TEDxYork Inspiration Exchange talks

Here are videos of the two presentations I gave at TEDxYork earlier this month, as detailed previously. These are the two six(-ish)-minute talks that bookended the Inspiration Exchange I ran during the day.

Part One:



Part Two:



Thanks to Marcus Romer and the Pilot Theatre team for taking such care in getting them up online. The whole day was full of inspirational speakers, and I can really recommend checking all the talks out on the TEDxYork YouTube playlist.

Songmap Sketch

Songmap sketch1, originally uploaded by third angel.

Going through images from Words & Pictures this evening, I came across this, a scan of an early pencil drawing of how Songmap might work, using the Arab Strap song The First Big Weekend. It's obviously more detailed than the drawing I'm able to do in the performance, when I only have the length of the song to draw the song. It's reminded me that I want to get back to doing more drawing with pencil.

There's more on how the project developed, in this earlier post.

Inspiration Exchange: Phoneboxes

I was invited by Marcus Romer to present at TEDxYork last week. It was a great and inspiring day, and I was pleased to get a chance to talk about the Phoneboxes, as part of an Inspiration Exchange.

First off, here's a [slightly longer] version of what I said about the phoneboxes.

---

I'm inspired by telephone boxes. Now I know that 'inspired' might seem like a strong word when it comes to something as everyday as phoneboxes, but they intrigue me. They make me feel, well, a bit excited, when I come across one.

And it started here.

 

          01369 870 212

This is Glen Striven in Scotland, on the western shore of Loch Striven. (No doubt you've recognised 01369 as an Argyll and Bute area code.) It's actually the end of the public road - the gates, and some others you can't see, are to private estates. When I took this photograph about 12 years ago, it seemed to me that the main users of the phonebox were the three-man crew of the LNG Lagos, which at that point had been laid-up there for eight years. Chatting to one of the crew, I found out that each morning one of them would take their small motorboat across the loch to check their postbox and make a few calls. They did have a mobilephone on board the Lagos, but this was back when mobile calls were very expensive and they weren't allowed to use it for personal calls. So I took a photo of the phonebox and wrote down the number. I don't know if I imagined I was going to give them a call or something.

Of course, in some ways, it started before this. It started with a phonebox on Glossop Road in Sheffield. One evening I was on a bus: it was dusk, the phonebox was lit up, and there was a man inside. I obviously couldn't hear what he was saying, but in the six or seven seconds it took me to pass him, I could see from his body language, and his hand gestures, that what he was talking about was important.

And it started before that in a phonebox at Nether Edge crossroads in Sheffield. It was a Friday morning, and I was standing inside it, whilst my girlfriend stood outside, watching me make calls, rearranging my weekend plans, making new travel arrangements. Because half an hour earlier I had got a phonecall on our incoming-calls-only-landline in our shared house, 5 minutes walk away, telling me that I needed to go home to the midlands, and that I needed to do it today, to go to the hospital today, in case any later was too late.

And it started before that on Milking Stile Lane, in Lancaster, where I lived as a student. Because we were poor, and our landlord was crap, we didn't have a phone. So we would give out the number of the phonebox outside our front door as our own phone number, thinking that Greg or I, who had the front bedrooms, would hear it ring. But of course we never did, and we would sometimes open the door to slightly bemused knocks from passersby telling us that we had a call. Our friends and family were only sporadically successful in getting though to us, often finding themselves saying, "Yes, I know it's a phonebox, will you please knock at the door of number 1 for me?"

And on a teenage camping trip with my dad, I remember pausing each night on the way back from the showerblock to look at the telephone box, now free of its tea-time queue, lit up and surrounded by insects.

So the interest started in all of those places, but there in Glen Striven, is where the cataloguing started.

          0114 270 0008

          0207 278 5424

          01298 85211

          01663 762073

          0114 236 0387

          PAYPHONE REMOVED

 

          0114 236 1184 

          0114 236 6550

          01369 870245

          01904 643310

          01298 871395 

I like their potential. I like the fact that with the right combination of numbers and enough loose change, you could, potentially, speak to, what, 80% of the world's population?*

And I like the fact that they are located, not by a map, but just by their own set of numbers. On Flickr I just tag them "red" and " phonebox". You can work out where they are from the area codes if you want to. Sometimes people tag them with their location, but I quietly remove such geographical information. 

But of course I am also aware that there aren't just any phoneboxes in this collection. None of your modern, flimsy phonebooths. I'm mainly interested in classic K6, red, cast-iron phoneboxes.  I like their solidity, their permanence. When I come across a new one, I have a sense that it has been waiting. When I picture them, I often picture them in the rain. Thinking about them this week, I have realised that one of the things I admire about them is their loyalty. They're always there.

So, yes, I'm inspired by telephone boxes. 

---

*a bit of research tells me that this was quite a good guess.

---

This talk was the kicking-off point for an Inspiration Exchange, that I ran throughout the rest of the day, in one of the great Pods that are part of The Ron Cooke Hub, where TEDxYork was held.

I swapped Inspiration cards with visitors, and then at the end of the day I reported back on what I had been told.

I swapped: 

EMPTY BENCHES for 

DOGS WITH SQUASHY FACES

SOMETHING MY MOM SAID TO ME WHEN I WAS 19 YEARS OLD for 

A SILENT APPLAUSE

DEAD JELLYFISH for 

RACING PIGEONS ON SKYE EDGE

BOTTLES OF MARBLES for
A BOX OF MARBLES

VOYAGER 2 for
PICTURES OF EARTH - WATCHING EARTH FROM THE SPACE STATION

MY GRANDAD SITTING LOOKING AT THE SEA for
"CAN'T GET USED TO LOSING YOU" BY THE BEAT

A SWIMMING POOL AT NIGHT
for
BEYONCE

A VENN DIAGRAM OF ALL MY FRIENDS
for
NEVER TOO OLD TO LEARN

THREE PINTS OF GUINNESS
for
"DON'T ACT POSITIVE FOR MY SAKE, BE POSITIVE FOR YOUR OWN SAKE."

AIR CRASH INVESTIGATION
for
THE MISSING RUG

COMIC BOOKS, INEVITABLY
for
I'VE GOT SOME PIES

Thanks to everyone who came to hang out in the Inspiration Pod, you were brilliant.

Psalter Lane, three years on

Number four in an ongoing series.

Three years ago I wrote a short piece for the Sheffield Telegraph about the importance to us of the Psalter Lane campus, as it closed down and the provision housed there moved into the city centre.

I still sometimes pass the old campus on my walk to work, so a year later, the proposed redevelopment having fallen through, I posted this.

Last summer, the demolition had begun, and so I posted photos of that.

After the demolition was finished, the old library building stood solitary in the newly levelled grounds. Part of me thought it was a shame that that situation hadn't fallen within the "yearly update" rules I had apparently set myself.

So, almost a year later, it is with mixed feelings that I get to post these. I miss it now it's gone.

Story Map at Transform

12 hours. 201 countries. 120 stories. Minutes to spare: zero.

We had a great time at Transform at West Yorkshire Playhouse. A really varied audience, including kids for the first time, who we got some nice stories from. One of my favourites was "Waterloo Bear". The girl who told us the story has a friend who is really keen on Paddington Bear - so keen in fact that he has eight Paddingtons. To differentiate them from each other, he has renamed seven of them, but always after a London train station. So one of the bears took his place on the map:

There's a really nice response to the piece, and other Transform work, by Clancy Walker, on the Culture Vultures blog, here.

There are more images of the piece over on our Flickr page, here.

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.

People on Fire, People in Love

People on Fire, People In Love from Third Angel on Vimeo.


To celebrate the return of What I Heard About The World this week, here is People on Fire, People in Love.

Our intern whilst we were making the show last year was film maker Lauren Stanley, and as well as working as researcher and rehearsal-documenter, Lauren also made a number of pieces of her own work in response to the show and the process.

This is the first of them - People on Fire, People in Love - a short film of the opening song of the show, written and sung by Chris Thorpe, filmed during the run at Sheffield Theatres in October 2010. I like the way Lauren actually dwells on the moments just before the audience come in.

Lauren's new blog is here: Organised Dust.