Third Angel presents
600 People
Northern Stage, Newcastle, UK
malavoadora.porto, Portugal
November 2015
This
story has grown in the telling.
The
conversation with Dr. Simon Goodwin that started it all off actually happened
during the process of making another show, 9
Billion Miles From Home. That show was also partly inspired by the Voyager
space programme, and grew to be about wider issues of distance and time. In the
end, only one thing Simon had said to me - about the speed of light and falling
through space - made it into that show. Not long afterwards his explanation of
light clocks made it, somewhat unexpectedly, into the short film Technology. But the bulk of what we
talked about had just stayed in my head, sometimes coming out in conversations
with friends when another space exploration story hit the news.
Then in
2013 we got a commission to make a short spoken word piece for ARC’s Northern
Elements project. One of the themes for the commission was ‘a moment when
something had changed’. The conversation with Simon back in 2006 suddenly came
back to me – and I realised this was a story I still wanted to tell.
This
first version toured as a 20 or 30 minute ‘performance lecture’ for a couple of
years, for spoken word nights, festivals, art/science events and as one of the
ballads in Northern Stage’s The Bloody
Great Border Ballad Project at the Edinburgh Fringe. This year, though, it
began to grow, new details creeping in, new areas opening up to be explored.
We’re grateful to our good friends at Northern Stage and malavoadora.porto for giving us a chance to try out telling this
longer version of the story.
Given
the astrophysics-lecture nature of the show, it feels appropriate to share some
Further Reading. As well as the conversations with Simon, other influences on
the ideas in this piece include the books Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari and If the Universe
Is Teeming with Aliens...Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi
Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb, along
with several episodes of the brilliant RadioLab
podcast, especially the one about CRISPR.
Thanks
very much for coming to see the work – we’d love to talk to you about it after
the show.
Devised &
Created by the Company
Written and performed by Alexander Kelly
Inspired by conversations, and in collaboration, with Dr Simon Goodwin
Directed by Rachael
Walton
Daniel Fletcher · Print
design and show visuals
Nathaniel Warnes · Animation
Craig Davidson, Richard Flood, Michael Gooch, Daniel Oliviera, Emanuel Rinaldi · Technicians
Hilary Foster · General Manager
Liz Johnson · Administration & Production
Trainee
Big thanks to all the staff at Northern Stage and mala voadora for their support, and to the Northern Elements team for their original belief in the project.
600 People will tour in 2016. [Get in touch if you'd like to book it].
www.thirdangel.co.uk · facebook.com/thirdangeluk
#600People · @thirdangeluk · @AlexanderKelly
Originally
commissioned for Northern Elements, a development programme funded by Arts
Council England & managed by ARC, Stockton Arts Centre.
Third
Angel is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation and a Resident
Company at Sheffield Theatres.