula Diogo, then of Teatro Praga, for their invited-artist-duets project “Shall We Dance IV”. Paula and I continued researching benches and collecting other people’s bench stories, compiling our findings into a performance piece (named slightly confusingly after a different short chapter) Off The White.

A version of Empty Benches was published in the limited edition artist's book, Slow, edited and bound by Ian Abbott; it was performed as part of the Café Scientifique/Art Science Encounters 'How To Be Creative' event, earlier this year. Benchers was reworked from its full length version to be a 6 minute 40 second Peachy Coochy presentation at NRLA earlier this year, and has now been reworked and slightly extended again; Benchers is co-written with Paula and a number of contributing benchers.

It Starts With The Dice was originally written, at the request of Teresa Brayshaw, for May Day Conversations at Leeds Met University earlier this year, specifically an hour of hobby-horses. I took the prompt fairly literally and used it as a chance to get down one of those chapters from the list. A short piece about hobbies, games, friendship, attention to detail and pedantry.

Dark is an extract from a new piece in development.

Dead Jellyfish is a new piece developed specifically for Words & Pictures. It started off as a (very) short chapter from the list. When I presented it to Rachael recently she suggested that there was more to be said about it. She was right. There’s a lot more to be said about dead jellyfish strewn on the shore of a Scottish loch than you might initially suppose.

Songmap is our contribution to our good friends Unlimited Theatre’s ongoing Mixtape project, for which a range of artists are being asked to choose a favourite song and set stage action of some kind to it. Ultimately the aim is to have a “a whole tape’s worth” of performances. We’ll be unveiling Songmap, and revealing our chosen song at the first performances of Words & Pictures in Sheffield and Leeds. Making Songmap has been a really interesting process for us – deserving of its own blog entry, I think, so more on that soon.

So finally, for this post, thanks to Off The Shelf, The Showroom Cinema, Leeds Met Gallery & Studio Theatre, Studio Dust, Unlimited Theatre, and all of the people who have fed ideas into the development of Words & Pictures, either in the making processes of the individual pieces, or as audience members at the work-in-progress showings at Forest Fringe and FIX09 over the summer.

**

UPDATE: there is a "Second Printing" update about Words & Pictures in a later blog post, here.

Leeds Met Gallery

Last chance to see... Leeds Met Studio Theatre – the space, not the programme – has closed down now. Along with the rest of the building it is housed in, H Block, it is being decommissioned, and this season’s programme, as exciting as ever (and of which we are pleased to be a part with Words & Pictures), is taking place up the road at University of Leeds’ Theatre Workshop. (Full details here).

But round the corner and down the corridor, Leeds Met Gallery – the venue and the programme – is currently hosting its final exhibition in its current space. Or should that be spaces? The final exhibitions (Souvenir, Old Wars New Wars and As Long As It Lasts) really show off one of the things that is unique about this venue; these three spaces - all accessed through the same double doors - all feel so distinct.

When we made Pleasant Land for Leeds Met Gallery in 2004 (co-commissioned by Shooting Live Artists), this gave us the opportunity to make three separate but linked pieces. In the front gallery, with a glass wall, we were able to grow a turf map of England:



It grew really well, apart from a single strip which seemed to correspond to the M1/A1 corridor. The turf map was surrounded by lightbox maps of the travels we had undertaken as part of the project so far:

Pleasant Land travels lightbox map: Land's End
(click to view full size)

In the back room - the double height space - we had the space to construct our own room, designed to house the audience, with space surrounding it for window-viewed video pieces, mini sculptural installations and performance.

Pleasant Land: Queuing

In the upstairs space, which overlooks the double-height space in places, but can be curtained off to be self-contained, we created a study room where audiences could contribute to the ongoing research for the project.

For a space with such strong character, it is also very flexible, and an important decision for artists occupying it is how separate to keep the three rooms. It can feel pretty open plan, or the three rooms can be made distinct with curtains and partitions, and smaller spaces can be made, of course (as the Gallery provided for Christopher Hall and I when we showed Reading & Writing there earlier this year).

An important experience for me was seeing Forced Entertainment's Ground Plans For Paradise, back in 1994, which used the spaces really well. The photographs of sleeping people that were exhibited at normal exhibition height in the upstairs gallery continued around the walls, over the balcony open to the double-height room, and around its far walls - so you were able to see some of the sleepers close up, but others only at a distance (from the balcony or from the ground). The double-height space was home to the beautiful, glowing balsa-wood city - which could also be explored up close up at ground level or viewed at a distance from above. On Saturdays the front gallery, viewable from inside or through the windows, was site of a durational, eyes-closed performance element.

The current exhibitions, which run until 17 October, use the three rooms differently again, and quietly commemorate the end of their lives as exhibition spaces. If you're in Leeds, or Yorkshire, it's worth making a last visit. Maybe see you there.

In the room

Rachael and I have done a little work on Words & Pictures separately up to now, but today was the first day on it together, and it felt good. We’re not making this piece in a solid block of rehearsal time; more checking in with each other, trying stuff out, setting ourselves writing and re-writing work to do before we meet again. As we would expect, this process is partly decided upon, partly discovered – “ah, that’s how we make this piece.”

Words & Pictures, at the moment, takes the form of a book reading for a book that does not exist. A collection of texts that might be in our book if we had got around to writing it. We’ve had some material ear-marked for this piece for a while, but for today’s session we also dug out a few other texts that were offshoots of other projects that we wanted to do more with; sections that we liked, perhaps, for what they were, but that didn’t fit, it seemed, with the show that they were initially written for. Some texts we worked with today were not originally intended to be performed – but then, that’s what a book reading is, isn’t it?

As we would also expect there was some thinking today about what the rules of the piece are – is a text allowed in if it has already been performed as part of another show? – but mainly it was an enjoyable day of try-outs and discussion – finding out what connections there are between pieces, what stands up well, what we’re less interested in now, what development, re-writing, cutting and expanding needs to be done.

So we've got a playlist of possibles, edits and re-writes up on the blackboards in our workspce. Next session will be about considering these re-writes and looking at the new pieces we’re developing specifically for Words & Pictures.

Leeds Met Gallery and Studio Theatre

It has been announced this week that the building that houses Leeds Met Gallery and Studio Theatre is to be decommissioned this autumn.  We knew it was coming, but I, at least,  had understood the schedule to mean closure in 2011.

The Gallery & Studio Theatre team are about to begin a consultation process with the University to discuss the future of the organisation.  They are asking for letters and emails of support, to express the importance of the venues to their audience, partners and artists.  If you'd like to write something, the address is: gallerytheatre [at] leedsmet.ac.uk.

The Gallery and Studio Theatre has been massively important to Third Angel throughout our career.  As well as currently exhibiting in the Gallery with Christopher Hall, I have recently completed a book with Annie Lloyd, Director of the Gallery and Studio Theatre.  Entitled The Dust Archive, the book records some of the memories of the performances Annie and I have seen, programmed and presented inside, and beyond, the Studio Theatre space itself.  At Third Angel we're hoping that the consultation and development process will forge an exciting future for the Gallery and Studio Theatre, and it seems fitting, therefore, to post my introduction to The Dust Archive here, addressing, as it does, our relationship with the Studio Theatre itself:

It’s hard to quantify just how important this space has been to Third Angel.  We have presented every piece of work we’ve made for theatre spaces here.  We’ve made work uniquely for this space and its sister gallery.  We’ve had some of our best and one of our worst ever gigs here.  We’ve seen work here - work that has moved us, inspired us, entertained us, challenged us.   And we’ve talked about work here - work we’ve made and work we’ve seen.  This space has been a constant in our planning and thinking for over thirteen years.

It has been a bittersweet joy remembering moments of performance for this project.  This space won’t be here for much longer, and compiling this book with Annie has helped me understand its significance - both to myself as an artist and to the alternative theatre sector in the UK.  It’s not that big; in fact it is one of the smallest spaces we tour to.  But boy, does it punch above its weight.  Work shown and developed here has toured across the UK, across Europe, across the world. 

In autumn 2000 we were at Leeds Met Studio Theatre with Where From Here, in many ways a coming-of-age show for Third Angel.  Rachael, Jerry, Jim and I are in the dressing room, getting ready for the second performance.  Someone is reading the paper - a story about how British Theatre is ‘in crisis’.  Again.  Well, Jerry observes dryly, it wasn’t in crisis in here last night, was it?

Not here, not last night, nor any night that I recall.