10 things about ‘Phantom Ride’ by Good Cop Bad Cop

1. Phantom Ride is based on the lost works of William Haggar.
2. William Haggar (1851 -1925) was a travelling entertainer in the fairground, theatre, early cinema and, most importantly, a pioneer film-maker.
3. Haggar’s films were made in south and west Wales and his travelling cinemas provided much needed entertainment for the rapidly developing industrial valleys.
4. Haggar’s film, Desperate Poaching Affray was shown throughout Europe and America, where it is credited with setting the trend and pattern for chase sequences as a film staple.
5. It is estimated that Haggar made between 40 and 60 narrative films as well as films of topical events and locations. Of all his works, only 8 remain, most of these as fragments.
6. In his book William Haggar – Fairground Film Maker (2007), Haggar’s great grandson, Peter Yorke, provides synopses of a further 32 films, mostly taken from contemporary catalogues selling Haggars films to cinemas. It is these 32 synopses, second-hand accounts that are impossible to verify, that are at the heart of Phantom Ride.
7. It is thought that many of Haggar’s films were improvised, made according to available time, locations, actors and so on.
8. The name Phantom Ride was given to early films made by fixing a film camera to a tram or train to provide the audience with a virtual journey.
9. Phantom Ride by Good Cop Bad Cop is a real time creation of ‘reel time’, breathing life into the remaining embers.
10. Good Cop Bad Cop say: "What we aim to do with this performance is to breath life back into the most cursory summations of Haggar’s ‘lost films’, ones that for some reason no one considered might be worthy of posterity. It would be easy to fetishise such films, to try and remake them either as ‘true to the original’, complete with period clothing, acting styles, live piano accompaniment, or alternatively as contemporary re-workings. But to us this would be to miss the point. One thing that interests us is that Haggar is partially worthy of interest to film historians for a body of work that will probably never be retrievable."

10 things about Good Cop Bad Cop

1. Good Cop Bad Cop is John Rowley and Richard Huw Morgan. Rowley and Morgan have worked together since 1990 when they met working with seminal Welsh theatre company Brith Gof, and as Good Cop Bad Cop since 1995.
2. Both are prolific artists in a variety of fields. Rowley has previously made films for Channel 4, BBC Wales and last year made an ACW funded series of video portraits. He has toured internationally with the UK’s premier performance company, Forced Entertainment and has just completed an illustrated children’s book.
Morgan was the recipient of an ACW Creative Wales major award in 2005 for his sonic art-work, has directed music videos for S4C, exhibited live and sculptural work at the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol, and has worked as a freelance graphic designer and in Higher Education.
3. What interest Good Cop Bad Cop about performance is the ‘here and now’. The immediate connection between the creative act and the audience, the ‘provisional’ and ‘propositional’ – It could always turn out different!
4. Good Cop Bad Cop’s work has a ‘stripped back aesthetic’, and is essentially performance about performance. They have a fascination with the potential immediate strength of the live performance act combined with its ultimate fragility.
5. Many of Good Cop Bad Cop’s works are what are often called ‘durational’ performances, unfolding over several hours or more. But obviously, all performances have a duration, it just depends from project to project what is the most appropriate duration. It’s the material that dictates form. In this case Phantom Ride reflects early cinema presentations of a series of very short films lasting for about an hour.
6. With regards to their latest work, Phantom Ride Good Cop Bad Cop say, "Its very accessible, what you see is what it is. At one level its very basic story telling, inviting the audience to build their own pictures along with us. We don’t know what the original films looked like, any more than the audience do, were just passing on second hand, even third hand, accounts – we’re performing a kind of oral history.
   Imagine having to explain the rules of football before every edition of Match of the Day. I suppose we have to assume that an audience, just like a football spectator understand some of what they are about to see before they turn up, but even if they don’t that they will start to work it out before the final whistle blows."
7. Good Cop Bad Cop have performed internationally with the assistance of Wales Arts International, the partnership between Arts Council Wales and the British Council, and in 2007 were selected for the British Council’s prestigious Edinburgh Showcase for the second time.
8. Morgan and Rowley are, together with Marc Rees and Eddie Ladd, part of the legacy of Brith Gof. They continue to work with Brith Gof founder Mike Pearson on his Pearson/Brookes projects. That is how they met their current collaborator, Louise Ritchie. " We are excited to be working with Louise, we’ve seen and worked with a lot of young welsh performers over the last 18 years, and Louise has got something special, as has been recognised by the Centre for Performance Research making her one of their Associate Artists"
9. Jon Gower, journalist and cultural critic, on Good Cop Bad Cop’s 2007 performance, Mas o Amser: "It continues a long line of challenging, edgy, urban and urbane productions by this two-man combo who never fail to provoke, usually entertain and are never anything but totally bloody serious about the theatricality of what they do and, in a sense, of modern life itself."
10. Good Cop Bad Cop can be contacted via rhmorgan@mac.com for further information.