"a rhythm that was all their own"

I've written earlier about the two-part nature of 9 Billion Miles From Home, and the front-of-house issues that entails (a task-based performance running for up to 50 minutes before the advertised start time).

At the National Review of Live Art, given that it is a festival with lots of other things going on, that durational performance/ritual/set up time was billed separately on the programme as "Process", immediately followed by "Performance". We found that having it billed like this, and opening up the entire circle-making ritual to the audience, meant that it was treated more as a durational performance by some audience members who came and went during the work. Other people though were in for the start of the 50 minute process and stayed right through both "halves".

Mark Fisher's response to these two halves of the piece has provoked an interesting discussion on the Guardian Theatre Blog.

"something of an obsession"

There's a nice review of Class of '76 at Sheffield Theatres' Intim8 Festival from the Sheffield Telegraph here. Next dates are Leeds Met Studio on 24 and 25 February.

Candles, Kits and Collaborations

The screening at The Showroom Cinema last Friday was a combination of work by Third Angel, Christopher Hall & Alexander Kelly, and a couple of Chris' other collaborations.  The running order was:

Snow

Christopher Hall & Alexander Kelly, music by Akira Rabelais

Technology

Third Angel

Inspired by a section from Parts For Machines That Do Things.

Candlelit

Christopher Hall & Alexander Kelly

Commissioned by Lumen for Composure.

Shodokan

Scott Allbright and Christopher Hall

Violets

Christopher Hall & Alexander Kelly, music by Akira Rabelais

Reassembly

Third Angel

A remix of Assembly, built out of some test footage from the early R&D of Parts For Machines That Do Things.

Benchers (work in progress)

Third Angel and Teatro Praga

A digital short inspired by documentation of Off The White.

Travels: Feet

Christopher Hall & Alexander Kelly

From Sharrow To Soweto

Christopher Hall
Commissioned by Football Unites, Racism Divides.

Drinking in New York

An Acquired Taste, a documentary/live art short I made with Chris Hall, is being screened at the monthly Iron Mule Comedy Film Festival in New York this Saturday, 7 February at 8pm, at 92Y Tribeca.  Full details here.

It's been very popular at festivals and screenings in the UK over the last few years, so I'm looking forward to hearing how it goes down in New York.  We won't be popping over to see for ourselves, sadly.

Circle Drawing

Last week we were shooting a new video piece, A Perfect Circle. The work has been commissioned by Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum for the Sheffield Pavilion 2009.

A Perfect Circle draws on material from the shamanic-ritual inspired performance piece 9 Billion Miles From Home and its development process.

Here's some of what we said about it in the proposal to Sheffield Pavillion (which in part borrows from this):

Over the years we have seen a constant interaction and influence between the work in different media on each other – performers on stage interacting with projected images, reframing them for the audience; a performer on video engaging the audience as if they were in the room with them live; installation work that incorporates durational performance, video, photography and made objects into one environment.

One strand of this has been a series of video works born out of, inspired by, and kicking against the video documentation of live performances that they originate from. Works created, authored, in the edit suite. Work that pays little heed to the formal construction of the originating performance work, but which focuses on a single moment, or idea, or feeling from that live work and responds to and/or amplifies it. As we fix a performance project in a video document of it, we find ourselves continuing the devising process and taking the work off at a tangent.

More recently these works have started to use video shot as part of the devising process, rather than documentation of a public performance, taking that tangent away from the originating process at an earlier stage. For example, Assembly (2008) utilises video footage shot as a try-out for what would eventually become live link video in the performance Parts For Machines That Do Things, and manipulates and layers it into something quite different.

A Perfect Circle takes this a step further. We shoot the circle making element of the performance piece 9 Billion Miles From Home (2007) specifically for the video work, and go back to material (a description of the world as described by the 116 images on the Voyager satellites) from the process that we liked, but that didn’t fit into the final performance. Combining these starting points we will experiment in post production to create something new – a satellite project from the original performance.

Chris has got the footage in the edit suite, but has to finish off two other pieces, Technology and Benchers, for the screening at the Showroom this Friday first...

How It Works

Technology film still 

by Christopher Hall

Full details of Third angel events for the first few months of 2009 are up on the main site now.  Class of '76, Presumption and 9 Billion Miles From Home are all out on the road in Sheffield, Scarborough, Leeds, Glasgow and Stockton.

We're kicking off with a screening of new short films by Third Angel and Christopher Hall & myself, at the Showroom Cinema, Sheffield on 30 January.  We'll be showing brand new and very recent stuff, none of which will have been shown (publicly at least) in Sheffield before.  

One of the new pieces is called Technology, which is inspired by a section from Parts For Machines That Do Things [co-produced with Sheffield Theatres this time last year].  The text for this is a long structured improvisation - me attempting to explain all of the technology I encounter in a single day - that Chris will be editing down to about 10 minutes.  Apparently my attempt to explain why clocks "move slower" as they approach the speed of light is an [unintentional] comedy highlight.  We'll see.

New Pictures on Flickr

leafpattern 8
Originally uploaded by third angel

Some new leafpattern and Empty Bench photos... more On The Road pictures to follow soon.