Third Angel

To celebrate the publication of the text for What I Heard About the World (along with Presumption and Where From Here) in our new collection There’s A Room, we are pleased to make the full length documentation of the show available again for free.

The text of What I Heard About the World is in the collection There’s A Room, which is available through Drama Online and from Bloomsbury.

WHAT I HEARD ABOUT THE WORLD
A theatre piece with two songs: one original, one karaoke.

When you actually go there, you’ll understand. The heat there. It’s a different sort of heat. Or the cold. It makes you shiver in a completely new way. The light. They’re always going on about the light.

There’s a place where you confess your sins to voicemail.
There’s a place where you can buy a cure for loneliness on CD.
There’s a place where fake snow covers real mountains.
There’s a place where the dances only exist in the memory of three old women.
There’s a place where you can rent demonstrators to be angry on your behalf.
There’s a place where you can rent strangers to cry at your funeral. 
There’s a place where they listen to a radio station that broadcasts silence. 
There’s a place where there are only five official haircuts for men. 

Join Third Angel and mala voadora as they attempt to describe the world. As they try to hold an accurate picture of the whole world in their heads. A world that seems to get bigger by the day. How on earth can you know all the places you’ve been, let alone the places you haven’t?

Original Programme Note: Ongoing Research

This project was born during a conversation in Jorge Andrade’s flat in Lisbon in 2007. Since we had met in 2004 we’d been talking about our two companies, Third Angel and mala voadora, collaborating on a project.

As is often the way, we had had a moment of realisation that this collaboration wasn’t going to happen unless we actually, you know, started it. (We had had a similar realisation about working with Chris Thorpe a couple of years previously). So Jorge and I met for coffee, each bringing a few ideas to the table. Jorge told me about several newspaper stories that had caught his attention recently. It was immediately noticeable to me that the thing these stories had in common was that they were of fakes: replacements, stand-ins, substitutions.

The conversation moved on to maps and mapping, and how a map is a fake, or a stand-in. We began discussing a project that located these stories of the inauthentic on a giant map of the world. By the end of the conversation we understood what we thought the project was about, and we had the title, What I Heard About The World.

Fast forward to 2010. Jorge and I have been joined on stage by Chris as co-devsior/performer, and in the rehearsal room at different times by Rachael, Capela, Lauren and Johanna. We have also been benefiting from time with the generous team at Worldmapper. Our understanding of maps, and map making is enhanced and altered.

We have been collecting stories via the internet, conversation, and through work-in-progress performances at Sheffield’s Forge Festival, and the Pazz Performing Arts Festival in Oldenburg. The process has in fact thrown up a stand-alone durational performance that we call What I Heard About The World ? Research Table, which we have shown in collaboration with Forest Fringe, in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, and at the Society of Cartographers Summer School in Manchester.

The story collecting process has been marked by retelling and renaming the stories, and by drawing an icon, or motif, for each one, as a means of cataloguing them. The show you will see tonight has been made in response to the stories collected so far, and the conversations that have occurred during that cataloguing process. That process continues, and if you have a story that you would like us to hear, please do get in touch.

Alexander Kelly, September 2010

Trailer