Where From Here Symposium Line Up

Where From Here: 21 Years of Third Angel
A one day Symposium hosted by Leeds Beckett University and Compass Live Art
Headingley Campus, Leeds
Thursday 17 November, 10am - 6.30pm (followed by drinks)
FREE - but advanced book advised: click here.

We are delighted to announce the line up for Where From Here, our 21st anniversary symposium.

The day's papers will reflect on the past, present and future of Third Angel, and explore the territory of work we have inhabited and influenced over the years, from making live art, durational performances and video art through to our theatre making practice and collaborations with other artists. It's also a chance celebrate Third Angel's longevity and place this into context in the current political, economic and artistic climate.

The programme for the day includes performances, short films, presentations and papers; it will be of interest to performance academics, teachers and students, plus audience members interested in finding out more about the work. We're thinking of it as something in between a symposium and a one-day festival. So we are very pleased that with the support of Leeds Beckett University's School of Film, Music and Performing Arts, the Symposium is free to attend.

The final line up is still being confirmed, but we are very pleased that Where From Here will feature contributions, presentations and performances from artists and academics including:

• Aletia M Badenhorst
• Oliver Bray
• Gillian Dyson 
• Lucy Ellinson 
• Christopher Hall
• Caroline Horton & Dr Jacqueline Taylor
• Andrew Jeffrey
• Alexander Kelly
• Gillian Jane Lees & Adam York Gregory
• Dr Hannah Nicklin
• Michael Pinchbeck & Linford Butler
• Henry Raby
• Jodean Sumner
• Dr Jocelyn Spence
• Kirsty Surgey
• Chris Thorpe
• Rachael Walton

Plus the premiere of The Small Celebrations, new video works by:

• Action Hero
• Hannah Butterfield
• Massive Owl
• RashDash
• Third Angel

The full schedule will be announced later in October. 

Where From Here: 21 Years of Third Angel is convened by Oliver Bray, Alexander Kelly, Michael Pinchbeck and Hannah Nicklin. Compass Festival of Live Art runs 11-20 November 2016.

Image: Rachael Walton in Where From Here (2000), photographed by Rob Hardy.

Monthly Film: PILLS 03:20:00

This month (well, three months in that already seems a bit arbitrary, but anyway), the monthly film is an old favourite that always went down really well at our Playing With Time screenings: Pills 03:20:00.

Back in 2000 we were making a number of projects to do with happiness.  I’d been keeping a list in my notebook of “Modern Pills”, just the titles, things that sounded like they would be useful. I took them in to the making process for Where From Here, and Rachael and Jerry improvised explanations of them – like a TV show. It was funny, but it was like a TV show.

Where From Here is constructed around a series of stories and descriptions of the rooms those stories take place in, told by one performer/character in turn, in order to implicate the other. Jerry came in the next day with a short speech that would work as a solo intro to the Pills sequence – suggesting that they were something the man enjoyed on his own.

For a while we experimented with projecting images of the pills onto the white set, but as the show became lower tech projection was ruled out. But we liked the pictures of the pills, so they became a piece in their own right, Pills For Modern Living, with the text borrowing from the show.

When we came to document the whole piece, we made a full length video of it (90 minutes), and then Chris suggested we make another stand-alone short. We asked him what we had in mind.

Over to Chris:

Alex has just asked me to write a couple of hundred words about Pills. There are quite a lot of facts about the how and the why of this film that we’ve shared over the years, at screenings, in articles and within lectures.  

Here are some bits and bobs about the film that I’ve kept to myself until now: 

From the very first time I saw Jerry do the monologue on stage I thought to myself – that’s a good monologue but I could put it into better order. In all of the stage shows since I've actively looked for monologues which I could adapt into something similar. I’ve only tried it once and that film was screened once (it didn’t work).  

With Pills 03:20:00, and the other two films which have their length in timecode as part of their titles, I genuinely hoped would start a fashion for that kind of titling.  

I’ve never known whether they are real drugs or whether he’s taking the piss out of her.  

The sound design is directly influenced by the title track of the Prince album Lovesexy, and the visuals are influenced by an experimental film that a fellow student made at film school, where a mans heads was shot through a lens with a stocking stretched over it.  

For many years if you'd asked me what the main colour was, I would have said yellow. Until a few years ago I was always surprised when I saw it was blue, and then I would remember all the other times when I'd surprised myself by misremembering. 

For the record, the visuals were achieved (I think) in the end by Chris re-shooting the footage of a TV monitor in the edit suite – possibly onto VHS, or even VHS-C. I seem to remember that VHS was in play a fair bit back then.

***

Pills 03:20:00

Performed by Jeremy Killick (with Rachael Walton in there briefly)

Text by Alexander Kelly, Jeremy Killick & Rachael Walton
Directed by Christopher Hall, Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton
Edited by Christopher Hall
Soundtrack by Christopher Hall, David Mitchell & Lee Sykes

Edinburgh Blogpost 1: Where From Edinburgh

In the run up to presenting What I Heard About the World as part of the 2013 Edinburgh Showcase this August, I'll be blogging about our preparations for the British Council.

After our first visit to the Showcase with Where From Here in 2001, I was invited to write about our experience for the BC's On Tour magazine. I had been planning to post this article here anyway, and in the end we've used it as the first of my posts for the Showcase (here). 

WHERE FROM EDINBURGH?

photo: Rob Hardy

Every May and June since Third Angel was set up in 1995, I've found myself having the same conversation with several of my friends. It goes something like this:

Friend: So are you going to Edinburgh this year? 

Me: Well, I might go up for a weekend/to attend the Television Festival/Film Festival/see a couple of shows, and then go and visit my Mom. 

Friend: But Third Angel isn't taking up a show? 

Me: You must be joking. No chance. 

Friend: Really? Why not? 

Me: Well, it costs a fortune to take a show to the Fringe, it's a massive lottery as to whether you get an audience, it's really hard work, and we would have to squeeze a show that normally takes a whole day to set up properly into a 30 minute get in and share the space with six other companies, and we just couldn't do that and do the work justice.

But this year [2001] was different. This year we were offered the chance to be a part of the British Council's Edinburgh Showcase with Where From Here, a show we had originally toured in Britain from November 2000 – March 2001. We were dubious; we take the reasons for not going to Edinburgh listed above very seriously. Where From Here normally takes a full eight hours to set up, an hour-and-a-half to perform, and hour-and-a-half to get out. If we took it to the Fringe we would have to do all of that in four hours. We make it a rule not to pay venues to show our work – we get paid a fee or at the very least a box office split with a guarantee because this is what we do for a living. The Fringe is the opposite of the way we work. We were dubious. But then again…

Where From Here is, commercially and critically, our most successful show to date. We had already shown it at Mousonturm in Frankfurt and it had been well received. The British Council were keen for us to go and they thought we could get more international work out of it. This was too good an opportunity to miss. But there was one other thing. Where From Here was devised and performed by Rachael Walton, my Co-Artistic Director, and Jerry Killick (pictured above). We couldn't imagine it being performed by anyone else. But Jerry was already committed to another company throughout the summer, and so wouldn't be able to come to Edinburgh.

We decided we would find a way. We got the venue we wanted: Theatre Workshop is the sort of space that Where From Here was designed for. We reprinted our publicity materials, we found a flat and we did our research; we spoke to Sophie and Andrew at the British Council, and to friends in companies who had been a part of the Showcase before. We managed to kidnap Jerry to come and perform the first night of the show, and decided that as I knew the show best after him and Rachael, I would play his part for the rest of the week's run. We prepared ourselves for what we expected to be the hardest week of our careers.

We had been warned that the Breakfast Meetings were vitally important and would be terrifying at first. Hilary Foster, Third Angel's administrator, and I turned up at the first morning's meeting and surveyed the scene from behind coffee and croissants. Everyone was talking to someone. Everyone was making deals, confirming international tours already, and no one had a clue who we were, or wanted to talk to us… or so it seemed. But we were prepared and entered the fray. We met some nice people, none of whom had seen our show.

And then the next morning it all changed. Rachael and I went to the breakfast meeting together; I had performed the show the night before for the first time. It seems obvious now, but people who had seen the show recognised us. Promoters seemed to have seen the show and quite a few had liked it. The British Council officers were able to introduce us to delegates who had seen the show and were interested in booking it, or at least talking to us about it. Where From Here was a well-toured show by the time we got to Edinburgh, but it was enlightening to discuss it with an international audience. For the rest of the week we broke the rules and all three of us went to the Breakfast Meetings early, and stayed until we were thrown out.

And what of those reasons not to do the Fringe? Well, it was hard work, but the show did go up and down in under four hours. We got pretty good audiences for a Fringe show. We didn't make any money. But almost 150 promoters from all over the world saw Where From Here. The feedback has been informative and very encouraging. We're taking the show to the Merlin Theatre in Budapest for seven nights in December. We're talking to promoters about festivals and bookings throughout 2002, and collaborations for 2002 and 2003. It was the hardest week's work I've done in a long time, but at the time of writing this, the benefits for Third Angel could be incalculable. We have rethought our plans for the next two years, and could well find ourselves touring Where From Here, and our new show Believe The Worst, through until December 2002. The Showcase was clearly too good an opportunity to miss. 

Alexander Kelly is Co-Artistic Director of Third Angel. Third Angel presented Where From Here for six nights at Theatre Workshop, as part of the British Council's Edinburgh Showcase, August 2001. Third Angel's next show, Believe The Worst, toured Britain from November 2001 – March 2002. As part of the Edinburgh Showcase 2013, Third Angel will be performing their show, What I Heard About the World, from 20-24 August at Northern Stage at St Stephen's.