I’m very excited to announce that, in December, a group of 24 final year theatre and performance students from the School of Performance and Cultural Industries will, as part of their course, be staging a musical inspired by material from Graeme’s book. The production has been given a working title of ‘Electrified’, and after the students have performed in December, we are hoping to take some of them to Lotherton Hall in January 2016 to film some of the scenes on location, as well as some character monologues on the subject of domestic electricity.
This collaboration has come about through meetings with our colleagues in the School of PCI Tony Gardner (lecturer in performance processes and techniques) and George Rodosthenous (associate professor in theatre directing), who are supervising the project. In 2013 Dr. Rodosthenous was also responsible for bringing to the stage ‘Diffraction’, a musical about the lives and scientific work of father and son team Sir William Henry and Sir William Lawrence Bragg in Leeds. This was timed to coincide with centenary celebrations at the University commemorating their work on x-ray crystallography, for which they received a Nobel prize in 1915.
The students have parts of Graeme and Abigail’s research to read over the summer and I will meet with them in September to discuss their ideas and help them to stay true to the source material when writing the musical. This opportunity gives us the chance to produce a project output which we will be able to invite project partners and others to come and see, which will provide us with footage to enrich our video and other digital resources, and which we could then use as trigger material for teaching about the history of electricity.
So: anyone have any song ideas?