Cape Wrath Storify

To Cape Wrath

As I write this I am on a coach from Sheffield to Inverness, on my way to Cape Wrath.

In September 1988, when I was 19 and he was in his early 60s, my grandad went on a trip, on his own, from Walsall in the West Midlands, to Cape Wrath. Though not particularly eventful, the story of this trip has been retold by my family over the years. This is the version of the story that I remember:

My grandad set off from Walsall with the intention of visiting Cape Wrath. My grandfather was Scottish, Glasgow born and bred. But I don’t think he had ever been as far north as Cape Wrath before. He used public transport as far as he could, then hitch-hiked the last bit of the journey.

He got dropped off by a postman who told him he would be back in a couple of hours and could pick him up if he liked. So my Grandad sat on the cliff at Cape Wrath “and looked at the sea and thought about my life.”

The postman picked him up a couple of hours later, and he went home.

There's more to it than that, of course, but that's the basics. I've often thought about this journey, in the years since, and what it must have been like to do it. So this week I'm finding out. I can't do the journey exactly the same way as my grandad did it, but I'm doing it as closely as possible.

And I guess that at some point, I'm interested in talking about it, one way or another. We'll see.

**

UPDATE: More on the actual journey in the next entry.

Story Map

This Saturday we're running Story Map as part of West Yorkshire Playhouse's fantastic Transform season. Story Map started life as one of the research engines for What I Heard About The World, and has been through a number of incarnations, and names, on its way to become a stand-alone piece.

In the early devising process we referred to it simply as 'Map Game', and it was a way of getting existing research material/knowledge out of Jorge, Chris and me: we would set arbitrary journeys around the world, landing at seven or ten countries, and connect stories between them. This evolved into an exercise we could play with other people in the room which we presented as an 'in progress/research performance' - which we called Research Table - with Forest Fringe in Glasgow in Edinburgh. We ran this for two, 3 hour blocks at The Arches, and then calculated that we could probably map the whole world in 12 hours, which is what we attempted at the Forest Cafe last summer - making it with four minutes to spare.

In Edinburgh we worked alphabetically from the CIA World Factbook - agreeing on 201 countries and collecting over 100 stories. When we remounted a smaller, six hour, version at the Society of Cartographer's Summer School in Manchester last September it occurred to us that now we had set the countries on the map in alphabetical order, it would be too easy to do it that way again. So given that we had an audience of mapmakers we decided to make it more difficult for ourselves by choosing the countries 'bingo style'. I say more difficult for 'ourselves' - I mean more difficult for Chris, who's job it is to actually place the countries on the map. The means of representation - every country represented by post-it notes of the same size - are deliberately restrictive, but it was fascinating watching cartographers help Chris to get the Caribbean islands just right.

As noted previously on this blog, the stories we seek in Story Map (and online, via Twitter and Facebook for example) are stories of fakes and replicas - not deceptions, but rather stories of substitutes or stand-ins used knowingly in the everyday. And the stories from Story Map do become part of the theatre piece: if you've seen What I Heard About The World, the Natashas story was given to us at Forest Fringe in Edinburgh by someone who had been on the bus with them, and the Dead Man's Suit story was emailed to us during the run in Manchester.

But Story Map is more than just a research engine for the theatre show - it has grown to become a stand alone element of a multi-platform project; it explores some of the key themes of the project for us. In the theatre piece the idea of mapping is much less obvious, and it was important to us to make a piece of work in which we name every country in its own language.* The theatre piece is not as specifically concerned with the inauthentic, either - it has become about something else, about the impossibility of holding the world in our heads, and the tools we use to nevertheless attempt to do so.

Story Map attempts to gather stories and to label them with a two word title, pin them to the map with a single image - and to get the names and colours right on the map. It's about the task of cataloguing the stories, and telling them, and re-telling them. It's about the stories, whatever our agenda, that you want to tell us.

So, if you're near Leeds this weekend, or online, please join us:

Third Angel and mala voadora present

Story Map: What I Heard About The World

Transform Festival, West Yorkshire Playhouse

11am - 11pm, Saturday 11 June 2011

Twitter hashtags: #whatiheardabouttheworld #wyptransform

Devised and performed by Jorge Andrade, Alexander Kelly & Chris Thorpe in collaboration with José Capela & Rachael Walton

Story Map is a companion piece to the theatre show What I Heard About The World, co-produced by Sheffield Theatres and Teatro Maria Matos, in association with PAZZ Festival and Worldmapper.org.

Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Third Angel is Regularly Funded by Arts Council England, Yorkshire.

There's loads of other great stuff on as part of Transform, including Melanie Wilson's Simple Girl this week, Geraldine Pilgrim's epic Handbag on the same day as us, and Chris Goode's remarkable new project, Open House next week. Well worth checking out.

*Of course, what we actually do is name the countries in English and then what the CIA says is their local language.

Notes on Twitterbug

Last Sunday I was in Stoke for DATFest, to host the live presentation of Twitterbug. These are some initial thoughts on the process and outcomes of the project.

Although this was the last day of Twitterbug, it wasn't intended as a culmination of it. It was one output of a 'multi-genre, multi-platform performance writing project' (as I described it in a tweet). We didn't necessarily understand that that was what it was, at the start, and that was one of the great things about the project, set up by Catherine Edwards – it was an opportunity to play and explore.

I've heard it reported that the guys who invented Twitter have said, “it was like we put the bat and ball in the room, and the users invented baseball.” This is a really nice analogy I think, although it's maybe more like one of those games played by kids down the park – in different parks all over the country – that is somewhere between baseball and cricket and the exact rules and conventions depend on where you're playing it.

Twitterbug felt like a miniature of this. The project introduced writer/performers Jarrod Cooke, Eve Steele and Danielle Henry to Twitter and other social media platforms under the guidance of Hannah Nicklin, and then we all got to ask: Well, what can we do with this? What opportunities for character, narrative, performance, art, intervention, does this give us?

Jarrod, Eve and Danielle's brief was to create a character/persona/avatar and spend two weeks exploring that character's situation/attitude/narrative on Twitter and at least one other platform. Then, at the end of the two weeks, to present a short, script-in-hand presentation of that character. During the two weeks, Catherine and I threw in extra daily tasks, to create formal connections between them, and to give 'what if' discovery opportunities – ask at least 6 questions, prepare for an evening out and report back, relate a conversation.

Some of the earlier discussions and questions are blogged about in the last entry here, and by Catherine, here, and Hannah, here. Here are a few more questions from my notebook:

• Who do we follow on Twitter and why? I follow interesting characters. I follow good company. I don't follow people for narrative – but I might deliberately follow a story unfolding via a hashtag – using Twitter for the news.
• Can we have “unpleasant” characters on Twitter? Following someone you don't like is very different to, for example, spending time with Begbie in Trainspotting.
• Who is listening? People using twitter like the inner monologue in detective fiction. The outsider/observer.
• Walking is our base unit of travel – this has come up a lot in our discussions. Allows for observation, as does public transport. Both allow for 'live' tweeting.
• Do the characters know each other in real life? On Twitter? How much can/should they respond to each other?
• How much can/should they respond to other people online – some of whom will not know they are “fictional”?
• How plot driven? Life's narrative isn't structured.
• Locating character/playing with form/more cryptic?/genre influences?
• How serious? How playful? How silly?

What was really interesting to me was that Eve, Danielle and Jarrod, all starting from very similar experience of social networking and responding to the same brief, were able to use social media differently and then present written pieces that were formally different to each other, and worked with/against their online lives differently, too. Unsurprisingly, Catherine and I felt a compulsion to play along, and I found myself using the opportunity in a different but related way, too.

The two-weeks 'live window' was a comparatively short time to develop a work online, and we found that the characters did become more plot driven towards the final weekend – the brief also included taking the characters to Stoke at the same time as the performers, who were charged to turn the location settings 'on' on their tweets.

Danielle's character was the most fictional: @Honey_henry, a honey-trapper, cynical, world weary – a contemporary take on the private detective archetype. She advertises her services online, and tweets observations on human relationships, perhaps as a way of dealing with any compromise she feels about her job. Danielle's live presentation, the most poetic and stylised of the three, recounted @Honey_henry's feelings on the occasion that her status quo is challenged – the night she falls for one of her marks - and the consequences. So the present-tense of @Honey_henry's live presentation took place on a number of occasions in the proceeding two weeks.

Jarrod's character, @zombiejarrod, lived Jarrod's own life, as if he were a member of the formerly living. Played comparatively straight, @zombiejarrod, a very nice guy by all accounts, was also looking for a date to a wedding in Stoke. Jarrod's presentation found his zombie-self standing outside the church, stood up by his date - an opportunity to retell his character's story, putting in more detail and background than we got from following him on Twitter. The text was therefore positioned at a specific point in the timeline of the previous two weeks – in the 5 minutes leading up to the sending of a tweet hashtagged #worsttimestobestoodup, on the afternoon of the last Saturday.

Eve's character, @_evka_ was the most real world of the three – a slightly reframed version of her own life, focussing in on one way of responding to that situation. The actions in the real world (going on protests, for example) were all done by Eve and @_evka_ simultaneously. It was only in the final two days that @_evka_'s timeline became fictional, as she deliberately didn't collect her kids from her ex-husband on the Saturday morning (preventing him from going on holiday) and went to stay in a hotel in Stoke. As some of @_evka_'s followers didn't necessarily know that she was a character, Eve was keen to make it clear that she wasn't abandoning her kids indefinitely, just having a weekend away to recharge her single-mum batteries. Eve's text for @_evka_ was a series of video messages sent to her kids and their dad over the weekend, which stood alone, but could also be fitted into her online narrative if you'd been following that.

I'm interested in how these characters each felt like they were referencing another genre, whilst still exploring what social media could do for them. I noticed that the avatar I created to try things out alongside performers, @stagcaptain, started as a fairly conceptual way of exploring ideas about routine and ritual, and quickly evolved into a Lad-Lit short story – a genre I am fairly familiar with.

Over the two weeks up to last weekend, the online characters had largely been in the same place as their writer/performers. At the time of the presentation this was clearly not the case, so I asked them, live, where, in their online timeline, their three characters 'were now'.

@Honey_henry was still holed up in her unexpected love-nest. @Zombiejarrod was on a train back to London. @_evka_ had just finished sending her final video message from the cafe of the Museum we were in, and was about to get the train home to Manchester, to pick up her kids...

Beyond that, I don't know if those particular characters will continue online, but I'm pretty sure that this initial exploration has sown the seeds of future projects for some of us.

Twitterbug

A couple of weeks ago I was approached by Catherine Edwards, who we've worked with a couple of times before at the Birmingham Rep and Script, about a project exploring the possibilities of theatre/performance/story-telling and social networking (in general) and Twitter (in particular).

Catherine had set the project up partly in response to the RSC/Mudlark's Such Tweet Sorrow project and the discussion it provoked.  I had dipped in to Such Tweet Sorrow, but my thinking about it had been provoked mainly by Hannah Nicklin's blog post about it (which you can read here). Catherine was asking me to come on board in an advisor/director figure, and I was pleased to hear that Hannah was advising on the project, too.

We would be working with three writer performers, Danielle Henry, Eve Steele and Jarrod Cooke, to explore performance writing/presence on Twitter and other social media platforms. I wasn't sure that 'director' was a helpful job description in the context of the project, but was happy to join in as facilitator/collaborating artist, using Twitter as I do, in my role at Third Angel. I had been really struck, recently by Dan Rebellato's groundbreaking use of Twitter during the Raoul Moat story, and very interested in Daniel Bye's discussion of this area on his blog. (It is exciting to learn that Dan and Dan will be collaborating on a Twitter project for Pilot Theatre, too).

So we gathered in Manchester last week to begin exploring the possibilities opened up to writer/performers by social networking, for the telling of stories. You can read more about the background to the project and the start of the process on Catherine's blog here.

The brief for the project is a two week online exploration of character/persona, narrative and interaction on social networking sites, leading up to a live reading/presentation in response to that exploration at the DAT Fest in Stoke. We had no specific formal outcome set for us, which is very exciting, as it allows the writer/performers to really explore their personal responses and interests.

I don't want to say much more, really, as we're now just at the start of the online exploration. But our questions are around the development of character, how much characters can interact with other people online, how narrative can emerge from the day-to-day use of social networking, and where we can place characters on the spectrum between real and fictional.

So if you would like to join us on our explorations, then please follow some or all of:
Twitter.com/zombiejarrod
Twitter.com/_evka_
Twitter.com/Honey_henry
Twitter.com/stagcaptain

You don't have to be on Twitter to see what they're saying - just click on any of the above links to see what they have been tweeting recently, and follow links to their other online platforms. But signing up to Twitter is also easy - just click on one of the names and follow the Sign Up link. And if you're already on Twitter, well, you already know what to do.

**

UPDATE (20 Feb 2011): Hannah has posted a really interesting blog entry about her thoughts on the start of the Twitterbug process on her site, here.

Working Drawings

If you've seen What I Heard About The World, you'll have seen me, or Jorge and me (depending on which version you saw) draw a picture of a donkey, and then turn it into a zebra.

I/we do this live each night. We know we have to modify the drawing of the donkey to become a zebra, because that's what they do at Gaza Zoo, so we draw the donkey from scratch as well. Other drawings in the show are redrawn afresh in advance of each performance (the paper plane) or are reused each night (a lifesize flat daddy and a set of haircuts). But it feels right to draw the donkey live.

This connects to the Story Map performance that is part of the whole What I Heard About The World project, in which we draw icons for all of the stories we gather throughout the piece. Drawing the donkey is much easier of course, as I know what I'm going to draw, and I've now had a lot of practice.

During the run in Sheffield we were invited to contribute some work to the exhibition Working Drawings, which has just opened at the Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery.  Pam Bowman, the curator, was interested in us representing how we use drawing in the work, but also as part of the process for projects that don't necessarily feature drawing by the time they meet an audience.

In the end we're showing a selection of finished work and documentation. We were asked, naturally, to provide an artist's statement about the work. I asked how long it should be. Pam said, "As long as it needs to be - you know, there's more context needed for your work. I mean, why do you draw live in front of an audience?"

This is something that has come up in discussion with a few audience members, so I've been thinking about it this last week or so.  I'm not sure our artist's statement fully answers that question, but it certainly explores our use of drawing. Here it is.

Third Angel

Drawing Projects

Third Angel is an internationally-touring theatre company based in Sheffield. We make work that connects the territories of theatre, live art, film & video, photography, installation and digital media.

The work is devised by the artists working on each project, led by Artistic Directors Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton. The devising process is one of discovering and developing the form and content of the work, and drawing is one of the tools we naturally use.

Drawing is, unsurprisingly, used to develop early ideas, work things out, and to share thoughts: how the space might work, what a performer relationship might look like, how something might be constructed. But it is also used as part of the aesthetic and action of some projects. We’d rather use a hand drawn straight line than a ruled one. We would (usually) rather use a traced map or diagram than a photocopied one. We would (usually) rather use handwriting than projected type. If an image or text needs to be big, we would (often) rather draw it small and blow it up – to see the imperfections that make the line unique.

And drawing is one of the tasks we have been found ourselves returning to in a number of our live performance projects, something to do in front of the audience, rather than something to be prepared earlier. The work is full of narrative, character, fiction, mixed in with autobiography and factual research. The mode of presentation utilises text – character dialogue, personal narrative and explanation – along with the performance of tasks. Real actions are part of the performance: carrying all of the furniture required on from the wings; balancing your own weight against your fellow performer’s through a pulley system, whilst creating a perfect, three metre circle of talcum powder on the floor.

Sometimes this live drawing is of diagrams and maps. Sometimes it is illustration. Often it has a restriction placed on it – a simple time limit, or the fact that it has to be done with eyes closed. Restrictions that might seem to say, Don’t worry, of course the drawing won’t be very good in these conditions, when of course, we include the drawing, and the restrictions, because in fact we believe the opposite.

For Working Drawings we are showing a number of pieces:

Mixtape: Songmap (2010)

Video piece / documentation of live performance. 7 mins.

Music: The First Big Weekend by Arab Strap.

Performance devised and performed by Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton.

Filmmaker: Christopher Hall.

The brief, for Unlimited Theatre’s Mixtape project, was to create stage action to accompany a favourite song. We didn’t want to tell a different story to the one in a chosen song, and we didn’t want to act it out. We talked about cataloguing and mapping. Originally the drawing was going to be done much bigger, on a wall, by both of us. But actually our presence, along with the view of our backs, was not helpful. We’d used the drawing table for writing ‘chapter titles’ in the show The Lad Lit Project (2005), but the devising process for that piece had involved a lot more drawing. So we changed the scale of the Songmap drawing and found we had this.

Pleasant Land – Lightbox maps (2003)

Hand drawn maps with text and photographic images.

Commissioned by Leeds Met Gallery & Studio Theatre and Shooting Live Artists.

www.pleasantland.org

It began with the Census. There wasn't a 'Scottish', 'Welsh' or 'English' box to tick. Only 'British' or 'Irish'. People in and from Scotland and Wales wanted their own boxes. We noticed that Scottish and Welsh friends referred to themselves as, surprise, Scottish and Welsh.

Between April 2003 and March 2004 we travelled around England, meeting people, asking them about their own Englands and asking what Englishness is these days. Every month we sent digital postcards from our travels. In October 2003 Leeds Met University Gallery hosted a Gallery installation and performance, responding to this travelling research and the responses to Pleasant Land Online.

We’d been keeping diaries and taking photographs. We had planned our routes, but then been distracted and diverted. Or just got lost. In trying to work out, retrospectively, exactly where we had been, we began tracing our route from the road atlas. We became infatuated with these new maps that charted a very selective version of England – the England we had travelled through. It felt important that the lines of the map should remain hand-drawn, and the text be in handwriting, to recognise the personal, partial, nature of the record.

We asked people if they knew the difference between England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Often, they didn't. We asked ourselves what our England was, what we liked about our country, what we didn't? We wondered if other people would recognise Our England, or we, theirs.

Presumption (2006)

In association with Sheffield Theatres.

Performers: Lucy Ellinson & Chris Thorpe

Directors & Designers: Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton.

Performance photographs by Mark Cohen.

A bare stage. Bare, that is, except for the white lines marking out the (sometimes multiple) placements of a domestic environment. Furniture. Objects. Stuff. A table, six chairs. Precariously carried, precisely placed. Begin the scene, post-dinner party. Guest have gone. Stop. More furniture required.

Presumption is a show about love – love after the initial thrill of passion has gone. Everyday, what shall we have for dinner, love. The performers attempt to enact scenes from the lives of a couple, but continually come up against the obstacle of missing furniture or set, which they have to carry on from the wings. The positions that the furniture will occupy is marked out on to the floor in (hand drawn) white chalk paint. Somewhere in between a (1:1 scale) floor plan and crime scene.

Parts For Machines That Do Things (2008)

A co-production with Sheffield Theatres.

Devised by Alexander Kelly, Jeremy Killick, Gillian Lees & Chris Thorpe.

A show about aircrash investigation, about cause and effect. The performers piece together the narrative through extracts of text – monologue and dialogue – whilst also constructing, on camera, model-kit passenger airplanes.

The three projection screens were treated as a triptych, frames in which images were constructed as if they were drawings – sometimes explanatory diagrams, sometimes more abstract imagery.

What I Heard About The World – Story Map (2010)

A collaboration with mala voadora, originally presented with Forest Fringe.

Devised & Performed by Jorge Andrade, Alexander Kelly & Chris Thorpe.

Photographs by Isa Maubach.

A durational research performance that gathers, and re-tells, stories from the audience. True stories of fakes, replicas, stand-ins and substitutes. The world is mapped out, alphabetically, using post-it notes over the course of 12 hours. We attempt to collect a story for each country from the audience, or from our own memories. Each story is then labelled with a two word title, and illustrated with a hand-drawn icon to stand on the map.

What I Heard About The World (2010)

A co-production with mala voadora, Sheffield Theatres and Teatro Maria Matos, in association with PAZZ Festival and Worldmapper.org.

Devised & Performed by Jorge Andrade, Alexander Kelly & Chris Thorpe,

in collaboration with José Capela & Rachael Walton.

Rehearsal photographs by Clive Egginton.

Show photographs by Craig Fleming.

Plane photograph by Alexander Kelly.

A theatre performance intertwining stories gathered from the Research Table durational performance and other sources. The live drawing technology from Songmap was in the rehearsal process for some time, particularly to represent the specificity, subjectivity and fallibility of maps. As we moved away from maps to focus on the stories we had gathered, the drawing remained, but as physical objects – as stand-ins – for real things, with one drawing done live to tell the story of donkeys in Gaza zoo being painted to look like zebras.

The ‘prepared’ drawings play with the scale of representation: a life-size ‘flat daddy’ is blown up from a small illustration; life-size haircuts are drawn actual size; a hijacked passenger airplane is drawn in miniature 3D.

**

www.thirdangel.co.uk

Third Angel is Regularly Funded by Arts Council England, Yorkshire. All of the projects presented here were also supported by funds from the National Lottery via Arts Council England.

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. 

Rehearsal Blog 3

Here's Lauren's report on Week 2's work in Sheffield:

Post 3: What I Heard About The World Rehearsals Week 2

The start of the second week saw the first weekly visit by Rachael Walton, co-artistic director of Third Angel, and we were also joined by José Cappela, co-artistic director of Mala Voadora with Jorge. This gave the performers the opportunity to hear the opinions and ideas of people new to any developments in the rehearsal space.

Through analysing their progress, it was decided by everyone that greater clarity was needed on what the show is about, and how the stories that have been collected will be deployed. Jorge, Capela and Rachael focused on investigating possible connections between stories, whilst Alex and Chris wrote some potential text for the show, which also developed the way the stories will be blended into one coherent whole.

This naturally led onto discussion as to the role the table/stage will play. Once props were introduced, do they stay there or are they removed? Do performers stay on the stage throughout, or get off it when they are not playing an active part in the show? Should the stage be sloped or flat? Do we even need a stage? This was a source of much debate through the week, but on Wednesday there was a breakthrough that Alex, Jorge and Chris were all excited about (something that I obviously can’t tell you without spoiling the show, sorry!)

It felt important that from now on the performers should set out how they will use their devising time at the start of the day (e.g. improvise around a text for an hour, think about set design for a morning), rather than working where their thoughts took them. This ensured there was tangible progress at the end of each day, which in turn maintains motivation and energy levels through the process, and staves off panic of course!

We all have our own idea of what the world is (like the old adage that if you ask people to imagine a tree, everyone pictures a different tree), so the performers needed to clarify each others’ perception of the world, and that the world the show describes is the performers’ collective version of it. The ‘real’ world and the performers’ world have a relationship with eachother, but they are not the same thing. The performers’ description of the world they have heard about allows the audience to imagine and question the version of the world they hold in their heads.

Overall, a lot of progress was made in the second week, and whilst what a lot of what was developed in the first week has now been scrapped, I think everyone is more satisfied with what has replaced it.

Rehearsal Blog 2

Here's the next update from our Intern Lauren Stanley, for the latter half of Week 1 of devising.

Post 2: What I Heard About The World: Rehearsals Days Three and Four

Over the next couple of days, further ways of developing the source material were explored. Alex, Jorge and Chris devised a “There’s a place...” exercise, in which they took it in turns to summarise stories of their choosing in short statements. The statements applied to a specific story, but were not allowed to be explicit about the country they referred to. Telling the listener about a country without naming it discourages them from defining places by glib facts or stereotypes, something the performers were determined to avoid. Some examples were:

• There’s a place where you can’t chew gum.

• There’s a place that's disappearing.

• There’s a place where you’re only allowed one of sixteen haircuts.

• There’s a place where choirs mime.

• There’s a place where soldiers are made out of cardboard.

• There’s a place where you can buy a ticket for a plane that never leaves the ground.

• There’s a place where rich people live in containers.

• There’s a place where people are paid to cry.

Again this highlighted which stories are most familiar to the performers, and which they feel have the most potential, but they felt it was an effective, inspirational exercise. It forced them to be concise and get to the heart of the stories, but does this mean that they are being oversimplified because the performers are so familiar with them? It was decided that this was a nice way to make the stories epithetical and memorable, but what will the audience take from them if they are unfamiliar with the wider story?

The show needs a sense of a journey, a sense of having been somewhere, and returning at the end of it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the show follows a coherent narrative, just that it can’t be a list of stories strung together, leaving the audience to make of them what they will. The idea of using one story to start and end the show was raised again, and that a framework for the form of the show needs to be decided early to better inform the rest of the devising process: “We need to sit down and make decisions!”

Ideas were then suggested for stories that could be linked. The realisation that 71 stories would not fit into the show quickly followed, and wondering how much the stories could be mixed together. With this there is a danger that the show becomes about one character with hundreds of wacky anecdotes to tell. Instead there should be a mix of Alex, Jorge and Chris performing as themselves, the person they heard the story from, the people within the story, or a fictional person that reacts to or is linked to the story.

The connections exercise was then repeated, but this time only narrative connections were allowed (for example you can’t link two stories because they both mention planes). This threw up some great connections, with stories told in a mix of first and third person. There were moments of humour without forcing gags into the narrative, and the beginnings of ideas of how to tell the stories with drawings, props and interactions between the performers. This felt like a real confidence boost that the material was good, and that the stories were worth telling.

Rehearsal Blog 1

Our intern on What I Heard About The World is Lauren Stanley, film and installation maker and graduate of Sheffield Hallam University. She's looking after video tech in the rehearsal room, and documenting the process for us. It's interesting for me to see how the process reads to someone new to it. Here's her first response to the work.

What I Heard About The World
Rehearsal Days One and Two

So, Day One. A bit of a first-day-at-school feeling, very new territory for me if no-one else, and a sense of not being sure what was going to happen. After setting up the stage/table, Alex, Jorge and Chris starting sifting through all the stories they had collated through previous Research Table events and requests from the public, deciding which they wanted to incorporate into the show. This raised some fundamental questions as to what they wanted the show to say, and what form it should take. It was believed that through discussion of the individual stories an overriding message would emerge. It felt important that although the show is fictionalising, they had corroborated information through asking for stories. The stories are largely about fakes and deceptions, but the stories themselves are factual, and that should be highlighted in the show.

There was also an acknowledgement of the danger of describing the world through stories to patronise or even be derogatory, the 'aren't foreigners weird' angle needs to be avoided, or at least mentioned in the show as something they wanted to avoid. One possibility was to take a story, such as Caterpillar Milk, and analyse the underlying presumptions the audience might make about others based on it.

On Day Two once all the stories they were potentially interested in had been decided on, Alex, Chris and Jorge started generating material through improvisation exercises and further discussion. At this stage rules were set on the improvisations to force them to think more laterally about how to use the stories. First was the connections exercise, where the they all picked six stories at random, and took it in turns to connect them.

They then tried a character exercise, in which one person chose a story at random, and asked one of the others to improvise a monologue, from the point of view of a character involved in the story. This threw up some new perspectives on the stories (my personal highlight being Jorge’s uncanny wax baby...), and potentially more interesting ways of telling the story to an audience.

These exercises made them aware of which stories they were most familiar with, and cemented a belief that the show should be one ‘shaggy dog’ narrative, made up of elements of lots of stories, perhaps with one framing the whole by starting and ending the show.

Finally, the 'it's about' exercise helped to clarify what the three of them wanted the show to explore. Some ideas were:
• trying to understand what authenticity is
• how in order to to know where you are, you have to have an idea of where everything else is.
• a story standing in for somewhere you’ve never been
• bringing a far away thing closer.
• 6 and a half billion people
• the difference between history and story
• the difference between biscuits and cookies...

If it covers all that, it should be one hell of a show!