Happy?

Third Angel presents

Happy?

Devised & Directed by Oliver Bray, Christopher Hall & Rachael Walton

Camera: Dominic Green

Sound: Luke Pietnik

Production Assistant: Matt Sturdy

Collaborating Producer (University of Sheffield): Professor Peter Totterdell

General Manager (Third Angel): Hilary Foster
Funded by ESRC Grant EROS (RES-060-25-0044)

Back in 2004 we started collaborating with Peter Totterdell and Christine Sprigg, (amongst others) at the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield, on the research project Karoshi. Some of the work that came out of that collaboration is discussed in detail in the lecture Testing the Hypothesis, here.

The conversation has continued, with regular (if not as frequent as we would all like) coffee meetings to discuss what we're all up to. Recently Peter asked us if we would like to make something in response to the themes of his current research into emotion, specifically the content of his new book (edited with Karen Niven) Should I Strap a Battery to My Head? (And Other Questions About Emotion).

We were really pleased to have the opportunity, and making the film sat somewhere between an art/science collaboration and making a video commissioned by a client. It was great, too, to be able to invite Oliver Bray, who is currently working with us on The Machine, to be part of the process of making Happy?

The book and the film were launched at an Off the Shelf event earlier this month. Afterwards, Chris sent me over these thoughts on making the piece:

"I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."  Italo Calvino 

In some of Third Angel's film work I try my utmost to do the same. Sometimes I've spoken of this as artifice or stylisation. The removal of all artifice from the language and structure of the film, so that the final piece feels as if it just happened, right there in front of the audiences eyes.
Sometimes these have been the most difficult piece to make and somewhat counter intuitively the most enjoyable. 

Making Happy?, along with adapating the rich vein of content from the source material, the challenge for this film was capturing the performances from Oliver and Rachael. What you see in the final piece is the result of an intense, structured and rigourous devising, improvising and writing.

Asking Oliver and Rachael to repeat their performances, again and again and again, for the camera, often felt, from my point of view, as if I was undermining what they had just done, which I often thought was remarkable. But on the shoot we were finding new truths and rhythms that hadn't been there in the rehearsal room and I felt strongly that we should investigate these aspects of the piece fully on the day of the shoot.

Does it go without saying that we also had a great time on set? It wasn't all chin rubbing and earnest debate. Perhaps the biggest issue among the crew was not to allow our laughter to be heard off camera.

To paraphrase, sort of, a friend of Calvino's, Marcel Benabou from WhyI have not written any of my books. The other truth of what the shoot was like lies in the the rushes that weren't used. The multitude of alternate endings, the improvisations around tea that went on until one of the cameras switched itself off are all part of another film that hasnt been made. 

Happy? is the film that we set out to make but to get there we discarded a great deal of weight, both in concept and in content. 

This happens repeatedly in the film work (and the performance work). And it's one of many reasons that I love making films in general, and as part of Third Angel in particular. 

And Peter Totterdell send me this about the project from their perspective:

Our reason for commissioning the film was that we wanted to capture some of the questions that are currently being tackled in research on emotion in a way that would be engaging for an audience. We had been collating some of this work for a new popular science book on emotion, so we simply gave some of the chapters from that book to Third Angel to use as source material. We then discussed the ideas with them as the film progressed.

"Happy?" highlights a number of themes and research studies concerning emotion, but hopefully in a way that adds to rather than interferes with the narrative. Being able to show how research relates to an everyday context, in this case the personal relationship of a couple, can help convey the relevance and significance of psychological research. 

The film concerns interpersonal emotion regulation - in other words, the things we do and say to change how others feels. Our research has shown that people use a wide range of strategies to change how they and others feel but, as the film demonstrates, the things we do to make ourselves feel happy may not always work for other people. Interpersonal emotion regulation clearly is a skill that has an important bearing on our relationships and well-being.

Another aspect of psychological research captured in the film concerns emotion contagion, specifically whether we can catch other people's emotions from nonverbal signals such as facial expressions. The scene about holding a pen between your teeth was based on a lab study conducted in 1988 by Fritz Strack and colleagues, who discovered that participants found a cartoon more amusing when a smile was unknowingly induced in this way. As the film shows, emotions are not always as obliging in real-life. 

The final scenes capture the to and fro of emotion dynamics in relationships. This complexity is nicely demonstrated in the schadenfreude (pleasure from the misfortune of others)experienced by one of the characters towards the end. It is also demonstrated in the shooting scene, which is likely to elicit mixed emotions (pleasure and pain) in the audience. Which of the those emotions dominates may depend on whose perspective they adopt. 

Mainly though we just hope people enjoy the film and buy the book!

You can watch the film above, on Vimeo or on YouTube. 

No Stars / Reviews Round-up

A blog-post in two parts.

1. No Stars
Before we went to Edinburgh this month, I was planning to write something on here about review star ratings, and how I try not to acknowledge them. I really dislike them as an artist, but also as an audience member. This is a widely debated issue, so, briefly: for me it feels that whatever gets written in the review, it is always overshadowed by the number of stars. No one puts three stars on their flyers, do they? As someone who makes shows, who understands how much work goes in to developing and making a piece, the star-rating system is, for me, a woefully blunt instrument with which to assess or discuss or recommend work. So, since Presumption toured in 2007, we've avoided putting star-ratings on our publicity as much as possible.

But if you go to Edinburgh, we thought, and refuse to quote star-ratings on your flyers, aren't you basically shooting yourself in the foot as far as getting an audience is concerned? So for our trip to (the frankly brilliant) Northern Stage at St Stephens as part of the Edinburgh Fringe this year, we (I) conceded and put 4 stars and a nice quote from Exeunt Magazine on the flyer and in the brochures. I realise, retrospectively, that this was a bit silly, and if we were going to acknowledge stars for the print we should have put all of our 4 star reviews on the flyer. Because if you only quote one set of stars in Edinburgh, it looks like they're the only stars you've got...

Part of me was hoping that in Edinburgh we would pick up both a 1 star and a 5 star review, to complement the 2, 3, 4 and 4andahalf (thank you, Public Reviews) -star reviews we picked up on tour (I seem to remember that both Chris Goode's Hippo World Guest Book and ...Sisters got this full range of reviews, which I thought was brilliant, and would have been pleased to be in such company). But we didn't.

The star-ratings issue came up in a really interesting discussion between a group of artists, writers, critics and marketing officers at a Dialogues day at St Stephen's in August. Dialogues is an new initiative set up by Maddy Costa and Jake Orr to facilitate greater discussion between people who make theatre and people who write about it (with the understanding of course that many people do both). It felt like the start of a really positive development to me, with some good discussion and healthy disagreement (notably on the stars issue - though not solely along artist/critic lines as you might expect). There's a nice response to the day by Catherine Love, here.

But I didn't get time to do that, and now we are post-Edinburgh, and the reviews are in, and, unlike on the tour, where the show divided critics, in Edinburgh the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. But I wanted to acknowledge that "unwritten"  No Stars blog post, before moving on to this reviews round-up, or "Review Dump" as I saw our friend and collaborator Lucy Ellinson refer to such a thing recently. (If you're near London in the next few weeks I heartily recommend you go see Lucy in Erica Whyman/Northern Stage's brilliant production of Will Eno's Oh the Humanity at Soho Theatre).

2. Edinburgh Reviews Round-up
I am aware that this whole entry is in danger of becoming one long humblebrag, but, with the inevitable SPOILER ALERTS if you haven't seen the show, to the business in hand. 

Our Edinburgh coverage produced my favourite responses to What I Heard About the World - quite a few of which do not have star-ratings attached.

Alice Malseed's reading of the work on her blog Spiel is, for me, really on the money:
All these things happen gradually and suddenly.

And on the New Art blog, Wojtek Ziemilski produced a really interesting and personal response:
how much of my world view is just about making it easy on myself?

Of people actually reviewing, Dorothy Max Prior wrote a fantastically detailed (so much so it gets an extra SPOILER ALERT) and positive review for Total Theatre Review:
bridging the gap between 'new writing' and 'live art'.
On the back of which (I imagine) the show was nominated for a Total Theatre Award. We didn't win, but it was a real pleasure to be on such a great shortlist.

And although she didn't review it in the paper, Lyn Gardner did a lovely 'homage' to the show on the Guardian Theatre Blog:
Third Angel's collected gems offer as informative a take on the world as any government statistics.

Catherine Love wrote a lovely, thoughtful review for Exeunt.

Fringe Biscuit's review was so succinct (because it is a tweet) I can quote it entirely:
What I Heard About The World, St. Stephen's. A fiery show that provokes and unsettles with striking, often brutal storytelling. Amazing.

The Telegraph found the show:
a reminder of the best and worst of human behaviour, by turns hilarious and moving.
Although like several other reviewers, Laura Barnett wonders about how many of the stories are true. 

So, to be clear. They're all true. Because if we put in stories that we know are false, how can we expect you to believe any of it? With this piece we're specifically interested in the way true stories are used and repeated (more on that here), rather than lies and urban legends (that's another show). 

Fest called us entertaining, inventive and hugely informative.

Broadway Baby called us Worldly Wise.

Fringe Review proclaimed us a Highly Recommended Show.

Public Reviews found the show Challenging in the very best of ways.

And for Theatre is Easy, the show was beautifully different... A Must See!

[I've noticed, writing this up, that I have used "the show" and "us" or "we", interchangeably. A 'tell' there, of course, about why we can be so sensitive...]

That, as far as I know, is it for reviews. The Twitter response was overwhelmingly positive, thanks to everyone who took the time to see the show and then tweet about it, tell people about it, write about it, talk to us about it. We really appreciate the feedback and the discussion.

Although there are no other dates actually confirmed at the moment, we are optimistic that What I Heard About the World will tour internationally next year. We're still collecting stories, too, and Story Map will visit Hatch, Leicester, on 14 October. So please do keep sending us stories.

The Structure of a Story

We've been touring two slightly different versions of What I Heard About the World in Portugal and the UK over the last two years. In Portugal Jorge performs in Portuguese and English, whilst Chris and I perform in English, and the English text is surtitled. In the UK version we all perform in English. In both versions, a small section in French is surtitled in the home language of wherever we are.

In the UK version, Jorge tells a story in Portuguese which isn't surtitled. He checks if anyone in the audience speaks Portuguese, and if anyone does, he includes them in the story-telling. It is important to us that Jorge gets to speak in his native language in the UK version of the show, as it means he is able to be more "himself". And I guess on a really simple level it's a reminder that we can't understand everything that happens in other countries, other languages.

This week we've been in Helsinki with the show, at the STAGE festival at Korjaamo, and it's the first time (bar early work-in-progress showings in Germany) that the show has been performed in a country where neither English or Portuguese is the first language. We performed the English version of the show, with the majority of the English language (plus the French) surtitled in Finnish. Of course the Finns' grasp of English is, on the whole, embarrassingly good.

There were two sections that we didn't surtitle, because they are the loosest performance-wise,  the most conversational, and so quite easy to follow for an audience who have a bit of English. We also think (though with only anecdotal evidence) that it is more distracting for the surtitles to seem to be inaccurate as we go "off script" live.  Even though the audience are listening to a whole show not in their first language, we decided to keep the section where Jorge tells a story in Portuguese - without surtitles - for the reasons mentioned above.

After the second performance we had a post-show discussion, and we were talking about this with a couple of audience members. They said that they really liked "not understanding" the Portuguese-language story, because it changed their relationship with Jorge and made the show "more human". One of them then observed that although he couldn't understand what Jorge was saying, he could follow, from Jorge's delivery, "the structure of a story" as he was telling it. 

I really like this idea, and I realised that this observation articulates something I already think about that section of the show, where we are playing with how briefly we can tell certain stories, and still make the point with them that we're trying to make. This is the section of What I Heard About the World that is most like the story-telling in Story Map - five stories told directly to the audience, a couple of different ones (from me) each night. For me it feels like the stories in this section have been told several different ways, with different structures, until we have found the structure that suits them - suits what we want to do with them - best. The content of the story is the same, but we try several structures for it before settling on the right one.

Psalter Lane, four years on

So, this is the fifth in an ongoing series. Four years ago I was asked to write a piece for the Sheffield Telegraph about the closure of "Psalter Lane" - which many people in Sheffield understand to mean Sheffield Hallam University's Psalter Lane Campus - an art school. Sheffield Hallam were moving their art teaching to be part of their city centre campus.

I was sad to see it close. I had attended Psalter Lane as an MA film student, and then did a few visiting lectures there once Third Angel was set up. But I knew it mainly from going to degree shows there - an annual cultural highlight in Sheffield. I was brought up around Walsall College of Art as both my parents taught there, and so I have an ingrained affection for self contained art colleges/campuses. And I live in this area of Sheffield. I felt I was qualified to write something. So I did. I said I was sad to see it close.

And every summer since I've done this. You can see previous entries, including the Sheffield Telegraph article, by clicking here.

This year I chose the one overcast morning of an otherwise sunny week to take my camera with me on my walk to work. As you'll see, there's a planning application in. Perhaps next year, it will look different. But whatever they build, I'll miss the art school that was here, now that it's gone.

Emergency Drinking Water

This month I've been making a show with MA students at Leeds Met University. I have a (very) part time salaried post at Leeds Met, but this project was very much like the "visiting artist" models we deliver in Universities across the country. We make shows with groups of up to 30 students - treating them as much as possible, within the educational framework, as we would treat fellow devisors in our other projects. The difference, of course, being that rarely do we get to work with a cast of that size.

Emergency Drinking Water, which we presented last week, was closest to a normal Third Angel devising process - if there is such a thing - partly because it was a team of just eight devisor-performers.

We re-mount the show in Leeds in September - here's what Version 1 looked like.

EMERGENCY DRINKING WATER

Devised & Performed by

Jane Bellamy

Hannah Butterfield

Louise Hill

Kimberly Maud

Rochnee Mehta

Debbie Newton

Lisa-Jane Pennington

Tina Torrington

Devised & Directed by

Alexander Kelly

Lighting Design &

Technical Management

Matt Sykes-Hooban

Rehearsal photographs by 

Kiran Mehta / Leeds Metropolitan University

The Distance Between Us

I've just received my physical copy of Performance Research: On Foot. It's lovely to get partly because we've got a set of Artists' Pages in it, and although I'd been sent a link to the online version of it, the pdf doesn't quite do it justice, as it is designed to be held as two 2-page spreads.

I saw the call for the On Foot edition quite late, but knew it was something we'd like to contribute to. This is what I pitched to them:

In Third Angel's performance piece 9 Billion Miles from Home, artists Gillian Lees and Alexander Kelly were attached to each other via a pulley system that meant that for one of them to move forward, the other had to move back. 

Barefoot and supporting one another they created a perfect circle of talcum powder, so positioned that although they could both reach the centre spot of the circle, they could not do so at the same time. Once each in the performance they stepped into the circle, leaving (in Alex's case) four perfect foot prints or (in Gillian's case) evidence of ten minutes of barefoot running on the spot. This was a shamanic performance obsessed with travel, return, cycles and distance – distance measured in miles, metres, footsteps, days, years. 

Ten years earlier, in Third Angel's Saved, Rachael Walton stepped backwards through a floor covering of epsom salts in a performance in which the audience were required to remove their shoes in order to feel the salt shift under their feet. Rachael left perfect footprints in the salt, before stepping back and erasing them. 

For The Distance Between Us, Alex and Gillian revisit 9 Billion Miles from Home to discuss the task of performing it, and the physical and emotional memory it has left them with, and Rachael revisits the solo task of walking backwards for anything up to 5 hours at a time, erasing traces of her passing. The paper takes the form of an illustrated conversation, discussing how, in performance, Alex and Gillian would watch, not each other's faces as they travelled about the stage, but each other's feet. How they learned the measure of each other's steps. They compare footstep awareness with Rachael: when to place a heel or toe first; how to measure the transfer of weight. The blisters, scars left by, and the cold of, the different floors they trod on as the work toured. The footprints left in the talcum powder and the salts.

The On Foot edition of Performance Research is edited by Nicolas Whybrow and Carl Lavery. Nicolas asked me what "an illustrated conversation" might entail. I said I wasn't actually sure, but that I liked the sound of it.

Through talking to Gillian and Rachael, the illustrated conversation idea evolved into a kind of performance map, the conversation layout reflecting the performer-journeys taken in the shows.

The Distance Between Us : 9 Billion Miles from Home (detail)

The Distance Between Us : Saved (detail)

It was a really helpful process creating the pages in collaboration with Nicolas and Carl, and I'm pleased with how they've turned out. I am also interested in the process with  both Rachael and Gillian that created them. I wonder if there are more of them to be made.

Performance Research: On Foot (with lovely contributions, too, from Gregg Whelan, Dee Heddon and Stephen Hodge, amongst others) is in shops (and libraries) now. You can subscribe and download individual articles on the Taylor & Francis website, here.

The Story of the Day

Here's the text / notes of what I said as the final summing up / 'story of the day' presentation at the end of the Inspiration Exchange at PSi#18 in Leeds last Saturday. The exchange was open from 9.30am - 6pm, with this happening in the last 20 minutes.

I started off writing 36 cards, thinking that six rows of six cards would work aesthetically. But when I got the table, I realised that five rows of seven worked better. 35 cards. So I had to choose one card not to include.

I chose not to include one that I thought the most general piece of inspiration: SOCIETY DREAMING. This is something that Douglas Rushkoff said on a panel I heard at the Edinburgh TV Festival many years ago. He explained the idea that culture and art are society's way of dreaming, its way of working things out. He talked about the experiments that have been done in which human beings are stopped from dreaming, being drugged or simply woken up whenever they enter REM / dreamsleep. After a couple of weeks of not being allowed to dream, human beings start to go mad. And you can see a parallel, he explained, when societies aren't allowed to dream; regimes that censor and restrict art eventually start to go mad.

This idea has stayed with me since I heard it. But it seemed, in this context, these easiest card to extract.

And then the Exchange opened and no-one came in. The calm before the storm? I hoped so. I wrote some notes.

For the first hour it's only members of the production team who cross the threshhold - people with furniture and lamps.

Other peope look in, most bearing takeaway cups of coffee. They promise to be back later, or just wish me luck for the day. I enjoy the quiet. I use the time to get a double espresso, eat a banana. Rearrange my furniture. Put the foldaway chairs away into the corner, to make it look like I'm expecting less people. I figure out how to use the remote controls for the air conditioning unit and the dimmable lighting.

I start to write the words that I am reading to you now, 7 hours later.

I think about the way my grandma would just slightly adjust the objects on a worksurface in the kitchen. A small notepad, some keys, a pack of pills. Moving them mere millimetres. As a teenager I found it irritating. (Or did I, really? Did I actually find it strange, and did I find things that I didn't understand, irritating? Or did the door it opened onto the loneliness of old age frighten me? Was my irritation just a defence mechanism?) But now I understand, I think. Just to make sure everything is just so.

I watch people walk past the doorway to my self-contained and well signposted room, without looking in. I wonder if I should have asked to be out in the main hall... Occassionally people slow slightly, look in and smile at me. But they don't stop.

I realise that I am expecting someone to interupt me writing these notes, so I can break off and tell a story. To them. To you.

I think about my children.

And then someone comes in and

I swap A PERFECT CIRCLE

for THE PERFORMANCE THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN

a story of sticking at it.

I swap "WHEN WILL THE WEDDING TAKE PLACE?"

for LOCKSMITH: "I WANNA SEE YOUR WORK."

I swap PEOPLE WITH CLIPBOARDS

for ANCESTRAL FRUSTRATION

Then I swap THE PERFORMANCE THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN

for HOW-TO DEMONSTRATIONS

I swap NOT KNOWING WHAT TO THINK ABOUT POLE DANCING

for DO I DRAW THE ACTORS OR DO I DRAW WHAT I SAW?

I swap THE HOUSING BENEFIT CLAIM SYSTEM

for THE HUMAN INSTINCT TO CREATE IMAGINARY MINDS

I swap THE IDEA OF A RETRONYM

for THE ICONS OF FORGOTTEN TECHNOLOGY

I swap 23 POSTCARDS FROM AMERICA, FROM MY DAD

for HIRE AN APOLOGY

I swap AN ESCAPED LUNATIC ON CANNOCK CHASE

for this:

I swap EMPTY BENCHES

for THE FLOOR CARRYING YOU

I swap THE PATENT NUMBER OF A UFO

for ARE CONKERS BABY WOOD?

At some point I say to someone, "Pick one that sounds good." And then I think what a stupid thing to say that is. I think about the disappointment - for them and for me - when someone picks the "wrong" card, and gets a story that they're not that interested in. Particularly if this is a story I've told to someone before and they've really found a personal connection to it, and then this time it doesn't mean much.

I swap HURRY SICKNESS

for SQUIRRELS

in general, and then I immediately swap SQUIRRELS

for A SQUIRREL

in particular.

I swap THE INSIDE OF A SAXOPHONE

for LETTING GIRLS BE

I swap THE EMPTY SOAP PACKET

for QUICK SHAVE

I swap A SWIMMING POOL AT NIGHT

for PROFESSOR MOAN ALOT

I swap "IF IN DOUBT, TAKE IT OUT, IF YOU CAN'T WIN, LEAVE IT IN."

for A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR

I swap AN UNBOOKABLE PIECE OF KIT

for MR. BEEFHEART

I swap AN 84 YEAR OLD AUNT WHO SMOKES 20 A DAY

for RIGOROUS HERBERT

I swap DESIRE PATHS

for I CAN DO THAT

I swap A SQUIRREL

for FU CHU CHOO-CHOO

I swap THE FLOOR CARRYING YOU

for FLAMENCO INCOGNITO
and then swap FLAMENCO INCOGNITO
for 1 - 2 - 3 PALOMA BLANCA

I swap PROFESSOR MOAN ALOT

for MEETING MY FIRST HUSBAND 25 YEARS LATER

We refine the rules and figure out what happens if I'm offered a story first,
and so I am swapped 1967

for A BOTTLE OF MARBLES

I swap RIGOROUS HERBERT

for LIFE BEGINS AT 40...

I swap SOMETHING MY MOM SAID TO ME WHEN I WAS 19

for CUT A STORY SHORT

I swap FU CHU CHOO-CHOO

for A TREE IN SIBERIA

I swap THE ROADS THE BUS DOESN'T TURN DOWN

for TRAVELLING PADLOCKS & A JAR OF KEYS

And then we were out of time.