A man I met in Nottingham

As part of the build up to presenting Cape Wrath at West Yorkshire Playhouse’s brilliant Transform festival last month, I was asked to write a response to a set of questions, that was then posted as an “Introducing…” interview. It’s mainly about Third Angel in general, our relationship with Leeds, and Cape Wrath in particular. (You can read the whole thing here).

But the last question asked:

...tell us about a transformative experience for you or your company?

And the story that came to mind was one I’ve told a couple of times when teaching or talking about our work. I’d last told it as part of a performance called Serial Collaborator, at Northern Stage’s Stronger Together event, back in 2011.

For Stronger Together, a really great, timely event exploring (rather than just talking about) collaboration, I was invited by Erica Whyman, then Artistic Director of Northern Stage, to do a performance of some kind. I somewhat rashly proposed a performance in which “I talk about everyone I have ever collaborated with. In 20 minutes.” Erica kindly, and almost as rashly, said okay.

Once I was preparing it, I went through a process that felt familiar from making Class of’76, of initially wanting to talk about everyone equally, but then realising that that did no-one any justice, and wouldn’t be at all interesting. So the format evolved to become one in which I named everyone (I could think of) who I had ever collaborated with, and talked about some people in more detail in order to discuss different kinds of collaboration.

In amongst that I wanted to talk about students and audience members, and the ways in which they are part of the conversation of, and development of, the work. So in both instances one (or a few) individuals were able to stand in for their ‘group’. And the audience member to talk about was obvious to me, because he had changed the way we understood our own work.

[For various reasons to do with permissions, technical issues and me choosing to not use a mic, Serial Collaborator wasn’t documented, and stands as one of the very few actual one-offs we’ve done. I did intend to write it up, but it was never urgent enough… so its nice, after this time, to at least put up a story from it on here.]

And, after that slightly discursive intro, here’s the story.

**

2002. We are at Angel Row Gallery in Nottingham, presenting our show Where Have They Hidden All The Answers?

WHTHATH? (as we refer to it), is a one-to-one "interview performance", in which we tell the audience member the story of an urban legend, as if it is true, trying to convince them that it is researched fact - claiming we know the first instance of the story. Towards the end of the piece we ask the audience member if they know of "any stories like that", and if they could tell us one? 

The guy sitting opposite me says, "No, I don't have any stories like that. But I can tell you about the most important day of my life, if you like?"

I realise that of course I would like that, even if the story isn't the "right" sort of story, the sort of story I think I'm looking for.

The man tells me that when he was little, about seven, his mum was really ill. She was dying, in fact. She'd had to start sleeping on the sofa, too weak to climb the stairs. His aunt came to stay, to look after them.

One morning he came down stairs and his aunt told him that his mum had died in the night. He looked at her, lying on the sofa. He could see her hand sticking out from under the blanket. He wanted more than anything to go and hold his mum's hand. But his aunt told him he had to go and get the doctor.

When he came back with the doctor, there were more people around, and his mum's arm had been tucked back under the blanket, and he never did get to hold his mum's hand.

"I'm 52 now," he tells me, "and there isn't a day goes by that I don't regret that I didn't say something, that I didn't insist on holding her hand to say goodbye."

I'm not sure what to say to him. So I say, "That's an amazing story. Are you sure you're happy for me to share it with other people?"

"Of course I am,” he replies, “I wouldn't have told it to you otherwise."

And that was the day I understood, whatever story is that the person sitting opposite wants to tell us, that's the story we need to hear.

Recent Articles

In these interactive pieces, the key is to find a clear mechanism that allows the conversation to happen. When we’re making work we’re looking for the right frame, or form, to best explore the ideas that we’re interested in. The form that adds something, that articulates something that another form wouldn’t. In this case one that allows sharing. That is sharing.

I have a new article in the "artists' pages" strand in the latest edition of Performance Research: On Value, edited by Joslin McKinney & Mick Wallis. The whole issue is a response to the PSi#18 Conference that they ran last year, and they invited me to submit a wider response to the Inspiration Exchange that I ran as part of it.

In a great innovation, there are a limited number of free downloads of it available, so if you'd like to read it, click here:
Inspiration Exchange: The value of sitting opposite.
[update, 28 June 2013: All the free downloads have been used up. You can access it through your library, if they subscribe. Or get in touch with us.]

And on the subject of journals, there's a lovely piece about Cape Wrath, Class of '76, and other 'digitally augmented' autobiographical projects, in a recent edition of the Journal of Media Practice. Now, where was I? is by Jocelyn Spence, Stuart Andrews and David M. Frohlich. You can download it here, for a fee; or if you're at a University, your library may have an account that allows you to access it for free:
Now, where was I?

It's fascinating for me to read such a detailed response to relatively early incarnations of Cape Wrath, and how themes that are really important in the piece for me were so strongly readable in these early, highly instinctive presentations. More about Cape Wrath soon, no doubt.

Testing the Hypothesis (v4)

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 not 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.

**

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. 

Five Tables, Five Chairs

On tour with Class of '76 in February and March my plan was to write up as many of the questions and answers from the post-show discussions as I could. That hasn't happened yet, but one of the questions in Newcastle was about whether the table and chair were specifically chosen to look like a school table and chair, or if they were just found at random in each venue.

The answer is, of course, somewhere between the two. And me being me, I was already planning to document them over the tour. So, anyway, here they are, from Part 1:


Northern Stage, Newcastle


ARC, Stockton on Tees


greenroom, Manchester


Dartington Arts, Totnes


BAC, London

Some Responses to the Work

Andrea Ochsner's new book, Lad Trouble, is a reassessment of the Lad Lit genre - 'the male confessional novel' as she calls it. I met Andrea a couple of times whilst I was touring The Lad Lit Project in 2005 - as she was interested in our response to genre in performance. Lad Trouble includes an epilogue/chapter about The Lad Lit Project - and it's really interesting to me to see the show positioned in relation to the books that it was (partly) a reaction to. I haven't read the whole book yet, but I know that the Lad Lit Project chapter also includes some extracts from the show text and my notebooks.

It's pretty pricey as it's an academic book, but perhaps you could get your library to order it if you're interested...

*

Alex Herod has written a really nice response to seeing Class of '76 at Manchester's greenroom last month - it's on her blog, Bees on Toast, here.

*

I had an interesting and inspiring chat with Andy Field, joint artistic director of Forest Fringe, last week, about the influence of gaming on his and our work - specifically Homo Ludens - and on the work of others, of course. We've talked about that before, but the specific timing of this chat was in preparation for the British Council's UK Connected showcase in Tokyo. Andy wrote this really nice blog post as a result. His whole blog for UK Connected is really worth checking out, exploring the work of some of the most interesting companies & artists around at the moment.

*

Chloe Bezer sent us this response to seeing the short film Technology at out Hybrid screening last month. Introducing the film I said that Chris Hall had chosen, in the edit, the bits from a much longer improvisation that made me 'look the most stupid'. I was being flippant, and don't really mean that - but as Chloe has picked up on it, that'll teach me to think slightly more carefully about making jokes when introducing the work.

Thanks to Chloe for letting me quote some of her response here:

From hearing his various creative or critical points of departure (the three men he mentioned), I thought for Chris [Hall] to go on to make a short film like Technology was quite beautiful. You said that he chose the bits that made you look the most stupid – I’d say the most honest (always that word).

*** *** ***

The man in the film makes a journey from trying to explain the everyday technology that we use (that perhaps we ought to understand; a battery or gravity) ending by attempting to demonstrate how we can bend time itself.

Chris seemed to set out to try and explore humanity’s need to organise, rationalise, to understand and catalogue our lives and our history so that we can make sense of it on a personal level. The fact that he chose to do that by filming this man, unable to explain how a microphone works, was both hilarious and touching.

For what it’s worth, I’ve never understood why people have a problem combining faith and science. Not that I’ve nailed either, but I can’t see why the two can’t co-exist in the same paradigm. Share the same sandpit. Play nice together in the painting corner. And I wonder if actually, the problem lies in what we invest in those words. Why did we start saying that if we could explain something, that was Science, and when we couldn’t explain it, that was Faith?

As history advances we will come to understand more and more, be able to explain phenomena that we haven’t even encountered yet. Science will keep evolving as long as we have questions that need answering. But I might also say the same about Faith. It changes with our understanding of what Faith actually is.

I fully concur with the Underground Man: I want the choice to believe that ‘two plus two equals four’ is all very well, but sometimes ‘two plus two equals five’ is nice. Perhaps it comes back to freedom - irrational, illogical.

When did a mug become a piece of technology? It happened when the man in the film started using it to explain what was (or rather wasn’t) happening to its contents. It becomes what we need it to be, in order to explain what we need it to explain. Otherwise, it’s just a mug.

Science and Faith are like the dark knights of our human understanding; to know them conclusively (I think) will always elude us. Why are they running? Because we have to chase them.

Watching the man at the blackboard trying (and failing) to recall or understand a hypothetical experiment, I’m not sure which was more heart-breaking: the belief that it mattered so much, or the faith that, in spite of it all, it was true.

I had to ask Chloe who the Underground Man was. He's the eponymous character from a Dostoevsky novel who argues for the right to believe in two mutually exclusive viewpoints.

Class of '76 Programme Note: Still Telling This Story

So here I am, about to embark on the 10th Anniversary Tour of Class of '76. Ten years later, still telling this story.

In those ten years the idea of the show has almost become an anachronism. The show started as a 15 minute sketch, in which the things we said about the children in the photograph, including some of their names, were completely made up. And although we had the idea for a second version in 1999, it was in January 2000 that I set about trying to find the other 34 children in my infant school photo, before performing ‘Version 2’ of the show in Chuckery Infant School Hall in May of that year. That's the anniversary that this, final, tour of the show marks.

In January 2000 I had an email address, and connection to the internet at work, but, despite our later publicity tag of 'fresh and funny live art for the friendsreunited generation', there was no Friends Reunited yet, let alone Facebook, Myspace, Bebo or Twitter. I had a mobile phone, but had only had it since I was 28 – so no immediate connection to my old schoolmates. The process of tracking people down, therefore, involved phone calls, mainly to land lines, and a lot of 'going back home' to Walsall. Of course this massively affected the nature of the piece. Had I been able to do all the detective work remotely, I think the work would have felt quite different. It would probably have been more about the lives that the people are living now, as I would be able to visit, or at least observe, a lot of those lives online.

Which is why the idea of the show feels like an anachronism - kids at school now, and anyone who left school within the last - what, 10 years? - wouldn't need to track down most of their classmates; they'll already have contact with them.

‘Version 3’ of Class of '76 - the version that talks about the process of making Version 2 - has been in repertoire since 2001, although it was temporarily retired for a couple of years in 2006. Reviving the work in 2008, I suddenly felt this historical aspect of the show much more keenly. And this feeling has informed the decision (or is ‘realisation’ more accurate?), that the performances this year will be the last ones of 'Version 3'.

At post-show discussions over the last 10 years one of the most frequently asked questions has been: Why that photograph? What that year, why that collection of children? The answer is pretty simple: it is my last school group photo. I've got two infant school class photos – the second year one from 1975 and this one from May 1976. The following autumn we moved up to junior school, where we always had individual, or sibling group, school photographs taken.

So although most of the children in the photograph moved up to the same junior school, this later photo is the one that marks the end of an era – the end of infants school. Our last class photograph. That was the one I had to use.

Class of '76 at Northern Stages

The 10th Anniversary tour of Class of '76 opens at Northern Stage next month as part of their Northern Stages season - marking their own 40th Anniversary with a great line up. Northern Stages is a series of 40 'conversations' about Northerness, of which Class of '76 is one.

There are several ways of engaging with the season, other than coming to see the work live. The Northern Stages project is seeking thoughts and input about Northerness/Southerness, through the Northe research project. I'm also mentoring another of the 'conversations', Faye Draper's Tea is an Evening Meal - for which she is looking for input from the public, so if you have thoughts on, or stories about, regional dining rituals, Faye would love to hear from you.

As part of the programme I was asked to think about the relationship between Class of '76 and my adopted Northerness, and write something for the Northern Stages site. Here's what came out:

When we were first making Class of ‘76, (Version 2 - the version for Chuckery Infant School), 10 years ago, my initial thought was that this was a show about how a group of 35 kids happened to be in the same class at the same time, and how they happened to have their photograph taken together, and how, 24 years later (as it was then), they could have ended up anywhere, doing anything. They could have chosen to base themselves anywhere. How many would still be in the Midlands? How many would have moved South, North? And for how many would that have been a conscious decision, and how many would have just followed circumstance. How often, in fact, do we decide to exercise the control we have about where we live? And of course, does that ever change where we are from?

You can take the boy out of the Midlands... My moves North were accidental – I went to university in Lancaster, then Sheffield. That was because they were the courses that let me on. Plenty didn’t. But I had chosen to apply for those courses partly because I liked those cities. And most significantly, I stayed in Sheffield. There are all sorts of work, friends and family reasons for that, of course – but we have talked about moving over the years, and it was always going to be further North (the exception being some talk of moving to Bristol, because it “feels like a Northern city but with Southern weather”), maybe to Scotland. (The other exceptions being some talk of Spain. And Portugal.)

As a person somewhat obsessed with maps, I am very aware that the Midlands are not in the middle of the country, they are geographically in the South. (Sheffield, in fact, feels to me more like the centre of the country – but I know that there are several towns and villages that would dispute that, depending on how you measure it). The cliché when I was growing up was that Southerners think of Midlanders as Northerners, and Northerners think of them as Southerners. The other joke was that in England, the North-South Divide runs across the country south of Birmingham, but loops up around Solihull.

The reality, naturally, is more complex that either of those suggestions, and certainly being a Midlander, I think of the Midlands as a separate entity. Or should that be ‘originally’ a Midlander? I lived in Walsall for 19 years, and I’ve now been in Sheffield for almost 17. These days I refer to myself as being ‘from Sheffield’ as much as I do as ‘from the Midlands’. And being a father now, I am aware that, unless we do move, my girls will think of themselves as ‘from Sheffield’. My daughters are Northerners, with a Midlander dad and a Southerner mom.

As we prepare for the 10th anniversary tour of Class of ‘76, I’ll be thinking more about this, about the other 34 children in my class photograph, about when we were all from the same place, and where the adults they grew up to be are now.

Plans for 2010

In 2010 Third Angel turns 15. We're not sure exactly when, because we're not sure exactly when the company was born. Certainly in the summer of 1995 there was a conversation in a shared house in Withington in Manchester, where Rachael was studying for her PGCE, about making a piece of work together. Then by the time that the poster for that show, Testcard, went to the printer's (early September?), we had the company name.

So at some point in 2010, we're fifteen. Before that we're celebrating another anniversary - 10 years since Class of '76, 'Version 2', was performed in Chuckery Infant School Hall - "on the spot where the photograph was taken," in May 2000. Class of '76 'Version 3.1' (as seen at Forest Fringe last August) will open at Northern Stage on 4 & 5 February, tour through into March, and then go out again in May. Full details of the first leg are on the newspage now, here. I know we've said it before, but these really will be the last UK performances of this version of the show. Most performances will be followed by post-show discussions, so if you do come along please stick around afterwards for a chat. More on this 10th Anniversary production soon, no doubt.

We'll also be showing Words & Pictures again in the first half of this year - slightly revised and updated - at Prema Art Centre, the National Review of Live Art (celebrating it's 30th Anniversary with an amazing line-up we are proud to be a part of) and Sheffield Theatres' Forge Festival.

There will also be a Sheffield screening of A Perfect Circle, as part of The Sheffield Pavilion at The Showroom Cinema on 2 February at 6pm.

However, we are also making a new work this year: What I Heard About The World is a collaboration with the excellent mala vaodora (Lisboa), our good friend Chris Thorpe (who worked with us on Presumption, Parts For Machines That Do Things amongst others) and worldmapper.org. We are delighted that this piece will be a co-production with Sheffield Theatres, Teatro Maria Matos (Lisboa) and the Pazz Performing Arts Festival (Oldenburg).

We'll be showing work-in-progress versions of this piece at Pazz in April and Forge in May, and the show will premiere in Sheffield in the autumn before transferring to Lisboa. We'll be asking for help researching this project, looking for true stories of fake things, so watch this space.

So, Happy New Year, and more on all of the above soon.

Third Angel in Edinburgh, 25 - 28 August 2009

We've recently put our Edinburgh dates up on the news section of the website. After saying how exciting their programme looked last year, I'm very pleased to say we're going to be part of Forest Fringe this August.

That means we're not part of the official Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Forest Fringe is its own mini festival, and consequently doesn't need to stick to one week minimum runs. The programme changes daily, and the work is free to go and see - they just pass a bucket round at the end. It's a great line up of artists this year, which we are delighted to be a part of. There's more about Forest Fringe and their fund raising campaign (putting shows on for free is expensive) on their blog.

We'll be showing the revised and updated version of Class of '76 for two nights and a work in progress version of a new piece Words & Pictures... If you are on our e-list, please note the slightly earlier start time of these shows than was stated on the last mail out. (If you want to join the e-list you can do it here.)

THIRD ANGEL in EDINBURGH
25 - 28 August 2009 at 7pm. Free!
Forest Fringe
Bristo Hall (above The Forest Cafe)
3 Bristo Place, Edinburgh EH1 1EY

Words & Pictures
(a work in progress)
Tuesday 25, Wednesday 26 August at 19.00 (45 min)

A collection of short stories:
Chapters from the Unfinished Books of our Life Stories.
Texts to explain our obsessions and our passions.
Writings that try to understand why it is we are fascinated by those empty benches we see by the side of the road.
That try to remember what it felt like to stand on the highest diving board as a kid.
That try to explain why we hated that job.
Notes that try to understand games and songs.
Words to accompany pictures.
Readings to be heard in the dark.

There comes a time in your life by which point you should have written a book. If you were going to. Well, we’re at that time, but we just haven’t got round to it; we’ve been busy. Really busy. There’s a book’s worth of stuff there, but, well, there’s been too much else to do. But we do like the idea of a book tour. Touring, we’ve done a lot of that. So we’re cutting straight to that bit: The Book Tour. Words & Pictures is a book reading for a book that hasn’t been written yet, let alone published.

Words & Pictures is commissioned by the Off The Shelf Festival of Writing and Reading 2009, and Leeds Met Studio Theatre.

Class of '76
(an old favourite)
Thursday 27 and Friday 28 August at 19.00 (60 min)
"incredibly moving and beautiful" Yorkshire Post
"magical and beautiful" Total Theatre

Class of '76 was originally commissioned by Small Acts at the Millennium and Site Gallery, Sheffield.

"it felt like we knew all of those people ourselves"

Our friend, and now fairly long term supporter of the work, Annabel Turpin, sent me a link to a blog post she wrote about presenting Presumption at ARC in Stockton last month, and coming down to see Class of '76 in Leeds.  It's one of the nicest things I've ever read about our work.

It won't be a surprise that I'm going to link to it, here.

"something of an obsession"

There's a nice review of Class of '76 at Sheffield Theatres' Intim8 Festival from the Sheffield Telegraph here. Next dates are Leeds Met Studio on 24 and 25 February.

How It Works

Technology film still 

by Christopher Hall

Full details of Third angel events for the first few months of 2009 are up on the main site now.  Class of '76, Presumption and 9 Billion Miles From Home are all out on the road in Sheffield, Scarborough, Leeds, Glasgow and Stockton.

We're kicking off with a screening of new short films by Third Angel and Christopher Hall & myself, at the Showroom Cinema, Sheffield on 30 January.  We'll be showing brand new and very recent stuff, none of which will have been shown (publicly at least) in Sheffield before.  

One of the new pieces is called Technology, which is inspired by a section from Parts For Machines That Do Things [co-produced with Sheffield Theatres this time last year].  The text for this is a long structured improvisation - me attempting to explain all of the technology I encounter in a single day - that Chris will be editing down to about 10 minutes.  Apparently my attempt to explain why clocks "move slower" as they approach the speed of light is an [unintentional] comedy highlight.  We'll see.

Class of '76 at The Public

Performances of Class of '76 at The Public in West Bromwich are confirmed for Saturday 23rd (at 4pm) and Sunday 24th (at 2pm) August.  They are free events as part of The Public's August Bank Holiday Weekend celebrations.  Not quite going home to Walsall with it, but back to the Midlands at least.

As I wrote previously, we are updating Class of '76 for these performances - a 'revised and updated' edition of the show. Version 3.1, if you will.  This doesn't mean that I've tracked everyone down again for an update - that's meant to happen in 2020.  But I'll have been performing the different versions of this piece, off an on, for 9 years now (last time was in 2006 at Trama, in Porto).  A lot has changed in that time, and it feels like there has to be some recognition of our changing relationship to the material in the show, and the themes and issues it explores.  

If you're in the Midlands that weekend, why not come and see what you think.

Back to School

We’ve just agreed to revive Class of ’76 this August. Very quickly another couple of possible gigs fell in to place for early 2009.  So, here I am, 8 years after the original process of tracking down my old classmates, still talking about it.  Still telling the story.

Of course, it is very flattering to be asked to present the work after all this time, but we have said several times that *this* is the last time we perform this piece. So, why…?  Well, I realise that it still speaks to me.  And it seems to be in demand. The subject matter seems to endure.  And it will be updated - a ‘revised edition’ - when we present it at the end of August. 

Also, there seems to be a lot of it about at the  moment.  Unsurprisingly, when it was first touring Class of ’76 did get compared to Dave Gorman’s work.  There seemed to be a developing area of ‘is it live art or is it stand up comedy’ work. 

So, it was only matter of time before someone (thanks Noel) pointed out Friends Like These to me.  Danny Wallace, who co-devised/wrote Are You Dave Gorman? has been looking for his old school friends.  Interestingly, from our point of view at least, because he moved around a lot as a kid, he’s not using one class photo, but instead an old address book – and in Class of ’76 we compare the urge to track down down the kids in the class photo with the urge to phone people found in an old address book.

I liked Danny Wallace’s Join Me project very much, so I’m intrigued to know how Friends Like These turns out [I’m 50 pages in at the moment].

I’ve just started working with Mole Wetherell from Reckless Sleepers on a possible response to Class of ’76.  We’ve been talking about how this idea of getting back in touch with school mates won’t be relevant to kids at school today – or indeed people who have left school in the last 5 years or so - because through Facebook, Twitter, personal mobile phone numbers (as opposed to numbers for parents’ houses) they’ll just stay in touch.  Digital Natives.

When we started making Class of ’76, when I was finally getting to play detective, Friends Reunited didn’t exist.  School Disco hadn’t become the "clubbing phenomenon of the new Millennium" yet.  Logging on to Friends Reunited now [and finally even putting up a profile], I see that it would have been only limited help in finding my 1976 classmates now. But it would have got me started, and it would have made it easier, as the idea is so much more familiar.

Oh, and a few years ago there was a TV drama with Robert Carlyle called Class of ’76.  That was about tracking down your old school mates, but by a serial killer, so there was only limited similarity.

Working with Mole on ideas for this project, we’ve been to visit his junior and secondary schools.  Walking round both of them I was aware of the difference in experience for the two of us.  For Mole these were the sites of specific personal memories; for me they were more neutral, generic.  But they still sparked memories for me.  Walking round someone else’s junior/infant school felt very familiar to me; I felt, yes, I’ve done this project, I’ve scratched this itch.  I have my project through which I can talk about this. What surprised me was how different walking round a deserted secondary school felt; I had a real urge to go back to my secondary school, to walk through empty corridors and classrooms.  This felt like a different project, a different itch.

We talked about the difference between those school experiences. How, although you change, you go into infant school a child, and come out of juniors still a child.  Memories of this time are mainly of moments, repeated patterns perhaps.  You go to secondary school a child, but come out, not an adult, but certainly a step closer to who you are now. A different person.  Memories of this time are more of events and narratives. Changing relationships. Friendships.  Infatuations.  Love affairs, even.

As Mole told me these stories from his school days, I was aware that although we were in the school they took place in, I was picturing them happening in my school.  Spending 7 years at the same school, at the time in your life when you are physiologically programmed to be absorbing information and learning, really etches that place onto your memory.