Dr Alexander Kelly
Reader in Theatre & Performance | Leeds Beckett University
Leeds, West Yorkshire, UNITED KINGDOM
Dr Alexander Kelly is Co-Artistic Director of the Sheffield-based theatre company Third Angel.
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Biography
Alex is Reader in Theatre & Performance and has been with Performing Arts at Leeds Beckett since the start of its first course in 2006. He is theatre maker, performer, storyteller, game maker, writer and mentor, and tours throughout the UK and internationally. He is artistic associate of Lisbon-based international collective Má-Criação. From 1995-2023 he was Co-Artistic Director of the Sheffield-based theatre company Third Angel, with whom he created performances that connected the fields of theatre, live art, film & video, durational performance, conversation and digital media. Recent projects with Third Angel include The Desire Paths, 600 People, The Department of Distractions and The Distraction Agents.
Alex has taught at numerous Universities across the UK, and has also taught for Third Angel at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. He regularly mentors other artists and companies with Third Angel and through his role at Leeds Beckett. Recently this has included working with Vandal Factory, Yolanda Mercy, Holly Gallagher, Natalie Wong, Jack Dean, John Wilkinson, Lapelle’s Factory, RashDash, Daniel Bye, Ellie Harrison and Action Hero, making Equations for a Moving Body and A Conversation With My Father with Hannah Nicklin and mentoring Raquel Castro’s Turma de 95 (based on Third Angel’s Class of ’76).
Alex has recently published writing and drawing about Third Angel's work in There’s A Room: Three Performance Texts by Third Angel (Oberon, 2019), The Twenty First Century Performance Reader (Brayshaw, Fenemore & Witts, Eds., Routledge, 2019), Pinchbeck & Westerside’s Staging Loss (Palgrave MacMillan 2018), the Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research journal volumes Staging The Wreckage (2019), On Value (2013) and On Foot (2012), as well as co-creating the artists' book The Dust Archive with Annie Lloyd.
Industry Expertise (2)
Performing Arts
Education/Learning
Areas of Expertise (6)
Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration
Documentary Theatre
Autobiographical Storytelling
Devising
Reportage
Performance
Affiliations (1)
- Third Angel : Artistic Director
Links (5)
Languages (1)
- English
Event Appearances (4)
Mechanisms For Remembering
MEMORY STUDIES ASSOCIATION Third Annual Conference Complutense University Madrid
2019-06-25
Performing Science: How does it make you feel?
TaPRA Performance and Science Working Group Interim Event Jodrell Bank
2018-04-20
24' 51" Living A Lunar Day
TaPRA 2019 University of Exeter
2019-09-04
Telling Other People's Stories
TaPRA Interim Event: Training to give evidence: Performer training for verbatim, documentary, biographical and autobiographical performance practices Northumbria University
2016-05-11
Articles (4)
Backpages
Contemporary Theatre Review2015 Backpages is an opportunity for the academy to engage with theatre and performance practice with immediacy and insight and for theatre workers and performance artists to engage critically and reflectively on their work and the work of their peers.
Inspiration Exchange: The value of sitting opposite
Performance Research2013 Over the years, alongside our end-on seated-audience theatre work, Third Angel has returned to the exploration of a mode of performance built on conversation, or interview, with individual audience members. Performance in as much as you know more about what's going to happen than they do.
The Distance Between Us
Performance Research2012 In Third Angel's performance piece 9 Billion Miles from Home, artists Gillian Lees and Alexander Kelly were attached to each other via a pulley system that meant that for one of them to move forward, the other had to move back.
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