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...

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

Homo Ludens on artmetropol.tv - now with subtitles

The artmetropol.tv piece about Homo Ludens - shot at one of the preview performances, so the space isn't quite finished - now has English subtitles. Watch it here.

Game Over (for now)

Photos by Nina Urban.

Thanks for playing. More later in the year, hopefully.

Table Manners pictures

Some images from Table Manners, the project I made last month with Contemporary Performance Practice students at Leeds Metropolitan University. These photos are all by Sebastian Juszczyk (thanks Sebastian).

The show consists of a series of performer-audience member encounters over a table top, sometimes working on an individual level, sometimes with the performers all working together delivering the same material.

At the start there's an etiquette demonstration with paper cutlery and crockery:



Then the worktop becomes a drawing table:









And a place for conversation and story telling:







In the middle of the show there is a one-to-one origami lesson for each audience member:







And there are quieter moments of contemplation:





Each of the 20 audience members meets 13 of the 20 performers. So it was possible to come to see the show more than once, which a few people did, and see a very different version. I was making this piece in the middle of the making process of Homo Ludens, and there is a shared formal exploration here, in the dual layer of group performance/one-to-one performance experience.

Respecting the Grid

Perhaps it's just us, but we thought Katja painting 100 squares by hand (with assistance from Martina, in this video clip) was kinda beautiful...



Video by Rita.

Homo Ludens

Homo Ludens opens tonight at TiG7, Mannheim, under the guidance of Third Angel associate artist Lucy Ellinson, in collaboration of the whole of the team from TiG7. It's been an exciting, fun, challenging and sometimes moving process, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how the audience/players experience it. Full credits below.

Third Angel & TiG7 present
HOMO LUDENS
Devised and written by the company
Inspired by Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man
by Friedrich Schiller

Performed by:
Rita Böhmer, Daniela Cohrs, Lucy Ellinson, Martina Heubel, Einhart Klucke, Martin Kornmeier, Jellena Lugert, Alexander O. Miller, Julia Rützel, Stefanie Rapp, Natascha Slominski

Games Waiters:
Tobias Grauheding, Tobias Hannemann, Christian Lidy, Pascal Wieandt, Nils Witte

Licht- und Tontechnik/Lighting and Sound: James Bogner
Bühnenbau/Set Construction: Hubertus Seelhorst
Malerei/Scene Painters: Katja Angerbauer & Stefan Schneider

Research texts by Chris Thorpe
Co-directed by Lucy Ellinson
Directed and designed by Alexander Kelly

Third Angel management: Hilary Foster
Third Angel Co-artistic Directors: Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton
TiG7 Künstlerische Leitung / Creative Director: Maike Lex
TiG7 Organisation / Organisation: Christine Seikel

HOMO LUDENS is produced within /
wurde im Rahmen der Freien Theater Tage
SCHWINDELFREI 2009 produziert.
Kindly supported by / Mit freundlicher Unterstützung durch
John Deere & Sheffield Theatres

Das Theaterhaus TiG7 wird unterstützt vom
Kulturamt der Stadt Mannheim und dem Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg

Third Angel is regularly funded by Arts Council England

Postcards From The Road - Mannheim

A note of caution to start, one of the images lower down this post is of the Schillertage 2009 publicity campaign - which some people may find quite strong, featuring, as it does, a very new born baby. Certainly the woman who stopped as I was taking a photo of it felt it was a bit too strong... or that it was weird that I was taking a photo of it, or both. But first, clocks.


The clocks at Frankfurt Airport railway station are all in sync - to the second. There are perhaps 8 along one platform, perfectly in time. Doesn't really tranlate to a photo of course.


We needed to borrow some furniture for Homo Ludens from NationalTheater Mannheim. When we made Stage An Execution for NationalTheater's Schillertage 2003 we got to explore their costume store (although we ended up making the costumes from paper) which was suitably impressive. We actually rehearsed Stage An Execution in this building, that also houses the furniture store, although we didn't come and explore that time. This floor is tables, cupboards and sofas (plus those two grandfather clocks). We needed chairs or stools, too: there's a whole separarate floor of those. They had to pretty much drag Lucy and I away before we started staging Presumption there and then.

Homo Ludens is a collaboration with the wonderful TiG7, which is both a company/producing house and receiving house. They are one of 5 independent, or free, theatres in Mannheim. The free theatres have their own strand of Schillertage, which is called Schwindelfrei. There's no direct translation into English - or no equivalent single word at least. It's a pun (kind of, I think), and it translates as 'freedom from the fear of heights'. And all of their print is vertigo inducing op-art, which you can get a taste of here.

The theme of the whole of Schillertage this year is the idea of play and the playful human. Whilst I was there the advertising campaign went up - some posters using the Schiller quote that 'man is only truly a man when he plays', and also these new-born baby posters.


I asked our collaborators from TiG7 if there is any ambiguity about the phrase 'Spiel starten' - could it mean 'start to play' - but they said that although it hints at that, the over-riding meaning is as it it looks - 'Start Game' - enhanced by the computer game style graphics. This image, and the slightly sinister undertone, really got under my skin whilst I was there. Very powerful marketing. I think our work offers a more optimistic counterpoint to the slightly bleak reading I have of this image. But as that bleak interpretation is mine, maybe that idea is somewhere in our piece, too. We'll see.

Homo Ludens rehearsals

Five days to make the show, this week.  Starting off by finishing off - working out the second half of the piece, working from the ideas we took with us, and the texts that Chris Thorpe had written.

Working with the performers who we started making the show with in English (Julia, Rita, Martina) and with the cast who they have been teaching the show to: Steffi, Jellena, Martin, Daniela, Natascha and Einhart (who will be performing the show in German) and Alex, who will be stepping into the English team and also doubling with Einhart as the show's Concierge figure.

It was a great five days, lots of ideas, try-outs, translating and discussion, but also plenty of decisions.  The show now has a working model, within which the performers are still honing and developing their own material.

It was great to hear the material they had all been developing in preparation for Lucy's and my arrival, and even quite moving at times how they had all really embraced this task.  The results were sounding great.

The two teams of performers have been working as each other's audience most of the time, apart from when we can find someone else around the building (Maike Lex, Director of TiG7, for example) to be an audience member to play the game. So in this photo:

Lucy (blue) is performing to Steffi (green) and Julia (red) is performing to Daniela (hiding), on a temporary version of the gameboard. The game does throw up these dual performer/audience member encounters from time to time. The second pair to arrive tend to get to eavesdrop on the other performance briefly:

These photos are by Marita Heinzelmann, a design student from Mannheim's University of Applied Sciences, who is visiting TiG7 for a photography project.  I like these other images she's been working on from an earlier rehearsal, too:

Martina and Martin.

Julia and Steffi.

Rita and Daniela.

Once the overall structure was in place we realised that the piece was too long for the 30 minute slots we have worked out.  This always serves to focus the mind, and suddenly it was very easy to make a couple of specific cuts of sections that were sitting a little uncomfortably in my thinking anyway.  So the structure and rules are in place, with time for the texts within them to evolve and develop.

Problem Solving

When working with students on devised theatre projects, I often describe the process as one of both problem making and problem solving.  Creating and dealing with problems is part of working out what the show is – what the task of it is as performers. This process entails navigating a variety of parameters.  Some of these you can’t do anything about, or at least not by the time you’re in the making space in the run up to opening the piece: how much money and time you have (or have left), how many people are working on the project, when the show opens and how it has been advertised as working (when, where, how long, how much tickets cost, how may people at a time, etc).

For us (and others) devising work involves placing other restrictions on ourselves during the making process.  Decisions are made, and rules set, in order to have something to work with, and work against; because if anything goes, if anything is allowed, or possible, then where do you start, let alone stop?  These restrictions create opportunity and foster necessary invention.  The trick, of course, is to come up with rules and restrictions that make sense in relation to your intentions for the work: what you think it is about, how you want it to develop, how you feel about it.  What strategies do your instincts tell you will best interogate, challenge and, ultimately, help you understand those intentions for the work.

So, for example: for a project in which the narrative is constructed around the fact that two people might remember events from their relationship differently, such as Where From Here, it makes sense to us that the rooms they draw onto the walls of the set, to change the location of the telling, are drawn with their eyes closed; because memory, like these drawings, is inaccurate and evocative and indicative.  Drawing rooms with our eyes closed moves from being a restriction in the rehearsal room to being one of the performance modes and rules of the show.

As we return to the making process of Homo Ludens we find ourselves with an interesting  and unique combination of parameters: decisions already made, resources (time, money, people) and enduring artistic concerns.  The brief – the commission – is to make a performance work inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s text, Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man, and specifically his notion of the 'playful human', and to make this work in collaboration with members of TiG7 (‘Theatrehaus im G7’ – the centre of Mannheim is built on a grid system, with block names rather than street names – TiG7 is the theatre in block G7) to premiere as part of NationalTheater Mannheim’s Schillertage 2009.  We have the studio theatre space of TiG7 available to us, but can work beyond its walls, too, should we wish.

Reading Schiller’s Letters, there were immediate connections with some of our current and recent concerns: inventions and inventiveness; trying to see human beings at their best; our relationship with objects, and the memories and emotions we attach to them and the ideas they can represent;  the beauty to be found in those objects, along with everyday situations and experiences, rather than those things that the media and advertising (and other aspects of Western society?) tell us are the beauty to be most valued; playfullness and game playing – in a co-operative, rather than competitive, way.

This, perhaps, is the aspect of the devising rules and parameters that you have least control over: what you happen to be interested at any one time; the ideas, concerns and obsessions that you find yourself returning to. Or avoiding, because the time isn’t right to explore those themes. In Third Angel we have been asked over the years if our work is autobiographical, and often the work has been written about in those terms, too – mostly the ‘relationships strand’ of our work – Where From Here, Saved, Presumption – along with the projects that aim to specifically deal with auto/biography as a theme such as Class of ’76 and The Lad Lit Project.  But actually any of our projects will tell the audience what some of  the preoccupations were of the people  who were in the room making that show, because the process is open and exploratory.

During the first making period for Homo Ludens back in February and March, we were interested in creating an audience experience that on the one hand is friendly and welcoming – like an informal conversation – but that also works on a deeper level.  An audience experience that is unusual but not intimidating.  A piece of work that is at once a game and a performance.  Something that is different every time; not in the way an impro show is different every time, nor the way that of course all live performance is different every night from its very liveness. Rather, a piece in which all the material is prepared, known, rehearsed, but in which, through decisions made and rolls of the dice, is a different experience for every audience member. We set about making a work that deals with the future, and with the finite reality of our lifespans. We talked about work that deals with getting old, but is of interest to the young. We talked about grids, squares, curved corners, and introducing more colour into our design palette.  There was also a suggestion at some point that it would be interesting to make a piece that could be performed in either English or German.

So, for the second making period Lucy Ellinson (performer and co-director) and I are travelling to Mannheim having committed to a show structure in which 30 minute performances by a cast of four, for an audience of four, are performed alternately in English and German, up to ten times a day.

I find myself at the point in the making process where the ideas coalesce and I begin to understand what it is we’re making – or trying to make. We have developed a framework into which the individual performers all lace their own material; they have all been developing their own texts between the making periods, and further texts will be contributed by myself, Lucy and Chris Thorpe. I can see a connection in the piece we are making with the future-obsession of Presumption, and I can also recognise connections with recent large-cast creative learning projects Compendium, A History of Objects (both Leeds Met University) and Lifetimes23 (University of Hull @ Scarborough), although it looks like it will work on a scale larger than those projects, even though it has a smaller cast. I’m looking forward to finding out if it works in reality the way it does in my head.

300 Dice

Without wanting to give too much away about it at this stage, we need a bit of help for Homo Ludens, the piece we're making with TiG7 in Mannheim, for Schillertage 2009.  Performances run 20 June - 4 July, often throughout the day; full details on the TiG7 site.

Responding to Schiller's ideas about the 'playful human',  the show is an intimate experience for 4 audience members at a time: part game, part conversation, part performance.  We'd like to give each audience member their own six-sided die to play with, and take away with them at the end of the show.  Which means we're going to need about 300 dice initially.  And, being us, we'd like every one of those dice to be different.  So we've started collecting, as you can see above.

If you can help, and would like to donate one or more dice that you might have lying around, we can promise to take them on an interesting journey.  Please send any dice-donations you have to:

Homo Ludens

Third Angel

3 Brookfield Yard

Sheffield S7 1 DY

If you want to tell us a bit about where the dice come from, any stories about them, where you got them, that would be nice - we'll try to pass on any such stories to their new owners.  Thank you.

Playful Humans

We've just finished the first three weeks work on the new piece, Homo Ludens.  The title comes from Schiller's Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man.  We've been invited by TiG7 in Mannheim (who we presented Presumption with last year) to create a piece that responds to Schiller's idea to be presented at Schillertage (who we made Stage An Execution for in 2003) in June.

It's a fantastically open brief to direct and devise the show with (initially at least) three performers from TiG7, Rita, Martina and Julia.  I'm directing with Lucy Ellinson (who's touring Presumption with us, and who was also part of Standing Alone, Standing Together), and Rachael and Chris Thorpe are sticking an oar in, too.

Schiller's Letters... are full of ideas about beauty, art, freedom, time, infinity - y'know, all the big stuff.  Our process so far has involved the usual tools of show and tell (particularly picking our phrases, ideas, whole paragraphs of Schiller's that intrigue us, inspire us, baffle us or infuriate us), story telling, playing and deconstructing games, research (inventions and futurology) and writing up big lists.  The images here are of maps of deconstructed adventure game books.

Three weeks of conversation, discussion, writing, seeing other work, trying stuff out.  A really positive experience on several levels - lots of sitting round a table sharing ideas and getting to know each other, trying to play without being competitive (I think its fair to say that Julia and I found that the hardest), asking ourselves when human beings are at their best.

There are connections here with some of the larger cast creative learning projects I've made in the last couple of years.  If you'd seen them you'd see a visual lineage with Lifetimes23 (University of Hull @ Scarborough, 2008) and Compendium, and a thematic connection with A History Of Objects (Leeds Met University, 2008).

We're making a piece in which each audience member's actions and decisions have a direct effect on their unique experience of the show.  We're aiming, of course, for this to feel special and exciting, rather than making people feel like they've missed out on some stuff.  Each of the 4 performers in each show (we think we'll need to perform it with two teams) will look after a single audience member - again, we're not interested in that feeling in any way uncomfortable - and will have their own version of the task of the show.

My feeling, a week or so after we've stopped working on it for now, is one of delicacy and fragility.  That's what I think we need to hold on to as we build the rest of the audience experience over the next few months.  A careful balance of control and unpredictability.