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photo credit: picturesbybish

    what dya need books for, ur homeless.
    a “support-worker” once asked us this.
    this show is our reply.

Back in 2019, we invited gobscure to be one of the participants on the BOOST mentoring scheme. We were aware of gobscure as a writer, sean burn, having heard great things about their play joey, produced by greyscale earlier that year. 

They had approached us with their project provoked 2 madness by the brutality ov wealth, an autobiographical show about their experiences of homelessness, and an incisive take-down of various aspects of UK government and local council policy.

Over the course of a week we were able to shape about three quarters of the show, and share it with an invited audience. After that showing I think we were all sure that the project had legs. So we were delighted when gobscure was awarded funding by Arts Council England to finish making and then tour the show, and invited us to mentor the completion of it. Of course, everyone’s plans had to be rethought in the year that followed, but we were still able to open the show in a socially distanced set up at Slung Low’s brilliantly welcoming venue The Holbeck in autumn 2020.

We talked about documenting the whole show on video, but there are sections that really only work in the room live. Third Angel had recently really enjoyed working with Brett Chapman on thirteen short films for The Distraction Agents, and so we asked him if he was interested in collaborating with gobscure on making some short chapters from the show as stand-alone films.

The result is four ‘filmed-jewels’ from the show, created by gobscure, Brett Chapman, Lara Kardas, Alexander Kelly and Lindsay Nicholson at The Holbeck in autumn 2022, with the support of Third Angel and Slung Low. We launched the films online earlier this month and are proud to be able to share them here. We hope you enjoy them.

1. kicking the bucket


2. red tape saves lives


3. magic money trees


4. housing contains the word sing


 

Tuesday, 6 August 2019

BOOST 2019 ARTISTS & COMPANIES

We are delighted to be able to announce the artists and companies we will be mentoring through this year’s BOOST Your Artistic Practice scheme, in collaboration with Sheffield Theatres.

As ever, it was incredibly difficult to choose which artists and projects to select, and we could have happily supported far more than the four we have chosen. Thank you to everyone who applied - it is inspiring to hear about so many exciting projects in development.

We’re really excited to start working with this year’s Mentees:

gobscure

gobscure’s squarepegs into roundholes. © 2018 chris bishop

we will work with gobscure to develop their new show provoked to madness by the brutality of wealth weaving live-art and text-art into playful creative resistances that are urgent, but will also hope to offer a hard-won hopefulness, too.


Emergency Chorus

Emergency Chorus. Photo: The Other Richard.

We will support Emergency Chorus to play, experiment and generate material towards their new show, Something in Your Voice, working with an expanded group of deviser performers.


The Six Twenty

The Six Twenty: BUSY

The endless hurrying between meetings. Racing for trains. Not enough time for lunch. And somehow getting the kids out the door with only seconds to spare… The Six Twenty will spend a week with us exploring why we are all so BUSY for their new immersive and interactive show.


Tommi Bryson

Tommi Bryson performing at Queer Scratch Night at The Cellar Theatre (photo courtesy of The Cellar theatre)

We will work with performer and composer Tommi Bryson to develop a full length version of her solo, Disney-inspired musical, A Princess Could Work.

Big thanks to Sheffield Theatres for supporting the scheme and to Umar Butt and Ruby Clarke for their help with the very difficult task of selecting these exciting artists and companies. We’ll be working with them in the Crucible and Lyceum Theatre Rehearsal Rooms between September 2019 and February 2020. We’re really looking forward to getting started.

Wednesday, 29 May 2019

BOOST: Our new mentoring scheme

We’ve just launched BOOST, our funded mentoring scheme for 2019, offering time, space, money and expertise for artists and companies making contemporary theatre and live art. There are two main strands: Artistic Practice and Producing Your Own Work.

Some of you might have applied to TAMS (Third Angel’s Mentoring Scheme) in previous years; BOOST is replacing this and one major difference this year is that there are two separate application forms for the Artistic Practice and Producing. You can apply for both, but to make the schemes as bespoke as possible we need to ask you different questions for each.

For BOOST Your Artistic Practice we are looking for four artists or companies who devise their own work and create theatre or live art. We can support you through three days of Rachael or Alex’s time as a mentor, be that as an outside eye, dramaturg or co-deviser, a week’s rehearsal space with our partners Sheffield Theatres in either the Lyceum Theatre or the Crucible rehearsal rooms, and a fee. 

Yolanda Mercy, 2017 Mentee

Yolanda Mercy, 2016 Mentee

We want to support artists to make the work they want to make, and we want to work with them to find the best way of doing this on an individual basis. However, we’ve also been doing this a while now, so we also want to support projects that can make use of our experience and expertise. So, over the last few years, this is what we’ve learned about applying to the scheme:

  • Apply with the show or project you really want to make next - don’t try to come up with something to ‘fit’ the scheme.
  • We are looking for projects that are created primarily through devising. That isn’t to say the shows can’t have text or can’t be written.
  • We’re looking for projects that are ready to use a rehearsal room, to try out writing with performers, to start to improvise text, or to start to find the physical score of the work or the frame of the show.
  • We’re interested in supporting projects at any stage of their development, except the very start. If you still need to go and do the research (interview members of the community, meet a scientist, spend a week in the library/on the internet), then you’re not quite ready to apply this year.
  • We are looking for work that we feel we can contribute to in some way and be useful; work where a meaningful dialogue can take place between us and the mentee.
  • We’re interested in fiction, autobiography, documentary, verbatim, task-based, visually-led performance and live art. We run devising processes that utilise rule-based exercises to enable performers to create material for shows so they have ownership of, and investment in, that material in performance. Processes that involve devising, task-based improvisation, discussion, writing, making more material than will be used in the final show and editing. We would like to share this approach with you, but also remix and refine it so that it works for your project.
  • We can’t provide extra performers or actors, although we can sometimes help you find workshop participants if that would be useful.
  • If you would like to share some of your work at the end of the week we can facilitate that, but it is not a requirement of the scheme.

To apply for BOOST Your Artistic Practice, click here for the application pack

Callum Berridge, 2018 mentee

BOOST Your Producing is a free two-day workshop providing production and career-focused information and support, including company structures, financial management and budgeting, funding, working with venues, professional development opportunities. It aims to support artists and companies who find themselves needing, or desiring, to produce their own shows, projects, tours. This is where our expertise and experience lies – all of our work is produced in-house. We have an Executive Producer, Hilary Foster, who leads on this, and all members of the team are involved in producing projects to a greater or lesser extent. So these two days are aimed at artists/companies in a similar position, rather than freelance producers who want to work with multiple artists (though they might find them interesting and useful). BOOST Your Producing is designed primarily, but not exclusively, at those at the beginning of their theatre making professional lives.

If you’d like to BOOST Your Producing, here’s the application form.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Tuesday, 18 September 2018

MENTORING NEWS

We are delighted to be able to announce the artists we will be working with through the Third Angel Mentoring Scheme, in collaboration with our good friends at Sheffield Theatres, who support the scheme with rehearsal space in the Lyceum and Crucible Theatres. 

The scheme was busy this year. With 36 hours to go until the deadline, we’d had seventeen applications. That almost quadrupled over that last day and a half, to 71 applications in total – more than any of the previous years. Shortlisting was really difficult, with so many interesting, exciting projects that would clearly benefit from the time, money and mentoring support. There were more projects this year where we could see how we could be of use to the projects, where we were (and are) excited about being in the room with the artists.

We made a longlist of half the projects, then the panel met (this year we were joined by Umar Butt, who has worked with us recently on The Department of Distractions and The Journeys, and is doing great work at ARC in Stockton) and got that down to a shortlist of about twenty. And any of those twenty we would have happily mentored, and we are going to try to support some of them in other ways if we can. From that great range of proposals, we looked for the projects that looked like they would travel the furthest in the week with us in Sheffield, those for whom the scheme would have the biggest impact, as well as those that might push us as mentors a little bit too.

However, all of that said, we are very excited to announce the artists we will be working with on TAMS at Sheffield Theatres this year. In the order we will be working with them:

PAPER SMOKERS: MILES APART TOGETHER

Paper Smokers’ Diary of An Expat

Paper Smokers have just had a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe with their show, Diary of an Expat. We will be working with Katharina Reinthaller, Cecilia Gragnani and Emma Dennis-Edwards on the development of Miles Apart Together, telling the story of three female explorers, Annie “Londonderry” Kopchovsky, Bessie Coleman and Junko Tabei. Between them these women travelled around the world by bicycle, performed spectacular airshows and climbed the highest mountains on earth, fighting prejudice and scepticism as they went. 


MARY-FRANCES DOHERTY: SOPHIE’S SALE

Mary-Frances Doherty’s Certain Things. Photo: KK Dundas

Mary-Frances Doherty will develop Sophie’s Sale (working title) - a show for 12-16year olds about teenage suicide. Recently Mary-Frances has been touring her successful solo show, Katie’s Birthday Party to a number of prestigious international children’s festivals including On The Edge: The World Festival of Theatre for Young Audiences & ASSITEJ Artistic Gathering in Birmingham 2016.


CALLUM BERRIDGE: COMING UP FOR AIR

Callum Berridge’s Orwell’s Voice. Photo: Hannah Anketell.

Callum Berridge will develop Coming Up For Air, a show exploring memory and identity, and how these things are eroded by illness and by politics. It is a show about the coal mining industry in the north of England, the politics of the 1980s and the physiological and psychological effects of Alzheimer’s Disease on the brain. 


VANDAL FACTORY & FLORA GREYSTEEL: ENGLISH DIRT

Vandal Factory’s Whatever Happened to Vandal Raptor?

Early in 2019 we will work with Natalie Quatermass and Henry Raby of Vandal Factory and Emily Rowan and Simon Bolley of Flora Greysteel to develop, English Dirt, a new show exploring themes of historic nationhood and land-ownership and connecting them to contemporary struggles around border controls, fracking legislation and the housing crisis. The group will research traditional English folk songs, historical protest songs and songs connected to nation and use them a vehicle to tell their chosen stories. 

We are really looking forward to working with all of them, and will keep you posted on how their projects

This also seemed like a good time to check in with our 2017/18 mentees, and ask them how they’re doing… we asked them all for a quick update, and this is what they said:

Natalie Wong: An Odyssey

The Orang Collectif’s CIRCE. Photo: Wang Yue

“Since working with Alex during the Third Angel Mentorship Scheme, I’ve gathered much knowledge to not just develop my proposed work but to also create opportunities for it. I have co-created The Orang Collectif, a cross-disciplinary and multicultural collective. And with the collective, I have devised and directed the next vignette of AN ODYSSEY: CIRCE at the Omnibus Theatre, a live movement and music performance with 6 performers. The next vignette that I will be devising is Calypso which will be presented at a live art evening, Sane Asylum co-hosted by The Orang Collectif in London.”


Jake Bowen: Plea Bargain

Jake Bowen. Photo: Zain Zia

“Currently I am working behind the scenes – quietly! - on my new show called Death Squad which is a more political performance than my normal work. But while also doing this I am working locally with some of the guys from HOME and The Lowry to help build my Arts Council bid to get my tour sorted for Plea Bargain, hopefully for summer 2019! I’ve hit the ground running since the menteeship and I’m so happy to have had the chance to work with my favourite artists in the performance scene and it is genuinely fueling me to make something of myself.


Jess Gibson: Work In Progress

Jess Gibson’s Work In Progress. Photo: @TriumvirateMedia

“When I applied for TAMS in 2017 I had an idea - to make a show about my experience of having Borderline Personality Disorder, Anxiety and Depression. I had been working with other artists within the theatre community in Sheffield to help bring their ideas into actuality, but hadn’t the confidence to pursue my own. TAMS was the perfect push and offered the support I had needed to rediscover my artistic voice. It really gave me a solid platform, validated my work and gave the invaluable space and time to play with ideas.

During my week in the studio, with the ongoing support from my mentor Rachael Walton, I was able to transform a very basic, 20 minute improvised idea into a 45 minute structured, autobiographical and even comical piece of theatre! As part of the one to one mentoring, I was also advised to seek out opportunities to scratch the work to audiences so I could begin to gain feedback for it’s next development stages. From this I attained a slot at Sheffield Theatres’ Making Room Studio Takeover event in January 2018 where I was able to show my work to a live audience. Having this opportunity meant gaining access to contacts such as my current producer (Joseph Willis), enabled me to meet programmers and receive the feedback I really needed to take my work to the next level.

Work In Progress is now an Arts Council Funded show that is booked in for Theatre Deli’s Autumn Programme with it’s premier on 10th October 2018

I am very fortunate to have found such a wonderful team of creatives who believe in the work and who are helping me bring the performance lots of life! Since TAMS, I feel I have gone from an artist who was shying away from pursuing her ideas to a fully realised creative who is on her way to booking a tour. This work may not have been without the support from Third Angel and I can’t recommend the mentoring scheme enough for artists at any stage of their career.”


The Outbound Project: M.E.H.

Chloe Holliday, Gordon Millar, Phoebe Stapleton, Lucy Bishop, Blain Neale and Belisa Branças in M.E.H. Photo: Nick Gilbert, edited by Jordan Turner

“Since working with Third Angel, our project, M.E.H., has progressed through to development stage. We are currently working on a script, have a fantastic cast in place and hoping to stage the first performances in mid-November at New Diorama, London. Following on from the early Research and Development with Third Angel, we have secured further partnerships to make this production possible and hope to tour in Spring/Autumn 2019.”


Holly Gallagher: Tensile Strength

“The mentorship scheme was a great success for me - it gave me the space, time, freedom, and guidance to explore a new piece of work! It was also such a joy to work closely with Alex and to pick up some new approaches to work. Since completing the scheme I have gone on to have a fully-funded rehearsal period with the work wherein I used some of the approaches I was introduced to during my week. And I have also made great new working professional connections thanks to my association with Third Angel and the faith they showed in my practice by picking me for the scheme!

Tensile Strength (or How to Survive at Your Wit’s End) is about to embark on a national tour! It has two Autumn dates before more extensive touring in 2019: Theatre Deli in Sheffield on Tuesday 9 October, and ARC Stockton on Wednesday 7 November.”

We’ve been running Jake Bowen’s Plea Bargain at Theatre Deli in Sheffield today, as part of our mentoring programme, TAMS. Plea Bargain is a 20 minute, one-to-one performance based on Jake’s experience of the criminal justice system. He brought the show to us pretty much fully formed, and artistically we’ve just been helping him out with some dramaturgy and structural and design ideas. The other half of the mentoring is about helping him to tour the work, which could be slightly tricky logistically and financially, being a sited, one-to-one performance in which Jake himself is required to remain stuck in an interview room the whole time. I don’t want to say much more about that part of the piece, because spoilers.

We think the show needs another role – a slightly more performed Front of House role, which I undertook today: greeting people, explaining how the experience works, telling them what their role is, giving them some information to read before they go in to meet Jake himself.

I sit with audience members whilst they go over the information, then I let them into the interview room and set the clock. When the time is up I ask them to come out of Jake’s room and sit at our table again. Then I have to ask them to make a decision.

Jake’s show is deceptively simple, and the dilemma at the heart of it is a genuinely difficult one for many of us – I think - to come down on one side or the other of. Pragmatism versus idealism: a dilemma of our times. Consequently, this is a remarkable moment to get to sit in on. Each participant seems so invested, not just wanting to indicate their decision on the form, but many of them wanting to give detailed reasoning for it – verbally or in writing. Then my job is to give them an envelope with the final information in it. The last pieces of the puzzle.

Actually, that’s a bad metaphor. That makes the piece sound solvable, neat. But it’s not. It’s more like discovering that there are pieces from more than one jigsaw in the box. Depending on your reading of what you have just experienced, depending on what questions you have asked, there’s probably at least one big revelation in these final minutes of the show. 

My intention was to carry out my front of house role in a functional way: explaining rules, reading instructions, handing over papers, folders, envelopes. Setting the timer. Neither friendly nor rude. Efficient. But after this final section it’s just not possible to maintain that mode because people want to talk. Generally, they want to talk to Jake, but they can’t. Normally they would get to talk to other audience members, but it’s a one-to-one, so there aren’t any. So they  talk to someone who knows what they’re just experienced. It has felt such a privilege today to get to sit across from people as they have made their decisions, as they have woven the different aspects of the story together, as they have wanted, nearly all of them, to immediately share what they have been thinking about what they have just experienced.

A lot of my days are planned in advance – probably like yours. I know what to expect of them, know what’s going to happen. Today I knew what the job was going to be – was looking forward to it, in fact. But it still surprised me. It’s a good job, this, a lot of the time. Big thanks to Theatre Deli for hosting us, and to everyone who came in to share and support the work.

**

† The Third Angel Mentoring Scheme will run again this year. To be the first to hear about it when it is announced, and get our other news, please sign up to our email list here.

Edited to remove links after closure announced in 2023. 

Saturday, 18 February 2017

Third Angel 2017

We have a really exciting 2017 coming up, and I’m pleased to be able to announce some of the projects we’re doing here. Read on to see what we’re doing in the first half of the year.

PARTUS on tour
We’re currently back in the rehearsal room, revising and updating Partus. Updating because after a year’s break it’s normal to reflect on a show and rework it, but also because the personal circumstances of the team, and our relationship to the material, has of course changed. Check out the new trailer:

Partus is inspired by the everyday-amazing stories we’ve heard about people’s experiences of birth: mums, dads, midwives, obstetricians. The audience response in Sheffield last year was incredibly moving, so we are really looking forward to taking it out on the road again. 

Brilliant – best theatre I’ve been to. •  I chose to come to the baby-friendly performance which added an amazing atmosphere •  Wonderful. A must see. • Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!  I love that you talk about women’s stories, that they matter.

We open at ARC, Stockton before heading to Prema in Uley, South Street in Reading, Colchester Arts Centre and Barnsley Civic. (All our tour dates are on the new Calendar page). In all venues we are doing daytime and/or baby friendly performances. These were such a success when we did them as part of the Sheffield run, so we’re really looking forward to running them again.

Partus is touring again in autumn 2017 - get in touch if you’d like to book it!

600 PEOPLE on tour
We’re back out on the road with 600 People, our simple show about big ideas. “A love letter to the wonders of the Universe” said The List.

600 People. Photo by Ed Collier.

We’re at The ShowRoom in Chichester next (9 March), and then at MAC in Birmingham on 29 April.

Wish I had come yesterday so I could come again tonight and see it twice Absolutely incredible. Fascinating. Mind blowing. Emotional. Pure talent and fantastically performed. Can’t even contain its effect in the words! Thank you. A brilliant show. Awe inspiring and mind blowing. I loved it!

600 People is touring throughout 2017 and into 2018 - do get in touch if you’d like to book it!

FUTURE MAKERS
We’re already running year one of Future Makers our new free workshops for 14-19 years olds, introducing them to routes into the theatre and film industries. This week we have workshops in Stage Design & Art Direction and Adventures in Sound, with more to come at Easter and spring half term. All the information is here.

MENTORING
We will be running the Third Angel Mentoring Scheme again in 2017. The call for applications will go out in March or April - check back here and/or follow us on Twitter/Facebook for the fastest news.

In the meantime, many of our current and recent TAMS mentees are out on the road at in the coming months. Do check them out:

Yolanda Mercy
Luca Rutherford
Chella Quint
Joely Fielding
Jack Dean
John Wilkinson
Louisa Claughton
Charlotte Blackburn & Tim Norwood
Pauline Mayers

FESTIVALS
Inspiration Exchange will be part of the fantastic looking ReRooted Weekend in Hull on 25 March, and we’re also in the process of confirming visits to a couple of other great festivals with new durational work - to be announced very soon!


Tuesday, 17 January 2017

That was 2016 - an anniversary year

Partus
Partus. Photo by Helena Fletcher.

This was meant to be our New Year’s Eve post, but for various reasons, that didn’t happen. But here we are.

Usually for New Year’s Eve we post something from the previous year - a bit of text created for a show, an out-take or an extra, as it were. But 2016 has been so busy, it feels more appropriate to look at it all - or most of it, anyway - and say, well, that was a good year. An annual review, if you like. An annual review of a year that was a two decade review.

We started the year opening PARTUS with a week’s run at The Crucible Studio in Sheffield. We tried out baby and breast-feeding friendly audiences for the first time, which were a great success, over 30 and 50 babies at the two daytime performances.

Partus

Partus. Photo by Helena Fletcher.

Sheffield blogger Katie Hilton wrote:
“Partus is about births. Funny ones (and it really was funny in places), scary ones, multiple ones, sad ones, young ones, and exhausting ones but all of them real ones. It was born out of a research project and included real life experiences of mums, dads, doulas and midwives. I have no idea how you would begin to decide which stories to highlight out of the hundreds they heard but Third Angel chose well, I think, setting the balance of humour and emotion.”

And other audience members wrote:

Brilliant – best theatre I’ve been to. •  I chose to come to the baby-friendly performance which added an amazing atmosphere •  Wonderful. A must see. • Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!  I love that you talk about women’s stories, that they matter.

Alongside making the show, and feeding in to it, we ran The Young Mums Project, in collaboration with the brilliant, and important, Young Women’s Housing Project.

Partus is on tour in spring 2017 - check the tour calendar for dates. If you’d like to book Partus for the autumn, do get in touch.

2016 was our 21st Anniversary year - which actually kicked off in October 2015 with a revival of PRESUMPTION, performed by Lucy Ellinson and Chris Thorpe - who toured the show from 2007 to 2010 (I wrote about that here.) In February 2016, we revisited Presumption again, with performances at Northern Stage, this time with Rachael performing the show for the first time since 2006. (And I wrote about that, here.)

Rachael in Presumption 2016. Photo by Martin Fuller.

Rachael in Presumption 2016. Photo by Martin Fuller.

It was a joy to return to again. We had made a deliberate decision that reviving Presumption for the 20th Anniversary would be a remount of the existing show (we have thoughts about re-interpretations of a couple of other early shows), and in rehearsal we talked quite a lot about a couple of lines that we wouldn’t have written now. We did make one or two tweaks, and of course some later sections are partly improvised. But this is a couple who live together but who appear not to have mobile phones… in the light of that, Megan Vaughan wrote a really interesting response to the piece, here.

Shortly after that, we were back out on the road with 6OO PEOPLE, which we were lucky enough to tour to a host of brilliant Festivals: Castaway in Goole, Pulse in Ipswich, The NRTS Showcase in Falmouth, the Edinburgh Fringe with Northern Stage at Summerhall, Greenbelt Festival, Festival of the Mind and Off The Shelf in Sheffield (in a Spiegeltent and the Crucible Studio, respectively), Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival and the Sidewalks Festival in Beirut. Amidst a tour of brilliant gigs, the first night at Sidewalks stands out as one of my favourite performances ever.

600 People at Crucible Studio

Audiences have been brilliant for 600 People, and I’ve had some fascinating conversations after performances. We also had the show Peer Reviewed, by research scientist Dr Nathan Adams, who said that the show’s explanation of CRISPR (*happy science geek klaxon*) was “almost perfect” - and reminded me of the precise detail needed to improve it. He concluded: “Overall a wonderful piece of work.”

In May we brought two well toured pieces back to Sheffield for the beautiful WROUGHT Festival. We had two lovely gigs of CAPE WRATH:


And it was great to bring INSPIRATION EXCHANGE home to Sheffield (as it was created for a workshop at The Showroom in 2010) for presentations at both Wrought and at the first Hillsfest in the summer.Inspiration Exchange

Inspiration Exchange. Photo by Joseph Priestley.

Throughout the year we’ve been running TAMS - the Third Angel Mentoring Scheme - through which it has been a pleasure to support:

Yolanda Mercy
Luca Rutherford
Chella Quint
Joely Fielding
Jack Dean
John R. Wilkinson
Louisa Claughton
Charlotte Blackburn & Tim Norwood
and Pauline Mayers

Through Theatre Delicatessen’s great Departure Point scheme we also got to support: 

Tribe Arts
The52
Buglight Theatre
My Big Phat Writers Group
The Travelling Shadow Theatre

We also got to start or carry on mentoring conversations with:

Action Hero
Flickbook Theatre
Daniel Bye
Paige Stillwell
Ellie Harrison
Holly Gallagher

and Hannah Nicklin, who was on tour with EQUATIONS FOR A MOVING BODY, made in collaboration with me, including a three week run at the Edinburgh Fringe - again with Northern Stage at Summerhall. There were loads of really lovely responses to the show online and in person (it made the BBC sports pages), but this from Rosie Curtis was probably my favourite.

Equations For A Moving Body. Photo by Niall Coffey.

Hannah Nicklin’s Equations For A Moving Body. Photo by Niall Coffey.

We’ve had a long relationship with brilliant theatre maker and friend of the company, Michael Pinchbeck, and this year that was more apparent than ever. Rachael was a guest performer in Michael’s show The man who flew into space from his apartment at Wrought, and then also worked as a dramaturg, with Ollie Smith, on Michael’s new show Concerto (touring this year). 

Concerto by Michael Pinchbeck.

Concerto by Michael Pinchbeck.

Back in Sheffield in October we realised the long held ambition to make the full version of THE DESIRE PATHS. Originally conceived for Northern Stage’s Make. Do. And Mend. event in Edinburgh 2013, The Desire Paths was created in full for Sheffield’s Year of Making, October 2016. 

The Desire Paths, Sheffield. Photo by Joseph Priestly.

The Desire Paths, Sheffield. Photo by Joseph Priestley.

We chalked out the city centre street map from the Sheffield A-Z, and asked the public to rename the streets - not after some past event, but to commemorate a hope or a dream for the future: personal or political, serious or lighthearted. We heard so many stories, of first jobs, chance meetings, lost loves. A moving, brilliant day, and a chance to work with some regular collaborators, and some who we’ve been wanting to work with for a long time.

We’re currently compiling and editing all of the documentation of the day, and that will all go up on this site soon. In the meantime, if you’d like us to come and remake The Desire Paths for your town or city, do get in touch.

In the autumn we also launched FUTURE MAKERS, our new free workshops for 14-19 years olds, introducing them to routes into the theatre and film industries. The project carries on in school holidays in 2017 - all the information is here.



Our good friends at mala voadora invited us back to Porto for the second incarnation of Uma Famillia Inglessa. When we first met Jorge in in Lisbon in 2004, we were making the show that would become THE LAD LIT PROJECT. So if felt fitting to revisit and revive that show, to present with them, in their amazing space in Porto.


I’ve been performing The Lad Lit Project for 12 years now (though this performance ended a three year hiatus). I was worried that it would feel dated, but in the end, the only section that needed an ‘update’ is the Friends Map, which is much more complicated than it was in 2005, due to social media and being a parent.

In November 2016, to close our anniversary year, Leeds Beckett University and Compass Festival of Live Art hosted the symposium WHERE FROM HERE: 21 Years of Third Angel, convened by Alex, Michael Pinchbeck, Oliver Bray and Hannah Nicklin. Third Angel artists were joined by other friends, colleagues, artists and academics from around the country, who gave performances, papers and presentations either directly about our work, or their own work which explores a similar territory, or, most often, a combination of the two.


The (free) event was sold out, and it was great to present it in collaboration with long time partners Compass and Leeds Beckett University. We’ll be putting documentation of many of the talks and performances up online in the near future. As well as ‘our own’ symposium this year, we also presented papers about our work at the TaPRA Interim event, Training To Give Evidence, at Northumbria University (‘Telling Other People’s Stories’), and at the Staging Loss symposium at the University of Lincoln (‘Cheers Grandad!: Third Angel’s The Lad Lit Project and Cape Wrath as Acts of Remembrance’).

Where From Here was also the first public screening of THE SMALL CELEBRATIONS, a series of five short films - one by us, the other four commissioned from artists who we have mentored in some capacity over the last few years. After a second public screening at The Showroom/Workstation in Sheffield (where Third Angel was born in 1995), we put all of the films on line. You can watch them all for free:

Action Hero: THE THIRD ANGEL ANNEXE:


Hannah Butterfield: OENOMEL


Massive Owl: THE DOLPHIN HOTEL

RashDash: THERE WERE GODDESSES


And from us, POPCORN, made with long-time collaborator Christopher Hall:


Mixed in with all that there was of course more education work, and research and development on five or more other shows and projects. About some of which, more soon.

So that was 2016. Thanks for joining us for some of it.


There's lots more information about making and touring Third Angel projects 2008-2017 on our original blog, and 2017-2023 on the blog on this site.