Character Drama & Happy Accidents

The Machine photographed at GIFT by Richard Kenworthy.

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

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

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

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

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 Chris observed that we would revert to this, unpublished version to be closer to Perec's orignal intention.

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

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

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

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

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

Happy?

Third Angel presents

Happy?

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

Camera: Dominic Green

Sound: Luke Pietnik

Production Assistant: Matt Sturdy

Collaborating Producer (University of Sheffield): Professor Peter Totterdell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Machine

At GIFT Festival in Gateshead this weekend we are showing a new piece, The Machine. Well, I say new...originally made as a one-off for Off The Shelf and Bloc Projects space last October, The Machine is the first live performance of the English translation of Georges Perec's radio play, originally broadcast in German in the late 60s.

The project came together pretty quickly last year, and partly to do with brochure deadlines, despite the fact that both Rachael and I, and Third Angel associate artists Christopher Hall and David Mitchell were involved, along with recent collaborator Lauren Stanley, it wasn't billed as a Third Angel project.

I was also delighted that we were joined by new collaborators Teresa Brayshaw and Oliver Bray, both of whom we've been talking to about making something together for a while. The focus on language, and fast turn around for the piece, suited Teresa and Oliver's strengths exactly. We had a great time making the piece, and it went down really well. (There's a really interesting response to the piece in relation to game-play over on the Overlap site).

The opportunity arose to show the work again this year, and it seemed weird not to officially acknowledge it as a Third Angel project. So we have reconvened to explore the text further, and take it to GIFT, where we had such a good time presenting a Playing With Time screening last year.

It is the first time, as Third Angel, that we've worked with a whole, existing text. A few years ago we responded to Schiller's Maria Stuart, incorporating elements of his text into our piece Stage an Execution. Co-incidentally, Schiller features quite strongly in The Machine a couple of times.

Back in October I wrote:

It is unusual for me to start with a text. Chris gave me the script and what struck me about it immediately is that it's pretty much impossible to read on your own. I love that about it - you need four voices, four readers, for it to make sense. I could tell, dipping in to it, that it was fascinating, funny, complex...but I couldn't read the shape of it. I also knew within minutes that I wanted to do it.

When we gathered to read it as a group I began to see the text as much as a diagram, or a set of instructions. The formatting, a column for each voice, doesn't just tell you who speaks next, but demonstrates how the narratives and games of the piece flow across the line of voices. Considering that it was written as a radio piece, I'm taken by the visual, physical, aspect of this.

What I also enjoy about it is that the games that Perec plays in the piece, irreverently deconstructing Goethe's poem, Rambler's Lullaby II, remind me strongly of the way we explore text - particularly in rehearsals for film projects. These approaches pull apart the existing text enough to shed new light on it, and to find new meanings in it - sometimes flipping them completely. Perec really pushes this at times, creating whole new bastardised versions of Goethe's poem through serendipitous, randomised word replacements. But ultimately this increases your (well, certainly my) appreciation of the original. And what we're noticing is that within the stylised, systematic approach of the System Controller and the three computer Protocols (the voices of the piece are the control and subroutines of a computer programme), he also paints subtly distinct characters.

As performers, each time we come back to Perec's text, we find more in it - connections, subtleties, gags... and each time we have a bit more research and dramaturgy to draw upon. In rehearsal we're taking Perec's approach to his own text, playing with intonation, delivery, trying things out - taking the games too far - but finding new things that work each time. What continually amazes me is that we are working with a translation - Ulrich Schönherr has had to not only translate the words, and meaning, he's had to play the linguistic games of the original version with his translated text, obey the rules of the game in a new language. And he still finds the jokes.

Our intervention into this radio text in order to make it theatre is pretty subtle. We're performing in the round, and in a mode that nods to the idea of radio drama. We deliberately steer clear of it feeling like the recording of a radio programme, but we are definitely playing out to the live audience. We're having a good time with it. If you're going to be in Gateshead this weekend, we'd love to know what you think.

**

The whole GIFT line up looks great, and it really was a lovely festival last year. We're also presenting an Inspiration Exchange on the Sunday, 11 - 4pm.