Pinchbeck, M., Butler, L., 2016.

Building the room: remembering Third Angel's Presumption

A provocation by Michael Pinchbeck and Linford Butler, University of Lincoln, given at Where From Here: 21 Years of Third Angel symposium at Leeds Beckett University on Thursday 17th November 2016. This provocation seeks to remember what is was like to watch Third Angel?s Presumption both live onstage in 2007 (Pinchbeck) and on DVD in 2016 (Butler). Both speakers seek to provide a reasonable basis for belief or acceptance that something changed in their understanding of what devised theatre could be and do in that moment of watching a room being built. Their encounters with the work unravel different dramaturgical threads around its original devising, for example, using ?text as a tool? and ?moving objects around the stage?, citing Alex Kelly and Chris Thorpe?s dialogue in Duska Radosavljevic?s The Contemporary Ensemble: Interviews with Theatre-makers (2013). Finally, the speakers draw on their own research into the dramaturgy of contemporary (Pinchbeck) and DIY (Butler) performance, citing Pinchbeck?s interviews with Third Angel on his Outside Eye Project blog, where Kelly describes ?building the room? as both a literal and metaphorical part of the devising process.