What Is Story Map?

The What I Heard About The World UK tour draws to a close this month, culminating in two, 12-hour performances of Story Map at The Core at Corby Cube on Saturday 17 March (where the final - for now - performance of What I Heard... happens the night before), and at The Albany in London, on Saturday 24 March.

The performances run 10am - 10pm, free, no need to book: just turn up whenever you want, and stay for as long or short a time as you like.*  If you can't make it in person, you can follow the performance online [click here].

And what is Story Map? This video by Hannah Nicklin explains all:



If you've seen What I Heard About The World, or indeed, if you haven't, but have thought of any stories, from whichever country, that might fit in with our quest for stand-ins, replicas, replacements and fakes - we'd love to hear them. Come in an see us.

Or, if you're not near Corby or London whilst we're up and running at The Core and The Albany, you'll be able to submit stories online (and follow our progress), at the Story Map site, or on Twitter using the hashtag #whatiheardabouttheworld and by following me @AlexanderKelly.**

Although we'll be working through the world one country at a time, you can send us a story whenever you want, and we'll put it on the map when we get to the right country. At the last run, at ARC in Stockton, we got 130 stories for the 202 countries we put on the map. So, again, we'd love to hear from you.


*Current audience (jointly-held) long-service medals are for 11 and half hours viewing at ARC.
**I'll actually be a digital simulacrum operated by @hannahnicklin for the duration of the story mapping.

"what is and is not news"

Our friend, the artist Rajni Shah sent me this email this morning. I asked her if I could share it here.

Just read this in Stanley Cavell's beautiful essay "The Avoidance of Love" and it made me think of [What I Heard About The World]:

"We no longer know what is and is not news, what is and is not a significant fact of our present history, what is and is not relevant to one's life. The newspaper tells me that everything is relevant, but I cannot really accept that because it would mean that I do not have one life, to which some things are relevant and some not. I cannot really deny it either because I do not know why things happen as they do and why I am not responsible for any or all of it. And so to the extent that I still have feeling to contend with, it is a generalised guilt, which only confirms my paralysis; or else I convert the disasters and sensations reported to me into topics of conversation, for mutual entertainment, which in turn irritates the guilt."
(originally written in 1967)

It's such an important topic, and my work is also a response to this feeling which is why I relate so strongly to it - the work is a way of trying to allow us to see again, or to have some agency in our seeing, our knowing, in the world.

r.x.

 This really speaks to me about one of the strands that's there in the show. Thank you, Rajni.

"theatre for the enquiring mind"

Half way...four weeks into the tour. We're having a good time, and enjoying the different feel and atmosphere the show gets in different spaces.

Audience response has been great, and there are some very nice reviews out there. So, if you're interested - and with the inevitable SPOILER ALERTS - you can read the What's On Stage review from Soho Theatre here:

This is no mere travelling show of oddities, a simple freak show of human weirdness, but a true spoken museum.

and the Public Reviews piece from The Junction, Cambridge, here: 

This sublimely devised show is faultless in its presentation and originality bringing difficult subjects to life.

Dani Abulhawa has started a new Live Art blog, and her response to the show is the first entry on it, which is great:

[it is] constructed in such a way that the stories flowed in waves of emotion and energy.

And here's the review from the Northern Echo, reproduced with their permission, as it isn't on their website:

Northern Stage, Newcastle - Third Angel & mala voadora
What I Heard About The World

Review by Helen Brown

Third Angel is an international, experimental performance company producing theatre, film and video, while mala voadora, which incidentally means ‘flying suitcase’, is a Portuguese company who explore social issues and the nature of theatrical spectacle.  Quite an unlikely marriage, but its offspring production is something quite unique and brutally entertaining.  

Arriving in the auditorium, we find three men, Jorge Andrade, Alexander Kelly and Chris Thorpe, already on stage in a kind of live photograph of a dwelling that could be anywhere on earth. Their stories come from all corners of the globe and although some must be made-up, all are streaked with an uncomfortable reality, like the woman in Antarctica who cut the cancer from her own breast with the aid of a surgeon on the internet; a silent radio broadcast in Israel and a donkey painted to look like a zebra in a Zoo in the Gaza Strip. We are invited to consider global warming with the aid of salt poured into water and we meet Flat Brian, the cardboard replacement dad.

The structure of this performance is hands-on and punctuated with Thorpe’s excellent guitar solos.  Pictures are drawn, a great deal of Jameson’s whiskey is consumed and by the end of the show the stage is littered with confetti, paint, water and laughter.  All three performers are impressive; in particular Andrade, who breaths believable life into every move he makes. 

This is theatre for the enquiring mind; a journey through other cultures to find strange and wondrous stories that leave your jaw dropped and your mouth open. 

Anything is Possible

This is a piece I wrote as the programme note for Forest Fringe's first International Microfestival, at Culturgest in Lisbon, which happened this weekend.

**

Anything is Possible

From an original base in a dusty, under-resourced hall above an amazing cafe in Edinburgh, Forest Fringe have achieved remarkable things.

When you first encounter them, as an artist, they ask you what you need. They haven't got much to offer – a few lanterns, a couple of lighting bars, a small stage with a large pulpit on it, some other smaller rooms – but they ask you what you need anyway. You tell them, and they say, “Okay, that should be possible.”

The other thing they ask you is, “What would you like to do?” They have no agenda to impose upon you, other than, “What would be useful for you to do in our space?” You tell them, and they say, “Okay, that should be possible.” A piece performed by five audience members, who are all wearing headphones, and a television set? A man repeatedly climbing up a step ladder until he is the equivalent height of space? A danced memorial to a closed-down theatre in a different city? An all-night cabaret of one-to-one live art performances? A performance in a video shop at midnight? Okay, that should be possible.

If you don't know exactly what would be useful for you to do yet, they say, “Well, just decide when you get here.” They trust you. As an artist. Because they are artists. So they trust artists to ask themselves the questions, to set themselves the challenges, that will produce the experiences that will be vital for audiences. And pretty much, it seems to me, whatever challenge you come up with, they always find a way of making it possible.

And what do they say to audiences? They say, “Look, here are interesting artists doing great work. Come and see it, experience it, do it – okay, you won't like all of it, but you will like a lot of it, and you will love some of it, and it's all free or just one cheap ticket for the lot. Come in, experience it, stick around and talk about it.”

From the dusty under-resourced hall above the amazing cafe in Edinburgh, Forest Fringe have spread their wings and begun to tour a micro-festival model, adapting their structure to different spaces in different cities, but always maintaining their core ethos: What would you like to do? What do you need in order to achieve that? Okay, that should be possible.

If you're not familiar with how the Edinburgh Festival Fringe works, it's difficult to appreciate what an amazing, influential achievement Forest Fringe is. It started when that amazing cafe, The Forest, invited some artists in to curate a not-Fringe programme of free events during the Festival. The Forest Cafe is now under threat, perhaps gone for ever, because some people find it hard to see the amazing in things that are also difficult and unpredictable. But the influence of what they started, when they invited the creation of Forest Fringe, still ripples out through the Edinburgh Festival and across theatre and performance in the UK.

At some point, you realise that they are not 'they' any more, that they are 'you'. That you are part of the growing family of artists who make up Forest Fringe. It's an extended family I feel privileged to be a part of, and it is a pleasure to be asked to help introduce Forest Fringe to Lisbon audiences.

I feel like I am introducing two of my best friends who have not previously met. Lisbon is my favourite city that I have ever taken work to and I have been fortunate enough to collaborate with some brilliant artists, producers and venues across the city. I count Third Angel performances at Culturgest amongst my favourite ever shows. I think the two of you will get along just great.

Alexander Kelly

Co-artistic Director, Third Angel

Artist, Forest Fringe

"When something is this good..."

A quick round-up. Into our third week of touring, and the audience response has been great - really positive and engaged. We're really pleased with how people are connecting with the work.

In the warm up to this year's State of the Arts event, Alison Clark-Jenkins wrote a really interesting post on the SOTA Liveblog about the trying to comprehend enormity of the theme Artists and the Future Environment. That chimed with how we sometimes felt making this show, so I was really pleased that in that context she wrote:

I went to see Third Angel’s ‘What I heard about the world’ last week. At its simplest level,  some stories about some people in some places. In reality, a beautiful piece of  theatre with a deep, connected, emotive narrative. When something is this good, it stays; gently applying pressure to recall as you slow for an amber light, or look out of the window in a long meeting.  So, something is activated, I’m connected.

We've also done a couple of interviews about the project:
Here's Chris talking about the importance of corroborating the stories.
And here's me talking about clipboarding in Coimbra (amongst other things).

On the subject of corroboration, two popular Story Map stories have appeared in the news during the last couple of weeks - the Japanese Zoo Safety Drill (which even made it to Newsnight) and the Robot Camel Jockeys... ahead of the news, that's us.

What I Heard About The World: Video Trailer

A video trailer by Lauren Stanley
What I Heard About the World by Third Angel & mala voadora
On tour now, full tour dates here.

Packing the Van

Why tell these stories now? Why tell these stories again?

Stock-piling books, DVDs, comics, articles and music to take with me on tour. Stuff that's been on the to-read/watch list for months, some stuff bought especially. Touring luxuries.

Getting a bit done on the next two shows - moving them forward, conceptually and logistically, to a point where they can rest for a month until the latter half of the tour releases the head-space to pick them up again.

Checking the words are still there. Or rather, the stories. Discovering, as usual, on talking-to-myself walks to work that the words are still there - but the numbers aren't. Going back to the text to check dates and quantities.

Going back, too, to the wider research from making the show. Refilling my head with the stuff that is there in the show as spice and flavour, or (to push a metaphor) as stock, rather than as a main, visible, ingredient.

Planning workshops, talks, screenings and schedules. Getting my hair cut.

Asking myself, why tell these stories again, now? Remembering what first grabbed me about this stuff when Jorge told the first three stories. What made me want to tell these stories and find more of them. Thinking about how this project meant we had to look for bad stories, and the awkward contradiction of feeling pleased when we found them.

The What I Heard About The World project has been active in various forms, on various platforms, for almost two years now. That's pretty good service. Why tell these stories again?

I remember being sent a link to a story about a Korean couple who let their three-month old baby die because they were spending so much time playing an online game called Prius, in which they had to look after a (fantasy, magical) child. I thought simultaneously, (as a maker) brilliant, and (as a parent, as a person)...just...well, I don't know. Shock, disgust, disbelief. Anger, in fact.

I've been remembering that this contradiction is one of the things the show is about. It's about how we use stories. How we fit them in to our own agenda. At about the same time a similarly horrific and tragic story occurred in Sheffield - but not with the game element, and not, obviously, taking place in Korea. It seemed to me at the time - and a more recent internet search seems to confirm this - that whilst the Sheffield story was in the papers, it wasn't as widely reported as the story of the Korean family.

We like a good story. We like to repeat a great story - and to be brutal, the Korean baby and the computer game is a great story - partly because of the game, and partly because of where it happened. Korea. And as Chris says in the show,

...the thing about Korea, is, it's a very long way away. I mean, not if you live in Japan, but it's a long way away from the UK.

And, as Chris wrote to me just now, of course comparatively few of us have been to Korea. But we know it's part of our world. It has to exist, because we've heard of it. It's indisputably out there. We can watch its news. We can youtube its game shows and buy its exports. But for most of us, the place itself is just a series of facts, of anecdotes, without the balancing force of direct experience.  

I'm thinking about how, on one level, these stories of stand-ins are metaphors; their subject matter reflects the job they do as we carry them in our heads - as a stand-in for knowledge. As a substitute for understanding what it's actually like. Not that all the stories are as dark as the Korean story by any means - some of the stories in the show are ridiculous to the point of being almost unbelievable. A series of fakes, carefully crafted to let us believe we see the real thing.

They're a great stories. They suit our purposes. So we'll tell them again.