Let's go to the pub.

I'm currently spending most of my walks to work, and bus journeys into town, talking to myself. I'm telling myself the stories from The Lad Lit Project, which I am performing in Leicester next week. This isn't really a revival, as The Lad it Project is still officially in repertoire. But this is the longest lay-off I've ever had since performing a show. Lad Lithere). toured fairly regularly for four years, but it's three and a half years since it went to the Pazz Festival (there's a short documentary/interview about that,

What I always find interesting about reviving a show in this way, is how much of it comes back between the first and second runs of the material – without needing to refer back to the text or a video. Running the show to myself over several walks to work, there are many gaps – whole sections, paragraphs, turns of phrase – in my recall of it. But I've learned now not to get the text out at this stage. I start at the beginning again, and many of the gaps fill themselves, just through having been identified, it seems.

This time, even after such a break (I have performed Lad Lit many times, though) the stories were all there. It was the numbers that were missing, the statistics and measurements. Also missing was the detail of the stuff that's “about me”, but according to other people: various analyses of my personality through blood-profiling, starsign, handwriting analysis, and so on. But even that's all come back pretty quickly after one read-through. For a show that wonders where, in the matter of our bodies, our memories reside, this all feels appropriate.

I'm looking forward to performing the piece again – the show still means a lot to me, and I'm remembering that I find these collected stories both funny and moving (and I'm remembering that audiences do, too, fortunately). I'm enjoying the tweaks and updates that the show now requires. The Lad Lit Project is a show that thinks of peoples' lives as being broken up into chapters, and so a three and a half years gap inevitably means that there are a few important developments to reflect.

One thing I'm particularly excited about is that the venue for the show is a pub. The last UK performance of Lad Lit had a very nice pub nearby, but this time it's actually in a pub – The Crumblin' Cookie in Leicester, as part of a great new project by Hannah Nicklin called, straightforwardly, Performance in the Pub. For a show that was praised for, and sold on, the way if often feels like a chat in the pub, and indeed, starts off pretty much with a paean to the glory of the Great British Public House, it's perhaps surprising that this hasn't happened before.

And the biggest challenge of returning to this piece? Well, one of the lines in the text states that I tell “a topical football joke, that is only funny to people who know a lot about football.” I've kind of lost most of my interest in the overpaid activities of the Premiership in the last couple of years – so this is going to take a bit more research – or suggestions? Feel free to comment below.

As a final note, The Lad Lit Project is double-billing with It Starts Like This, a lovely piece by Jodean Sumner of Trace Theatre, which is well worth your time. So hopefully see you down the pub (Thursday 24th May, 7.30pm, pay what you want tickets bookable here) for a pint and a chat.

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.

Words & Pictures: Introduction, Contents, Acknowledgements

Words & Pictures is one of those projects where I find it tricky to pinpoint how/where it began. We’ve been working with the Off The Shelf Festival of Writing and Reading for a number of years now. Third Angel showed Pills For Modern Living as part of the festival (and in conjunction with ArtSheffield) in 2001. Chris Hall and I have made a number of installation and performance pieces for them since then, all of them exploring the significance of writing and reading in our own lives, from postcards to comics to books.

One of those installations, Chapter Titles From The Unwritten Book Of My Life Story (2005), was itself inspired by the making of The Lad Lit Project in 2004. In researching that show I asked men what they would call the chapters in the unwritten books of their life stories, and as part of that experiment I wrote a list of the chapter titles from my own life. When Chris was editing documentation of an early work in progress of The Lad Lit Project, in which titles were written in chalk on to, and then washed off, blackboards, he discovered the speeded up evaporation effect that then inspired our installation piece. We filmed me writing up and washing off all of the chapter titles from my list - with me self editing and re-writing as I went. Chris then removed me completely in the edit suite, leaving a series of vanishing chapter titles to be projected onto a blackboard.

A couple of those chapters had in fact already been written, and I still have the list as a kind of ‘writing to do list’ – or a 'waiting for inspiration and/or time' list. Although they wouldn’t flow together as a narrative whole, I imagine that eventually they would hang together as an autobiography of sorts. Most of them are still to be written (or written down at least), but the idea is there.

On top of these chapters, we have, unsurprisingly, built up a small a collection of text pieces that were written for other projects and didn't quite fit the 'finished' version of the show, even though we liked them. Over the years a few of these have stuck around, kept our interest - but they haven't found a home - yet.

More recently I was talking to Pat at Studio Dust, who designed the Third Angel website, and some of our print. Dust have done some really nice work in collaboration with other artists, producing books and paper/card objects. I really like the fact that whilst they do a lot of work digitally, they also have their own silk screen press in their workspace. Pat and I were talking about the images on our Flickr photostream, and he said, “We should do a book together.”

“Great,” I said, “what would be in it?”

“Your words and your pictures,” said Pat, “and we’ll design it.”

We liked, of course, the idea of doing a book. And it was natural that we would want to work with Off The Shelf to launch it. However, as a way of interrogating the material for the book, we’re doing the book reading first.

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So, Words & Pictures, at this stage, is a theatrical short story collection, made up of material Rachael and I have produced for a variety of contexts over the last few years.

The Office Texts were originally written during the making of Believe The Worst in 2001, these monologues proved to be a bit too real-world to fit into the dark reality of that show.

Empty Benches and Benchers between them chart the development of an obsession. Starting on our travels for Pleasant Land we began noticing, and then photographing, empty solitary benches. Several years later I found myself collaborating with Paula Diogo, then of Teatro Praga, for their invited-artist-duets project “Shall We Dance IV”. Paula and I continued researching benches and collecting other people’s bench stories, compiling our findings into a performance piece (named slightly confusingly after a different short chapter) Off The White.

A version of Empty Benches was published in the limited edition artist's book, Slow, edited and bound by Ian Abbott; it was performed as part of the Café Scientifique/Art Science Encounters 'How To Be Creative' event, earlier this year. Benchers was reworked from its full length version to be a 6 minute 40 second Peachy Coochy presentation at NRLA earlier this year, and has now been reworked and slightly extended again; Benchers is co-written with Paula and a number of contributing benchers.

It Starts With The Dice was originally written, at the request of Teresa Brayshaw, for May Day Conversations at Leeds Met University earlier this year, specifically an hour of hobby-horses. I took the prompt fairly literally and used it as a chance to get down one of those chapters from the list. A short piece about hobbies, games, friendship, attention to detail and pedantry.

Dark is an extract from a new piece in development.

Dead Jellyfish is a new piece developed specifically for Words & Pictures. It started off as a (very) short chapter from the list. When I presented it to Rachael recently she suggested that there was more to be said about it. She was right. There’s a lot more to be said about dead jellyfish strewn on the shore of a Scottish loch than you might initially suppose.

Songmap is our contribution to our good friends Unlimited Theatre’s ongoing Mixtape project, for which a range of artists are being asked to choose a favourite song and set stage action of some kind to it. Ultimately the aim is to have a “a whole tape’s worth” of performances. We’ll be unveiling Songmap, and revealing our chosen song at the first performances of Words & Pictures in Sheffield and Leeds. Making Songmap has been a really interesting process for us – deserving of its own blog entry, I think, so more on that soon.

So finally, for this post, thanks to Off The Shelf, The Showroom Cinema, Leeds Met Gallery & Studio Theatre, Studio Dust, Unlimited Theatre, and all of the people who have fed ideas into the development of Words & Pictures, either in the making processes of the individual pieces, or as audience members at the work-in-progress showings at Forest Fringe and FIX09 over the summer.

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UPDATE: there is a "Second Printing" update about Words & Pictures in a later blog post, here.

Ghostwriting for Performance

Beginnings, they say, are difficult.

It starts with something my Mom said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It becomes as a research project called Writing Backwards.

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

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

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

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

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

Reading and Writing in Leeds

Chris Hall and I have two video pieces opening at Leeds Met Gallery this week, accompanying a great looking show called The Cover of a Book is the Beginning of a Journey.  Here's the publicity blurb:

Friday 24 April- Saturday 23 May
Reading and Writing | Christopher Hall and Alexander Kelly
Christopher Hall and Alex Kelly take aspects of Alex’s personal history as the starting point for two engaging DVD projections.

23 Postcards From America
In 1975, when Alex was a young boy, his father travelled America and wrote to him almost every day. As the postcards appear the piece evokes not only a particular time in the artist’s life but captures the essence of an era, before the internet and accessible global communication.

The Chapter Titles From The Unwritten Book Of My Life Story
A blackboard stands silently; chalk-written titles appear, projected on it, from the unwritten book of Alex’s life so far. This strangely mesmerising work presents a story told in chapter titles – some ambiguous and some obvious, all personal and all open to interpretation by the viewer.

Although these are 'Christopher Hall and Alexander Kelly' projects, they have connections with Third Angel's work.  The postcards appeared (in fictionalised form) in Experiment Zero, and the Chapter Titles were inspired by The Lad Lit Project.  The 'named authorship' is a blurred line on these pieces, and, we have thought several times, is probably more significant to us than to the people who see the work...

The Lad Lit Project at Pazz Festival

It is a different project in a different city / country every week for most of this autumn. Two weeks ago was The Lad Lit Project at the new Pazz Festival in Oldenburg. A excellent festival, particularly for a first incarnation, and a great time had by all.

The shows went well, and you can see clips and hear me talking about the work here.

[update, June 2009 - now embeded above, hopefully]

We weren't there for as long as we would have liked, so didn't get to see that much work. I really enjoyed Theatre Replacement's Wee Tube project - one of those simple ideas that manages to be much more than the sum of its parts - due in no small way to the performances - and a really nice way of working with found text. You can hear them talking about the project here.

Postcards From the Road - Derby

We presented a revived and (as is the way at the moment) slightly revised version of The Lad Lit Project at Déda in Derby last week.  It was a particularly gratifying booking because Stephen Munn, the Director of Déda, had originally programmed The Lad Lit Project in to Quay Arts on the Isle of Wight as part of the original tour in 2005.  Having moved on to Derby he got in touch to find out if the show was still in repertoire.

It was a pleasure to be back there (we were last there in 2001 with the first version of Believe The Worst), with a stress free get in (thanks Mark, thanks Martin), and a warm and appreciative audience.  And then we went to The Flower Pot.  Was there ever a more appropriate pub for an after show drink?

That's the lounge.  This is the back room:

A great pub - live music upstairs, no jukebox downstairs, good food (order at the kitchen door) and well kept beer and wine.  Customers good mix of ages, too.

Next stop for The Lad Lit Project is the Pazz Festival in Oldenburg, 23 & 24 October.

Ghost Writing For Performance: The Lad Lit Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Autumn Schedule

Lucy Ellinson in Presumption

Photo by Mark Cohen

Our autumn programme is pretty much confirmed, with the possible addition of a trip to High Fest in Armenia next month.  The Lad Lit Project, 9 Billion Miles From Home and Presumption are all out on the road, and full the details are on the Third Angel home page.

No doubt these projects will all get more discussion on this blog individually as they loom closer.  However, I wanted to give a special mention to Presumption at Southwark Playhouse.  We're delighted to be doing a three week run there (17 November - 6 December) at the behest of our friend Ellie Jones.  It looks like a great season lined up there, including Ellie's own production of How To Disappear And Never Be Found and Unlimited Theatre's The Ethics of Progress (co-written by Chris Thorpe who, of course, performs and co-wrote Presumption), followed by a world premiere of the stage version of Philip Pullman's The Scarecrow and His Servant.  

It's a really exciting season to be a part of, but that's not the reason for mentioning it now.  The reason is Southwark Playhouse's 'airline ticket' style booking system, which basically means the earlier you book, the more likely you are to get a cheaper ticket.  So book now, and you can see the show for £8.  Tell your friends!