600 People update

The planned first performance of 600 People, as part of Is There Anybody Out There? at The Orangery in Wakefield last month, was snowed off. We weren't sure if we could get all the performers and organisers there, let alone an audience. We talked about it on the Friday afternoon, and decided to make the call on the Saturday morning.

This was a strange experience in terms of performer energy - even once a postponement was looking likely, I had to continue rehearsing as if it was going ahead.  Preparing a new piece has a very different trajectory to touring or reviving a piece, of course. We often (and I'm sure many other theatre makers do, too) talk about a new piece being "ready for an audience". We don't mean it's finished, but rather that we're not going to learn much more about it in the rehearsal room; we need the live response of an audience to give it a new, different energy. We're ready for the clarity and inspiration that performing to people-who-haven't-seen-this-before gives you. 

With 600 People I was ready to perform what I'd got, ready to see what an audience made of it. As the snow continued to fall on the Saturday morning, and news came in of people stranded on motorways, and other shows across Yorkshire getting cancelled, we knew we didn't have any option. 

My planned schedule for this final day had been a couple of runs in the afternoon and then the show. So I postponed all of that last-leg in my head, and it felt weird for the rest of the day. A nice bonus afternoon with the kids. In the evening, I didn't do anything else instead of the show, I just didn't do the show.

This week it was confirmed that Is Anybody Out There? is happening next week - with the same line up, which is great news. In the meantime we've also confirmed that it will go to GIFT in Gateshead in May.

This morning I walked to work, via the dentist, and performed 600 People to myself (either side of a filling). Considering its such a new piece, I was relieved that so much of it was still there, and pleased with how several new - better - phrases and links popped in to my head as I ran it. Another couple of runs like that and it should be ready for an audience.

**

Third Angel presents
600 People
Written & performed by Alexander Kelly
Inspired by conversations with Dr. Simon Goodwin

Is Anybody Out There?
The Orangery
Wakefield
Thursday 18 April, 8pm

GIFT FESTIVAL
Gateshead
Thursday 2 - Sunday 5 May 
Schedule to be announced.

Originally commissioned for Northern Elements, a development programme funded by Arts Council England and managed by ARC, Stockton Arts Centre.

Is There Anybody Out There?

I'm excited that today I start (well, technically, pick-up) work on a new show, 600 People. It's a short piece, premiering at Is There Anybody Out There?, a new spoken-word event at The Orangery in Wakefield, on 23 March at 8pm - featuring some great spoken word artists.

Here's the blurb about 600 People itself:

“We step out of our solar system, into the universe, seeking only peace and friendship...” 

So says the message from the human race on the Voyager spacecraft. But is there, y'know, anyone out there? Alex really wanted to know so he went to speak to an astrobiologist to find out. This is what he learned: Stellar Wobble. Light Clocks. The Mirror Test. The Distance Ladder. And murderous dolphins.

The conversation with Dr Simon Goodwin that inspired 600 People is touched upon in both 9 Billion Miles From Home and Technology, but this is the first time we've really got to explore what Simon told me and how it affected the way I think about the universe.

I'll be talking to Simon some more, and attending a couple of his lectures about astrophysics. No doubt I'll be tweeting about how much of that I understand, hash-tagged #600people.

But if you're in Yorkshire, come along and see us in Wakefield.

Playing Detective (1)

I’m writing this during rehearsals for Slung Low’s 15 Minutes Live. It’s a great event – five new radio plays performed live with and audience, and recorded for podcast. They’ve done two so far, each in a different venue, and this weekend is the third.

At some point last year Alan Lane asked me if'd like to write something for this one. I was chuffed to be asked, as it seemed to tie in with what we’ve been doing with The Machine.  I originally imagined that I’d write something about the Friendly Floatees, a story that I really like but that never found a home in What I Heard About the World. But then the Floatees did turn up in Emergency DrinkingWater, and so I left them there.

I started thinking about developing the idea of the Clues Game that I’ve tried out on Twitter a few times (you can see a Storify of it here). Piecing together the clues of a story. How an object is a clue to numerous plots and narratives. I started calling it Playing Detective.

I started running again last April, after a six year layoff. It took a few weeks to get the rhythm back, but then I started to enjoy the head space it gave me. I found myself writing Playing Detective in my head on these runs. Or rather, and I know this is a cliché, it started to write itself.

If you’ve seen Third Angel's work before, or read this blog, you may well be aware that I have a passing interest in genre fiction. Not just detective novels, but also Lad-Lit. And Playing Detective seemed to jump, or blend, genres. A story appeared unexpectedly, but that seemed to fit, as often detective fiction is about one thing on a plot level, and about something else – a place, or a wider issue – underneath that.

The Clues Game is still in there, but the piece as a whole seems to be as much about remembered experience (no surprises there), about cataloguing and about the people who are such a huge part of your life at a particular age, in a particular time and place, and what it’s like years later when they are no longer around.

Playing Detective is one of five scripts we’re performing tomorrow. I’m in two others, Lullaby by James Phillips and An Anatomy of Grappling by Chris Fittock. They’re both great, really different, and it’s nice to be involved in them as a performer, partly because that helps me to not be the writer (too much) when rehearsing mine. It's interesting, too, to find connections between the three pieces, all written entirely independently. I haven't heard or read them yet, but I’m looking forward to hearing the other two pieces, Judith Adams’ Sista Icarus and Mark Hollander’s The Tragic and Unexpected Conflation of Reuben Fleischman. 

It’s fast and busy work here. As I write this in the kitchen at The HUB, the band are rehearsing the songs for Lullaby in the next room. Food is being prepared, the kettle is always on, and the foley and sound team don't seem to ever get a break. It's not a bad way to spend a Saturday. If you're in Leeds tomorrow, I think it will be a great way to spend a Sunday. Come down.

Postcard from Cove Park

Back in 1995, after we'd made our first show, Testcard, Rachael and I went to Bakewell for the day. We'd been asked to apply for a few commissions, and were getting asked things like "Where do you see the company in five years' time?" by potential funders.

We realised that there was more work to make together, and that we needed to think a bit more about what this collaboration - or company - might be, beyond that first show. We spent the day walking, talking, drinking coffee and eating Bakewell pudding. We set ourselves a five year plan, which we went on to stick to and achieve nearly all of.

In the years that followed, "Doing a Bakewell" became Third Angel shorthand for going and having one of those future planning days. Or, more recently, half-days; there never seemed the time for such long discussions.

That changed this year. The reason it's been quieter on this blog for the last six months is because of the Organisational Development project we've been running. We've been having conversations and making plans: really useful and challenging conversations with consultant/advisors Joanna Ridout and (our board-member) Kamal Birdi, plus a generous group of producers and artists who have given us their time, experience and wisdom for free: thank you Artsadmin, Jo Hammett, Ric Watts, DepArts, Natalie Querol, Sheffield Theatres, Stan's Cafe, Forced Entertainment, Peter Reed, Gary Hills and others we are still to schedule chats with (and others I have no doubt temporarily forgotten). We've got a "fridge door" full of thoughts, realisations and ideas to explore further, along with a new company structure to implement. Fruits of the business developments born of this process will fall into place over the first half of next year.

But without doubt the most significant part of the process was the week Rachael and I spent at Cove Park in September, supported by Fuel Theatre and Cove Park themselves (big thanks to both organisations).

It is a wonderful, inspirational place - just remote enough to give you the isolation from the day-to-day pressures of running a company. There's a communal space with a huge table, library, wifi and computers. The accommodation has no wifi, and no phone signal, but room to talk. And space, amazing views and lots of weather - weather you can see approaching down Loch Long.

At some point that week Rachael said to me something that I've been repeating to people ever since. The value in it was the time it gave us to have "the conversations that are too big for a meeting" - that can't be fitted in to two or three hours, or even a whole day; conversations that can't be restricted by having to make room for other things on the agenda. Conversations that, therefore, get put off.

This space enabled us to have a three- or four- stranded conversation over the five days, pausing one strand to pursue another when needed, recognising that we couldn't always make a decision until something else was discussed. So we got to have, seventeen years down the line, as fundamental a conversation as we had in Bakewell. The decisions we made probably won't seem massive from the outside; nor will they produce a Radical New Direction. But they have clarified things for us, inspired us and given us a renewed energy.

We immediately scheduled another, equally useful, company away day with General Manager Hilary, and put plans in place for this to be a fixture in our annual planning. Get out of the office and walk and talk. For whole days at a time.

It's been a really good year for Third Angel. The tour of What I Heard About the World / Story Map went brilliantly, working at Northern Stage at St. Stephen's was fantastic, The Machine was something quite different for us, and this was all complemented by a series of other repertoire shows and new video work. Education and mentoring projects were rewarding, successful and great fun. We've pretty much made the next show Cape Wrath and have exciting plans in place for the two shows after that... To have the view from Cove Park in addition to all of that makes it feel like 2012 has been a very important year for us.

A massive thank you to all of the other collaborators, supporters, partners, friends and of course audiences who have been part of the last twelve months with us. Happy New Year - we wish you a brave and rewarding 2013.

Character Drama & Happy Accidents

The Machine photographed at GIFT by Richard Kenworthy.

We're about to go into the Crucible Studio for tech set up and rehearsal for The Machine, which we last performed back in May at GIFT. That was only the second time we'd performed it, and so we're still at the stage, in the life of the piece, where we're learning a lot about it each time we present it in a room with an audience.

What became really apparent to us in rehearsing and performing in Gateshead was how much character there is in the System Control and Processor figures. As I've discussed on here before, Perec's text doesn't look like a play-script, more like a diagram or flowchart.

The more we get to know its intricacies, the more we can feel the different personalities of the three Processors. This is in no doubt in part due to the fact that Teresa, Oliver and I are different performers ourselves, and that as audiences we like to find character and narrative in even the most abstract or minimalist material. But after two stagings of the piece we can also see how, despite being computer programmes, Perec gives them different attitudes to the tasks that the System Control presents them with. Indeed, this is where much of the humour in the show comes from.

We've always enjoyed the way even System Control loses her objectivity as the show unfolds, and we begin to get a sense of her personality and desires beneath the rules and instructions. There is a notable moment in the latter half of the show when she abandons being the instructor, and joins in the games she is instigating.

Chris Hall, who originated the project for Third Angel, mentioned this recently to Ulrich Schönherr, the translator, who explained that actually, this unusual action by the System Control is in fact a formatting error. In the reworking of Ulrich's text for publication, something slipped in the typesetting phase, and the dialogue on that particular page falls into the wrong column - is therefore allocated to the wrong voice. He sent Chris a pdf with the original formatting for him to see how it differs. Chris observed that we would revert to this, unpublished version to be closer to Perec's orignal intention.

But no. Ulrich assured Chris that we didn't need to do that: we should take the published version as the definitive version of the script, he explained, even though it isn't what Perec originally wrote. Given the games that Perec plays with Goethe's poetry in the show, this reformatting of the content of the script feels to me like an entirely, appropriately, Perecian piece of constructed serendipity. In fact, Ulrich has also pointed out to us that there is no definitive version of the text, because he wasn't aways working from Perec's original text. He was often working from his own transcript of the original German radio broadcast. And again, the Chinese-whispers nature of the translation process echoes the deconstructions that The Machine itself employs. Or is employed to perform. I know that Chris and Rob Barker are keen to explore a bit further when Rob chairs our post-show discussion event on Tuesday (an Off The Shelf Festival event). 

We've been asked by a couple of people about the fact that we're "doing a text" with this piece, and about how typical, or not, it is of what we do.  The short answer to the latter question is that I suppose it is typically atypical. It is deliberately different to what else we're currently doing.  

Thinking about the staging of a radio play, and what we're bringing to it visually - given that it is designed to work only as words and sounds that you hear. We understand now that what we do is create the space - the Machine itself, perhaps, as some viewers have read it - and bring the audience in to that space with us. The first thing we've actually done is strip away all the visual noise that you can get when actually listening to a play on the radio - the road, the traffic, the kitchen, the street, whatever else you're doing - and invite the audience to really enjoy concentrating on the text. 

And of course, as we're discovering each time we perform it, we bring more of the characters. We're able, by physically putting them in front of the audience, to play with the ambiguity of the person-alities of the computer processors. 

The Crucible is, of course, our new company home, and its Studio is the first already-in-the-round space we've taken the piece into, so we know we can do more with sound, too. I realised, driving home to Sheffield this afternoon, that I'm really looking forward to hearing and seeing it again.

Happy?

Third Angel presents

Happy?

Devised & Directed by Oliver Bray, Christopher Hall & Rachael Walton

Camera: Dominic Green

Sound: Luke Pietnik

Production Assistant: Matt Sturdy

Collaborating Producer (University of Sheffield): Professor Peter Totterdell

General Manager (Third Angel): Hilary Foster
Funded by ESRC Grant EROS (RES-060-25-0044)

Back in 2004 we started collaborating with Peter Totterdell and Christine Sprigg, (amongst others) at the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield, on the research project Karoshi. Some of the work that came out of that collaboration is discussed in detail in the lecture Testing the Hypothesis, here.

The conversation has continued, with regular (if not as frequent as we would all like) coffee meetings to discuss what we're all up to. Recently Peter asked us if we would like to make something in response to the themes of his current research into emotion, specifically the content of his new book (edited with Karen Niven) Should I Strap a Battery to My Head? (And Other Questions About Emotion).

We were really pleased to have the opportunity, and making the film sat somewhere between an art/science collaboration and making a video commissioned by a client. It was great, too, to be able to invite Oliver Bray, who is currently working with us on The Machine, to be part of the process of making Happy?

The book and the film were launched at an Off the Shelf event earlier this month. Afterwards, Chris sent me over these thoughts on making the piece:

"I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."  Italo Calvino 

In some of Third Angel's film work I try my utmost to do the same. Sometimes I've spoken of this as artifice or stylisation. The removal of all artifice from the language and structure of the film, so that the final piece feels as if it just happened, right there in front of the audiences eyes.
Sometimes these have been the most difficult piece to make and somewhat counter intuitively the most enjoyable. 

Making Happy?, along with adapating the rich vein of content from the source material, the challenge for this film was capturing the performances from Oliver and Rachael. What you see in the final piece is the result of an intense, structured and rigourous devising, improvising and writing.

Asking Oliver and Rachael to repeat their performances, again and again and again, for the camera, often felt, from my point of view, as if I was undermining what they had just done, which I often thought was remarkable. But on the shoot we were finding new truths and rhythms that hadn't been there in the rehearsal room and I felt strongly that we should investigate these aspects of the piece fully on the day of the shoot.

Does it go without saying that we also had a great time on set? It wasn't all chin rubbing and earnest debate. Perhaps the biggest issue among the crew was not to allow our laughter to be heard off camera.

To paraphrase, sort of, a friend of Calvino's, Marcel Benabou from WhyI have not written any of my books. The other truth of what the shoot was like lies in the the rushes that weren't used. The multitude of alternate endings, the improvisations around tea that went on until one of the cameras switched itself off are all part of another film that hasnt been made. 

Happy? is the film that we set out to make but to get there we discarded a great deal of weight, both in concept and in content. 

This happens repeatedly in the film work (and the performance work). And it's one of many reasons that I love making films in general, and as part of Third Angel in particular. 

And Peter Totterdell send me this about the project from their perspective:

Our reason for commissioning the film was that we wanted to capture some of the questions that are currently being tackled in research on emotion in a way that would be engaging for an audience. We had been collating some of this work for a new popular science book on emotion, so we simply gave some of the chapters from that book to Third Angel to use as source material. We then discussed the ideas with them as the film progressed.

"Happy?" highlights a number of themes and research studies concerning emotion, but hopefully in a way that adds to rather than interferes with the narrative. Being able to show how research relates to an everyday context, in this case the personal relationship of a couple, can help convey the relevance and significance of psychological research. 

The film concerns interpersonal emotion regulation - in other words, the things we do and say to change how others feels. Our research has shown that people use a wide range of strategies to change how they and others feel but, as the film demonstrates, the things we do to make ourselves feel happy may not always work for other people. Interpersonal emotion regulation clearly is a skill that has an important bearing on our relationships and well-being.

Another aspect of psychological research captured in the film concerns emotion contagion, specifically whether we can catch other people's emotions from nonverbal signals such as facial expressions. The scene about holding a pen between your teeth was based on a lab study conducted in 1988 by Fritz Strack and colleagues, who discovered that participants found a cartoon more amusing when a smile was unknowingly induced in this way. As the film shows, emotions are not always as obliging in real-life. 

The final scenes capture the to and fro of emotion dynamics in relationships. This complexity is nicely demonstrated in the schadenfreude (pleasure from the misfortune of others)experienced by one of the characters towards the end. It is also demonstrated in the shooting scene, which is likely to elicit mixed emotions (pleasure and pain) in the audience. Which of the those emotions dominates may depend on whose perspective they adopt. 

Mainly though we just hope people enjoy the film and buy the book!

You can watch the film above, on Vimeo or on YouTube. 

No Stars / Reviews Round-up

A blog-post in two parts.

1. No Stars
Before we went to Edinburgh this month, I was planning to write something on here about review star ratings, and how I try not to acknowledge them. I really dislike them as an artist, but also as an audience member. This is a widely debated issue, so, briefly: for me it feels that whatever gets written in the review, it is always overshadowed by the number of stars. No one puts three stars on their flyers, do they? As someone who makes shows, who understands how much work goes in to developing and making a piece, the star-rating system is, for me, a woefully blunt instrument with which to assess or discuss or recommend work. So, since Presumption toured in 2007, we've avoided putting star-ratings on our publicity as much as possible.

But if you go to Edinburgh, we thought, and refuse to quote star-ratings on your flyers, aren't you basically shooting yourself in the foot as far as getting an audience is concerned? So for our trip to (the frankly brilliant) Northern Stage at St Stephens as part of the Edinburgh Fringe this year, we (I) conceded and put 4 stars and a nice quote from Exeunt Magazine on the flyer and in the brochures. I realise, retrospectively, that this was a bit silly, and if we were going to acknowledge stars for the print we should have put all of our 4 star reviews on the flyer. Because if you only quote one set of stars in Edinburgh, it looks like they're the only stars you've got...

Part of me was hoping that in Edinburgh we would pick up both a 1 star and a 5 star review, to complement the 2, 3, 4 and 4andahalf (thank you, Public Reviews) -star reviews we picked up on tour (I seem to remember that both Chris Goode's Hippo World Guest Book and ...Sisters got this full range of reviews, which I thought was brilliant, and would have been pleased to be in such company). But we didn't.

The star-ratings issue came up in a really interesting discussion between a group of artists, writers, critics and marketing officers at a Dialogues day at St Stephen's in August. Dialogues is an new initiative set up by Maddy Costa and Jake Orr to facilitate greater discussion between people who make theatre and people who write about it (with the understanding of course that many people do both). It felt like the start of a really positive development to me, with some good discussion and healthy disagreement (notably on the stars issue - though not solely along artist/critic lines as you might expect). There's a nice response to the day by Catherine Love, here.

But I didn't get time to do that, and now we are post-Edinburgh, and the reviews are in, and, unlike on the tour, where the show divided critics, in Edinburgh the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. But I wanted to acknowledge that "unwritten"  No Stars blog post, before moving on to this reviews round-up, or "Review Dump" as I saw our friend and collaborator Lucy Ellinson refer to such a thing recently. (If you're near London in the next few weeks I heartily recommend you go see Lucy in Erica Whyman/Northern Stage's brilliant production of Will Eno's Oh the Humanity at Soho Theatre).

2. Edinburgh Reviews Round-up
I am aware that this whole entry is in danger of becoming one long humblebrag, but, with the inevitable SPOILER ALERTS if you haven't seen the show, to the business in hand. 

Our Edinburgh coverage produced my favourite responses to What I Heard About the World - quite a few of which do not have star-ratings attached.

Alice Malseed's reading of the work on her blog Spiel is, for me, really on the money:
All these things happen gradually and suddenly.

And on the New Art blog, Wojtek Ziemilski produced a really interesting and personal response:
how much of my world view is just about making it easy on myself?

Of people actually reviewing, Dorothy Max Prior wrote a fantastically detailed (so much so it gets an extra SPOILER ALERT) and positive review for Total Theatre Review:
bridging the gap between 'new writing' and 'live art'.
On the back of which (I imagine) the show was nominated for a Total Theatre Award. We didn't win, but it was a real pleasure to be on such a great shortlist.

And although she didn't review it in the paper, Lyn Gardner did a lovely 'homage' to the show on the Guardian Theatre Blog:
Third Angel's collected gems offer as informative a take on the world as any government statistics.

Catherine Love wrote a lovely, thoughtful review for Exeunt.

Fringe Biscuit's review was so succinct (because it is a tweet) I can quote it entirely:
What I Heard About The World, St. Stephen's. A fiery show that provokes and unsettles with striking, often brutal storytelling. Amazing.

The Telegraph found the show:
a reminder of the best and worst of human behaviour, by turns hilarious and moving.
Although like several other reviewers, Laura Barnett wonders about how many of the stories are true. 

So, to be clear. They're all true. Because if we put in stories that we know are false, how can we expect you to believe any of it? With this piece we're specifically interested in the way true stories are used and repeated (more on that here), rather than lies and urban legends (that's another show). 

Fest called us entertaining, inventive and hugely informative.

Broadway Baby called us Worldly Wise.

Fringe Review proclaimed us a Highly Recommended Show.

Public Reviews found the show Challenging in the very best of ways.

And for Theatre is Easy, the show was beautifully different... A Must See!

[I've noticed, writing this up, that I have used "the show" and "us" or "we", interchangeably. A 'tell' there, of course, about why we can be so sensitive...]

That, as far as I know, is it for reviews. The Twitter response was overwhelmingly positive, thanks to everyone who took the time to see the show and then tweet about it, tell people about it, write about it, talk to us about it. We really appreciate the feedback and the discussion.

Although there are no other dates actually confirmed at the moment, we are optimistic that What I Heard About the World will tour internationally next year. We're still collecting stories, too, and Story Map will visit Hatch, Leicester, on 14 October. So please do keep sending us stories.