Third Angel

We are looking for performers or artists who know Bedford to be part of our team for The Desire Paths from 2nd - 5th September. The Desire Paths is a conversational, durational performance that involves drawing a street map on the floor with chalk, talking to the public and inviting them to rename a street after a hope or dream for the future. It also involves listening to any stories they tell you about themselves and/or the town, and maybe telling those stories back at the end of the project. 

You can see photos and video of indoor and outdoor versions of the show here.

In Bedford we are working in partnership with The Place to present the performance in Church Square [sometimes known as Pigeon Square] so it will be an outdoor version, right in the town centre by the bus station. As visiting artists Third Angel will do some research into the history of the street names in Bedford, but we know from experience that it helps to have some people on the team who already know the streets and areas of town.

We are looking for up to 4 performers interested and/or experienced in engaging with the public, gathering stories (so listening and telling), drawing/writing in performance. You might be an actor interested in exploring more task based performance, a visual artist interested in installation and performance, a performance artist, or anything in between.

It’s 3 - 4 days work: one prep day, then two days performing, the final day will open the space up to passersby, and encourage them to use the chalk to draw their own pictures/maps/memories on the ground - probably 6 hours a day plus breaks! We can pay £120/day for freelance performers, with per diems for food and drink on top. If you’re interested, we would love to meet up and have a chat.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in joining there is an initial meeting with The Place Bedford and Third Angel teams on Thursday 8th of July - exact times/location TBC (expected between 11am-6pm depending on availability). We will be running a site visit in the town centre, talking to interested performers and finalising the plans for the event in September. If you’re interested in joining us please get in touch directly: al@theplacebedford.org.uk, or reach out to The Place team on Social Media.

After almost a year of planning and making we are delighted that this week audiences are finally getting to play The Distraction Agents, our brand new show / experience set in the ‘world’ of our theatre show, The Department of Distractions. The Distraction Agents is a new virtual experience with real world challenges which can be enjoyed from home: part puzzle, part film, part game, part theatre, part real life. If you’re interested in playing, all the booking info is here.

Thematically and formally, The Distraction Agents draws on a number of our enduring interests, plus also more recent concerns and fascinations. Helen, our new Digital Marketing Officer, asked if we could articulate some of those inspirations in a blogpost. Hopefully this will serve as something like a programme note, giving a flavour of our research and aims, without giving any spoilers…

Can theatre shows have sequels?
This thought certainly came up in rehearsal for The Department of Distractions, and also led to a discussion at a Third Angel Board Meeting at some point. Of all of our projects, The Department is the one that most obviously references genre fiction and TV drama, making several nods to the idea of a series – either of episodes or books (as we have noted before).

Both The Wooster Group and Forced Entertainment have created thematically linked trilogies of shows in the past, and writer/performer Joe Bone had great success with the movie-inspired Bane trilogy, which we caught two parts of at Cena Brasil in 2014. And then there’s Shakespeare’s histories, and two-parters like Nicholas Nickleby and Harry Potter… but none of these are the sort of sequel that we were thinking about.

The world of The Department Of Distractions seems so rich to us, that even before the tour was cut short by the pandemic, we were thinking about other stories to tell and games to play with it. We’d fallen in love with the characters a little bit, too, and didn’t want to say goodbye to them yet.

So it’s more accurate to think of The Distraction Agents as a companion piece to The Department of Distractions. Narratively, TDA it is set *after* TDOD, and features some of the same characters, but you don’t need to have seen the theatre show to play the new project – it’s a stand-alone project.

As an aside, we also wanted to create a new project in collaboration with the brilliant touring team of The Department: Umar Butt, Nick Chambers, Stacey Sampson and Louise Gregory. The pandemic has hit the arts hard, as you are no doubt aware, and it has hit freelancers the hardest. We specifically wanted to create work for as wide a group as we could afford to. We don’t know yet if or when The Department of Distractions will be able to tour again, so this was important to us. 

Easter Eggs (and Red Herrings)
The Department of Distractions knowingly plays with some of the tropes of detective fiction, such as red herrings & Easter eggs, as a stylistic and thematic devices. In the making process we half-seriously set ourselves the challenge of including a reference to every other Third Angel show, as well as films, TV shows, comics and song lyrics, amongst other things. Inevitably, this burying of clues has continued with The Distraction Agents. There are references to the original theatre show itself, as well as nods to other ideas, sources and inspirations.

Games & Puzzles
Both Third Angel artistic directors, Rachael and Alex, love games and puzzles. And, as we noted in Popcorn, both of us can be quite competitive. We use gaming mechanics in a lot of our devising processes. Warm up games are common in theatre rehearsal rooms, of course, and we’re not alone in using games for devising material – we call them things like ‘text generating prompts’ and ‘rule-based devising-exercises’. Several shows are structured around the turn-taking mechanics of game play, too, such as Story Map (2010), Inspiration Exchange (2010) and Homo Ludens (2009).

We like crosswords, logic puzzles, sudoku, the 1–5 number square thing that is next to the sudoku. With this project we wanted to create puzzles that are genuinely tricky, but funny to play and satisfying to solve. We discovered, of course, that coming up with a good puzzle is as satisfying as solving one. (Some of us were mesmerised by this solving of The Miracle Sudoku!)

Adventure Gamebooks
Alex in particular has been a fan of adventure gamebooks for almost as long as he can remember. You might know them better as the brand names Choose Your Own Adventure, or Fighting Fantasy, both massively popular in the 1980s. But the brand Alex fell in love with as a kid were Tracker books. As a kid of 5 or 6 he had three: the Pirate one, the Detective one and the Space one. 

What made the Tracker books different to the versions that followed was that they had a picture for each entry – sometimes including clues that were not mentioned in the text. What he loved was the idea that you were exploring a world, that there was no single set narrative, and he would play them repeatedly, trying to make sure he had explored every possible avenue of the narrative.

It’s been fascinating to see the renewed interest in adventure gamebooks since the appearance of Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch episode a couple of years ago, and then in the performance work being made under lockdown. The ‘choose your own path’ mechanism has cropped up in several making processes for us over the years, most notably Homo Ludens (with TiG7) in 2009, for which we made big maps of the narrative flowcharts of those three original Tracker books. And now we have finally been able to map an adventure gamebook first, and then write it, as part of this project.

Escape Rooms
Rachael in particular enjoys a good escape room or adventure trail – either in person or, more recently, played over Zoom, as has become popular during lockdown. Something that is a challenge, but that also provides you with fun, that aims to entertain you. We were interested in making something that did this using several platforms – that provides audiences with something tangible, as well as something to watch. We asked ourselves, how do we enable people to be more active viewers of film and video work?

Playing games remotely in lockdown, we enjoyed experiences where we could co-operate, work as a team. The Distraction Agents was originally designed to be played solo, but through the process of playtesting, we realised that it could be enjoyed by a household, at the same time, or in sequence, if people want to play on their own and then pass the materials on to a friend.

Play By Mail
The Distraction Agents is an experience delivered to the audience via video communications and resources sent by post. Individual audience members are recruited by The Department to go undercover in their own lives. We’ve always loved postcards, letters and puzzles sent through the post, plus mail art, zines and play-by-mail role-playing games. This idea of remote/delivered performance is something we have experimented with before (in Pleasant Land [2004] Favourite Ever Christmas Present [2010] and Cape Wrath [on Twitter in 2011] for example) and have been meaning to come back to for some time. Working with designer Bethany Wells it’s been a joy to create maps, booklets, instruction cards and various other ‘published objects’ (for want of a better description) to send out to players.

It’s worth noting, perhaps, at this mention of players, that the ‘game’ offers different levels of involvement and participation. Play-testers spent between 2–5 hours on the experience (usually about 3hours), through re-watching and replaying different aspects of the game. Some puzzles are necessary in order to complete the task of the show, but other activities are suggestions and invitations. You can play entirely at home, or out in the world; you can play over the five days that the instruction videos arrive, or save them up and play all in one go or at whatever pace suits you.

The complication the play-by-mail element gives us is that you need to book a week in advance of the week you want to play. We’re learning how this works as we go, and are initially doing a 4-week run (details here). Depending on how it goes we might extend that 4-week window or run the piece again in the autumn. Watch this space.

Short Film
We’ve always made film work, as part of the live performance pieces, and as stand-alone shorts, and we wanted to do more of that. Performance for camera has had a new lease of life during lockdown, and watching on mobile devices has affected what constitutes a ‘short’ film. 

Over the course of making the project (in collaboration with film-maker Brett Chapman), we moved from the idea of a smaller number of 10 minute films, to a larger number of much shorter pieces. We’ve also always liked the idea that short films are a genre of their own, and they don’t have to adhere to the rules of another genre (drama, fiction, documentary or performance for camera). In these days of video messaging and live streams to/from phones, this seems even more relevant.

Oral Folklore & Storytelling
We’ve long been fascinated by urban legends, but also the more verifiably true stories that get repeated about particular places: stories that make a point, and influence our opinions and behaviour. Modern day allegories and fables. All of these make appearances in The Distraction Agents, woven in to the daily puzzle / game structure.

Maps & Phoneboxes
The show also contains maps and phoneboxes.

**

We’ve probably forgotten some stuff, too, so perhaps we’ll come back and update this… If you’re playing The Distractions Agents, we would of course love to hear how your experience of it has been, and also about any Easter eggs you spot…

Here’s an update from Rob Fellman, our resident researcher, who is undertaking a collaborative PhD with us and the University of Sheffield.

Show and Tell

It has been some time since my introductory post, back when I began my journey as Third Angel’s researcher-in-residence. It is fair to say that rather a lot has happened since then! I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a bit of time working in the Third Angel archive between national lockdowns. It became a little safe haven from the very present crisis in the world outside, where I could escape amongst the pages of well-worn notebooks and in the translucent spaces between glossy slides of old photographic film.

As a brief aside, I have also recently been working on a national initiative that teaches secondary school pupils about all kinds of University-level topics. My course teaches them all manner of fun things about theatre archives, documentation, and ephemera… I am biased, of course, though I prefer to use the term ‘passionate’! I have always been interested in how archives exist in-and-around the theatre, as an otherwise live medium. Together with my students we have recently been asking whether, perhaps, a performance is an archive of sorts? And equally so, is the reverse of this also true: do archives ‘perform’? (I wonder, at least, whether their ghosts do?)

At various times during 2020 I had been writing quite extensively about Third Angel’s Class of ’76. In this show, Alex is the solo performer and Rachael the director. Third Angel guide their audience between a nostalgic reflection of Alex’s own childhood, his current practice as a theatre maker, and his research into the life stories of his fellow classmates. At other times, akin to a classroom activity of show-and-tell, Alex introduces his audience to objects from his childhood, such as a toy army soldier and a set of marbles.

Following on from my writing about Class of ’76, I set about on my adventure in the archive, simultaneously playing archaeologist-detective, sifting through dusty boxes in the hope of finding some clues (to what, I didn’t yet know). As I worked my way along the shelves I uncovered items from various versions of the show, items mentioned in the show (such as a very retro-styled CD cover for ‘find-a-friend’ software), and letters written between Alex and his former classmates.

These items began to add to my appreciation of the show, evidencing and confirming the stories Third Angel had told their audience. I realise now, from the very physical and tactile experience of the archive, that Class of ’76 is as much a performance as it is a dispersed collection of memories, images and objects that are brought (back) together to tell a story-of-stories. It also occurs to me that, on some level, memories are images; stories are memory. Objects are three-dimensional images, physical traces of the past: earthly anchors for the ghosts of memory. As I write this it dawns on me, that all of this, is what an archive is…

I plan to keep you updated on this blog with further musings and discoveries. I look forward to sharing more of my journey with you. If you are interested in keeping a closer eye on what I am up to, you can find me on Twitter @Rob_Fellman so please do feel free to connect with me on there.

Watch this space…

We’re delighted that the second Big Reveal of our New Year, New Team announcements gives us the opportunity to introduce you to a familiar face, although in a different role. The fabulous Stacey Sampson is joining us as our Community Producer, helping us to find new ways for Third Angel to support people to express their own creativity, find their voice and tell their stories. Over to Stacey…

If you follow the work of Third Angel, you’ll know that last year marked their 25th anniversary, and to honour that they released a collection of work – There’s A Room. It’s a title that resonates with me because I feel as though I’ve been wandering in and out of that room for the past seven years.

I first worked with Third Angel in January 2014. I remember it vividly because it was my first day back in a rehearsal space after having a baby. I walked in, saw Rachael and Alex’s welcoming faces amid a constellation of dancing paper butterflies and thought – this is a room I really want to be in. That meeting sparked a conversation about birth, which eventually evolved into our ‘verbatim cabaret’ Partus. It became a huge part of my life, and I wrote a blog about it here.

Since then I’ve also spent an unforgettable month at Edinburgh with The Paradise Project; chalked city-streets on Desire Paths; delivered industry masterclasses for Future Makers; collaborated with sixty amazing young people to devise Inherited Cities; toured with The Department of Distractions; and proudly took part in the launch of There’s a Room.

So now… It’s 2021 and I’m walking back into that room, but with a different hat on. I’m taking up the role of Community Producer – a post that’s not only new to me, but to the company. They’ve always been committed to creating work that defies boundaries, transcends traditional theatre spaces and actively acknowledges their audiences; But this post will allow for even greater focus on Third Angel’s relationship with groups and communities, forging partnerships and designing projects together.

It’s something I’ve been doing for a long time – collaborating with people of all ages in schools, libraries, community centres and theatres; but also parks, take-aways, police stations and disused steelworks… It’s a cliché, but I really am passionate about the arts being for any time, any place, anyone. 

As well as my part-time role at Third Angel, I’ll continue to freelance as a performer, facilitator, writer and dramaturg. The role of Community Producer will give me chance to draw all of these threads together. I can’t wait to get stuck into working with fantastic organisations like Artfelt + Sheffield Children’s Hospital, finding inventive ways to deliver activities to young people during the pandemic and beyond, growing the reach of Future Makers and Desire Paths, and developing new ways of framing arts experiences that massively chimes with my ethos.

Above all, I’m excited to become a more permanent member of this exceptional team. Third Angel are – as individuals, and as a whole, some of the most dedicated, innovative and supportive people I’ve ever had chance to work with. And this ‘Room’ that they’ve spent 25 years cultivating, is a really special place to be. I’m so happy that I now get to take off my coat, pull up a chair, and settle in.

2021 has got off to a cracking start at Third Angel HQ, with not one but TWO new members of staff joining us in January. The two posts, Digital Marketing Manager and Community Producer, are integral to the programme of work we’ll be delivering this year and we’re looking forward to telling you all about that very soon.  

So, without further ado, we’re delighted to introduce Helen Varley, who will be turbo-charging our digital communications. Let’s hand over so she can say Hi in her own words (and pictures. The pictures are important. You’ll see…)

I’m Helen and I’m SUPER EXCITED to be part of the Third Angel team in the role of Digital Marketing Manager.

A bit about me…

I’ve always been passionate about theatre, art and books. I made my first debut on stage at just nine years old. As I’ve got older, I’ve dabbled in loads of different mediums, from playwriting and crafting to photography, I just LOVE telling stories and experimenting with new ways to share them. Life is too short to have just one creative outlet!

I fell in love with digital content creation while studying for my MA in Journalism in London and turned this passion into my career. I have worked on some amazing factual and scripted shows and events, including the Radio 1 Teen Awards, Tracy Beaker Returns and my personal favourite, Blue Peter. I don’t like to brag, but some of the digital content I have produced has been nominated for awards, including a BAFTA! I’ve also done a presentation to HRH Prince William and met so many amazing people and celebrities, although I still feel a little embarrassed that I once mistook Justin Bieber for the office intern – oops!

I spent eleven happy years at the BBC, but I was made redundant from my post as Senior Content Producer last year as a result of the global pandemic. At the time, it felt utterly heart breaking and terrifying, but looking back it was a blessing in disguise as it meant I could rediscover my true passions exploring and supporting the arts. I’m so happy to be starting this new chapter with a company like Third Angel.

When I saw the Digital Marketing Manager role advertised, I knew straight away that I wanted it. I am very lucky to be working for a small company with big ideas and a bucketload of passion for telling great stories. As it is a part time role, I’m going to be spending the rest of my time working on my debut novel, which is currently on its second edit.

Although I’ve only been at Third Angel a couple of days, I’m itching to get started. I’ve already seen some of the TOP SECRET plans for upcoming shows and all I can say is I hope you are following us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook as big news is heading your way and you don’t want to miss it! Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our mailing list to be the first to hear about it all…

We were deeply saddened this week to hear of the death of Professor Noel Witts. Noel was one of Third Angel’s first board members, and remained a friend of the company long after he stepped down. Alex knew him best, as a member of the Performing Arts department at Leeds Beckett University that Noel did so much to shape. Here’s Alex’s tribute. 

I first met Noel in the late 1990s. We were both on a selection panel for the New Works Festival in Leicester. Third Angel had only been in existence for two or three years, and I was very pleased and slightly daunted to be on the other side of the programming table. Also on the panel was Noel Witts, who I hadn’t previously met, but who I knew was an important and influential academic. Due to the logistics of the day and availability of other panel members, Noel and I ended up having lunch together, in a restaurant around the corner from The Y Theatre, which was to be one of the sites for the festival.

Initially, I think, I was slightly intimidated. But there was no need to be. My abiding memory of the conversation that ran through lunch and into our work in the afternoon, is of Noel’s generosity of thought. He was genuinely interested in who I was, who Third Angel was, where I was from – Sheffield – what was going on there in the world of performance, what I thought of the job he and I were doing that day, what work I thought we should be selecting and supporting.

In the years that followed I learned that this was typical of Noel. As a performance academic what he was most interested in was what artists themselves had to say about how they made theatre and performance. His outlook was fiercely international, and his interests were people, performance and conversation. I worked with him a number of times in the following years in Scarborough, where his welcome and conversation were always as generous as the first time we met.

Noel was instrumental in establishing the Performing Arts provision at Leeds Beckett University, which I joined as a part-time lecturer as it welcomed its first cohort in 2006. It was a privilege to work alongside him. His enthusiasm was infectious. Whenever he was teaching, or seeing students’ work, he always saw the positives first: he was encouraging, supportive and inspiring.

We were delighted that Noel then joined the board of Third Angel, bringing with him his wisdom, enthusiasm and sense of humour. Even after he had completed his years on the board, he continued to be a great supporter of the company and we will always be grateful for that. We are richer for having known him, and we will miss him.

We’re really excited to announce that we are creating two new short-term opportunities to join the Third Angel team. Could you be just the person we’re looking for? You will bring your experience and insight to help us to meet the challenges of the ‘new normal’ and shape our strategy for the next five years.

Our new Community Producer will work closely with our Artistic Directors to find new ways for Third Angel to enable people to express their own creativity, find their voice and tell their stories. We’re looking for an experienced arts practitioner who is passionate about the power of creativity to transform lives.

Inherited Cities 2018 Photograph JSP Photography

The Digital Marketing Manager will help make the most of our digital platforms and ensure that our online presence is as innovative and engaging as our live work. We’re looking for an experienced marketing professional with a wealth of digital knowledge, a love of data, strong copywriting skills and an excellent eye for design. 

Still from Phone Company (2017)

Both positions are part-time (2 days a week) for 6 months, with a salary of £866/month (£26,000 p/a full time equivalent). 

There’s a short turnaround for applications, so time is of the essence! The closing date for both posts is 10am on Wednesday 2 December 2020 and interviews will be held on 14, 15 or 16 December (tbc).

You can download the Information Packs below. If you have any questions please email us on mail@thirdangel.co.uk, or if it would be helpful to have an informal chat you can call us on 0114 274 4974 or 07592 669167.

Click here for the Community Producer

Click here for the Digital Marketing Manager

We’re looking forward to reading your application!  

In March 2020, in the middle of the tour of The Department of Distractions, we took what at the time seemed like a difficult decision to cancel the rest of the performances for that month. Difficult because cancelling shows is the opposite of what we exist for, and The Department of Distractions feels to us like a timely show that we are really proud of, and which has been connecting strongly with audiences in each venue it has travelled to.

But it felt wrong to put our cast in the position where they were going to have to continue to travel long distances on public transport, and we felt a social responsibility not to encourage people to gather in a theatre. So we made the decision, even though we were gutted that the show would not get to meet audiences in Manchester, Edinburgh and Cambridge. We’re sorry if you were hoping to see the show in one of those cities. It’s not the same of course, but the script is available here.

Sadly we also had to cancel the last two workshops of Future Makers ’20, which had been going brilliantly at Theatre Deli and Sheffield Hallam Uni in the previous weeks. After making these decisions, though, it became clear that much of the rest of our industry was thinking along similar lines, and very quickly more seasons and tours were being cancelled or postponed.

After making these announcements, we gathered all of our free-to-watch video work together in our Film Room, to make it easier for our audiences to access. We’ve also started getting these projects captioned – we’ll be adding more soon.

Since then we have also had to cancel the remaining performances of 600 People in May and October, and cancel the next planned outings of The Desire Paths in Rotherham and Bedford this summer and autumn. We hope that many of these gigs will be rescheduled for next year. We have paused work on the next touring show for theatres, originally planned for early 2021.

We’ve been taking stock, and planning for the immediate future. Our priorities for the rest of 2020 are:

• to ensure that the company survives, and is able to continue to create artistic and participation projects in the future.
• to support the emotional and physical welfare of our staff and their families.
• taking the opportunities for learning.
• supporting freelance artists and the wider Third Angel family.
• planning activity in response to the new cultural and social landscape.

As a company fortunate enough to be in Arts Council England’s National Portfolio, and eligible for the government’s furlough scheme, we will be able to survive the year. By furloughing all salaried staff, at different times, during the spring and summer, we will be able to ensure that we have the resources to employ some of our freelance team on new projects in the autumn and at the start of 2021.

After some re-working, we are very pleased to still be running Arts Award, in collaboration with Growtheatre and Stacey Sampson.

We’re heavily involved in Making Room with other Sheffield companies, with the aim of supporting the wider community of Sheffield artists and freelancers.

Over the next few months the company will be fairly quiet, with only one or two of us at work most of the time. We’ll be back ready for new projects in autumn 2020 and spring 2021, and also thinking longer term about what performance and theatre can do to help in a post-Covid-19 world.

We’ll keep you posted on our plans here.

Thanks for reading, stay safe,

The Third Angel Team