Society of Cartographers Summer School

Lauren's report from Manchester...

Post 4: What I Heard About The World - Research Table at The Society of Cartographers Summer School

On Thursday 9th, the What I Heard team took a day off from rehearsals, to take part in the Society of Cartographers’ 46th Summer School in Manchester. There was some concern, given the previous day’s breakthrough, that the day in manchester might be a bit of an interruption to the devising process, but in the end it turned out to be worthwhile for everyone.

The research table had been run a few times before, so Chris, Alex and Jorge were familiar with the format, so they decided to introduce countries to the map at random rather than alphabetically. Chris then had to place the post-it note representing that country from memory, Jorge read aloud the long and short form of the country’s name in its native tongue, then any stories were collected. Where nothing new came up, or there were no delegates present, pre-gathered stories were re-used.

The delegates seemed to enjoy the improvised, ‘lo-fi’ nature of the map, and had no hesitation in telling Chris to rearrange his post-its when inaccurate (FYI, St Kitts and Nevis is North of St Lucia, not the other way round...). The nature of what a country is has been discussed by the performers before, but it became especially prescient in the company of experts, and there were many interesting discussions about mapping, borders, the history and politics of dividing up the world. We even learnt a new word: exclave.

Alex gave a talk about the development of What I Heard in the afternoon which was warmly received, and we received several new stories from delegates, which will be looked at further next week, and perhaps worked into the show.

Photos can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurencstanley

AudioBoos of Alex’s talk can be found here: Part 1 and Part 2

Ghostwriting for Performance

Beginnings, they say, are difficult.

It starts with something my Mom said.

When I left school, I carried on living at home with my Mom for a couple of years. I had a series of crap jobs: in a bar, then a call centre, then a warehouse. And during that two-year period, my social life revolved, almost entirely, around my gang of mates. All of us lads, all about the same age. And we did everything together.
We went to the pub together.
We played computer games together.
We played Dungeons and Dragons together. A lot.
We watched films together.
We watched football together.
We went shopping together.
We hung around each other’s houses, listening to music and talking about girls – together.

At some point during this period, my mom said to me, ‘When you are older and you come to write your autobiography, you will call this chapter “Waiting For The Lads”.’ And ever since my mom said that to me, I’ve had this idea in the back of my head about what I would call any given chapter of my life, even as I’m still living it.

It starts with my mate Boris sending me an e-mail, urging me to read Tim Lott’s novel, White City Blue, because ‘it’s written about us’.

It starts with Boris giving me the book Surviving Sting by Paul MacDonald, which is set in my home town, Walsall.

It starts with an e-mail I sent to Boris in response to that book, expressing enjoyment of the Black Country nostalgia, but commenting how obvious the formula, or recipe, for Lad Lit is in it.

It starts with an idea for a one-to-one performance called What Makes Me Me, What Makes You You?

It starts with an idea for a solo performance for an audience of eight, or ten, or twelve maybe, all sitting round a large table.

It starts with a research project called Matter, a collaboration with photographer Andy Eccleston, who arranges many, many hospital appointments for me and begins to compile a library of footage of me, using as many medical imaging techniques as he can access.

It evolves, in a discussion with Rachael, into a project that ‘isn’t autobiographical as much as about autobiography’.

It becomes as a research project called Writing Backwards.

It starts when we don’t get the money for that research project and we can’t bring in the three performers for me to direct. So, we put me on stage, although not yet alone, and invite many other men, some of them performers, into our rehearsal space to drink beer and wine, and talk about their lives.

It starts, with me asking men what they would call the chapters in the unwritten books of their life stories.

It starts, perhaps, with a previous project, Class of ‘76, in which I tell my own story of attempting to find my 34 classmates from my 1976 Chuckery Infant School class photograph. Telling my story of doing that involves telling their stories, their memories. In Class of ‘76, using a simple slide projection trick, I appear to produce those children next to me on stage. School Hall Magic, I wrote at the time, summoning the ghosts of the living.

**

This is an extract from Ghostwriting for Performance: Third Angel's The Lad Lit Project, which was originally a performed paper that I gave at the Writing Encounters Symposium last year, and has been published this month in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice (Vol 2 Issue 1), edited by Claire Hind and Prof Susan Orr.

There's plenty of other great stuff in it, including work by Claire MacDonald, Rita Marcalo and Dutton & Swindells. It's available from Intellect Books.

Ghost Writing For Performance: The Lad Lit Project

A great couple of days at the Writing Encounters symposium in York this weekend.  It felt more like a performance festival than a conference, with some inspirational presentations, notably Barbara Campbell talking about her extraordinary 1001 Nights Cast project.

I gave a performance/paper exploring the idea of The Lad Lit Project as an act of Ghost Writing - moving, I realise, from a literary genre to literary practice.  Here's an extract elaborating on that:

After seeing the show my friend and colleague Annie says: “What I like about it most is that I can see the ghosts of the other men on stage - the men who aren’t in it.”

My first guess is that she means the performers who aren’t in the show.  But on further reflection, I think she is also referring to the men who’s stories are told, but who aren’t physically present.  The men who inhabit the empty chairs lined across the stage.  The men who the audience are invited to imagine themselves in the position of.

This puts in my mind the idea that I am a ghostwriter for these men.  I interviewed A. and then retold his story in much the same way as a ghostwriter would when researching an ‘auto’biography.  So in one sense, I am his theatrical ghostwriter.

But I didn’t go to him for his story.  I went looking for our shared stories.  I knew I wanted this particular chapter, a chapter about being excluded.  I didn’t know it would be his.

The paper felt like it went well (giving the audience beer as they come in obviously helps in this respect), and got some really good feedback.  So I'm looking forward to presenting the whole show later this week at Déda (formerly Derby Dance) and next month at the Pazz Festival in Oldenburg.

Intangible Heritage

A nice week in Glasgow last week at the Sibmas Conference, discussing the problems associated with documenting and archiving intangible cultural heritage, specifically live performance.

I've written previously that there is more to say about our work with Christopher Hall, our Associate Artist (Film and Video).  Well, in Glasgow last week I said quite a lot about that, in a paper about how our Digital Shorts (Hang Up 02:39:02 pictured above and below) are a response to having to document live work 'faithfully', and how they have in turn influenced our other film and video work .  Here's an extract:

4. Some Problems With Documentation

From the outset, an ongoing company debate about the documentation of live performance.  We need to produce full length videos of our performances for promoters, archives and educational establishments.  We also need 5 – 10 minute samplers to show when giving lectures about our work.   We require them, practically, but these video documents don’t satisfy us creatively.  They're constrained by having to represent the performance, but are some distance from the experience of seeing the work live. 

Senseless 02:47:18 opened a door for us.  We realised that we could carry on exploring the ideas and themes of a live project, even as we are fixing it in the process of documenting it.

The process of making these shorts has much in common with our process of making our live work.  The core of Third Angel is the two Artistic Directors - Rachael Walton and myself.  For each project we draw together a group of collaborators – performers, sound recordists, composers - some familiar and regular; some new. Christopher Hall, now Associate Artist, has been working with us since we set up in 1995.

In devising the work we map out a territory, an area of interest, set an agenda.  We ask our collaborators to explore that territory with us, respond to what we've got, bring in new ideas.  We generate far more material, more ideas, than we can use in the final piece.  Many of these ideas will not be used because they don’t work, aren’t interesting enough, aren’t good enough.  But some of them just don’t fit, through time or formal constraints; some are the beginnings of something else.

So even when a project is ready to start meeting an audience, there are still loose ends to be used, or new ideas nagging at us.  Even as we tie a live performance to video in making the documentation we need, we are able to continue devising, trying out ideas in relation to the themes we are exploring, through making a digital short inspired by it.

We go in to the edit suite with rushes, much in the way we go into rehearsal with a bit of text or an idea for a section of the show.  Rachael and I have already set a territory by making the live work; Chris begins his exploration within that territory, sometimes responding to seeing the work live, sometimes responding to making the documentation of it.  He sets out to find something that interests him within the territory we have laid out.  

My paper was followed by a really interesting presentation by my old pal Becky Edmunds, who used to be a dancer and choreographer (her past tense), and is now a dance film maker.  She showed us a video duet made with Fiona Wright, in which only Fiona appears, but of which both artists are clearly authors.

In spirit Becky's work is quite close to our Digital Shorts, I feel.  She said a nice thing, something like: "I won't make something accurate, but I will make something appropriate".  She talked about the gap between the live performance and the documentation of it, and suggested three solutions: Ignore it (just video it from the back of the audience), try to lessen it (use more cameras to give you close ups and opportunity to edit) or (her approach) jump in to it and have fun, play around in it, make it wider.

Later in our session, Daisy Abbott (Glasgow University) gave a paper that pulled together some of these strands nicely.  She observed that a worry with a 'faithful' video document of a performance is that it becomes the authoritative version, even though it is just one example of that performance.  That even the final performance of a particular piece isn't a summation of performances that have gone before, it is just one more version.  So for a video of one particular performance (or for-camera version) to acquire that status can be problematic to many artists (I know it is for us, particularly if work is documented early in a tour).

Daisy quoted Peggy Phelan's observations that "the performance becomes itself through disappearance" and that documentation is not an act of representation but of transformation (any inaccuracies mine, not Daisy's).