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Third Angel

 

Third Angel, 2001

For ten years now we've been having a company debate about the documentation of live performance. We need to produce full length videos of our performances for promoters, archives and educational establishments. We also need 5 – 10 minute samplers to show when giving lectures about our work.

But these video documents rarely satisfy us creatively, as they're constrained by having to represent the performance, yet feel distant from the experience of seeing the work live. So over the years we have developed a separate strand of video works, that are made from the documentation rushes but are designed to exist as video work in their own right.

These pieces are made primarily in the edit suite by editor Christopher Hall, with input from Co-Artistic Director Rachael Walton and myself. Chris manipulates the source material, sometimes adding new/re-shot footage from his VHS-C camcorder, with little or no concern for its performative origins. Sometimes this is during the documentation editing process, sometimes he'll turn up in our studio and take a handful of DV tapes back to his attic. Then he'll show us a rough cut and we return to the collaboration, giving responses, feedback and/or direction. What are these works? Who is the author? Who should they be credited to?

We have shown them, usually under the banner 'Third Angel: Digital Shorts', at film festivals, in Artists' Film and Video programmes, in galleries, at performance and live art events and on the internet. My preferred way of screening them is at a compered screening of a variety of our film and video work (single screen short films, video work from installations, exhibitions and live performances and even, occasionally, some of those short documentations), where we can introduce them and give them a context. Not because they need an introduction – they have frequently been screened without – but because I think the audience can get more out of them if they know more about the process behind the work, and we get more out of it if we are there to experience their reaction.

Alexander Kelly, Co-Artistic Director, Third Angel

Pills 03:20:00 (2001), DV, 3.5min, Video still: Christopher Hall

Third Angel is a Sheffield-based arts collective centred around the collaboration between Co-Artistic Directors Alexander Kelly and Rachael Walton. The company makes a range of work incorporating live performance, installation, film, video and photography. Third Angel's Digital Shorts include Senseless 02:47:18 (1998), Hang Up 02:39:02 (2000), Pills 03:20:00 (2001) and Project Zero (2002). Other film and video works include With The Light On (1996, nominated for Best Drama at the British Short Film Festival), On Pleasure (1997, for LWT's The South Bank Show) and Realtime (commissioned by Arnolfini Live and Wonderful: Visions Of The Near Future).

Third Angel (www.thirdangel.co.uk) has shown its live performance and installation work at venues and festivals across Britain and mainland Europe. In 2001 and 2005 the company was invited to show the theatre pieces Where From Here and The Lad Lit Project at the British Council's Edinburgh Showcase. Also in 2005 the company presented the 50-performer intervention Standing Alone, Standing Together at the Millennium Galleries, Sheffield, commissioned as part of the exhibition Tate Sculpture.