History-onics!

Rehearsing Electrified. ©Mark McDougall

Work on our history of electricity musical has now begun in earnest, and the final year theatre and performance students in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries (PCI) are putting a lot of time into writing the script and song lyrics, composing the music and choreographing the dance scenes, as well as designing a period-appropriate set.  There are 24 students in all and they supervised by Dr. George Rodosthenous (Associate Professor in Theatre Directing) and Dr. Tony Gardner (Lecturer in Performance Processes & Techniques).

Having given them material to read over the summer I went to see them at the beginning of their project a couple of weeks ago to talk to them about our work and how they might think about adapting it for the stage, especially given my recent experience working with other drama students to produce our Light Night performance.  They have a blog, which you can visit for news, photos and podcasts about the development of the production.  They’re also on Twitter: @ElectrifiedPCI.

Lady
Light Night: the lady of the house‘s costume.

Although working with drama students wasn’t something we originally envisioned being a large part of this project, our collaborations in this area have nevertheless produced some of our most innovative and creative outputs.  We have developed a very good working relationship with our colleagues in the School of PCI, George Rodosthenous and Tony Gardner, and have found the students very enthusiastic to take part in other opportunities to dramatise our project materials.  As a result, our dramatic outputs have now expanded to include – as well as the musical – our Light Night performance, guide characters for our KS2 history of electricity digital interactive, and a short film we will shoot at Lotherton Hall in December.  The students have also taken it upon themselves to organise an educational workshop at the University for local school children at which they will perform sections of the musical.

Our digital interactive is currently being built by our technical officer, Corey Benson.  It will benefit from the involvement of the students through the use of green screen filming techniques to insert them into video footage of the houses in order to explain elements of the history of electricity.  The interactive itself will comprise floor plans of each of the three partner houses, which pupils will navigate around in the order in which they were electrified (Cragside, Standen, Lotherton Hall).  For each house there will be four clickable rooms on the floor plan which pupils can select to learn more about the history of electricity in that particular room.  Each house will have a guide character, played by one of the students.  These characters will introduce themselves and their respective houses to pupils at the beginning of the interactive, and will then talk to them about specific areas of the history of electricity (science and technology, aesthetics, social history) in videos in each room.

The Electrified cast rehearse as the fairies of Iolanthe. ©Mark McDougall

The last dramatic output (for now) is our Lotherton Hall short film.  This will be about ten minutes long and will explore what happens when a reporter from a London ladies‘ journal visits the house in the early 1900s to talk to the family and the servants about their new electrical installation.  She is concerned in particular with the potential for accidents, especially given the number of people who have been injured or killed by domestic electricity around the country over the preceding few years.  I am currently working with a small group of the Electrified students to develop this, and we will film it in Lotherton Hall in December alongside the footage for the digital interactive and the green screen guide characters.  The film will be on display at Lotherton Hall for visitors to watch in spring 2016.

The maid from our Light Night production: scared of electricity.

I think these enthusiastic collaborations with staff and students from the School of PCI are due in part to the appeal of the stories and anecdotes Graeme brings out in his book Domesticating Electricity, the source material for the project.  These humanising stories of the fears and hopes of the people of the time, and the sometimes amusing, sometimes tragic, accidents or problems they ran into, serve to bring the period to life, and lend themselves well to dramatisation.  As we consider the ways in which we might further develop this project in the future, the success and excitement of these dramatic outputs is something which we are very much keeping in mind.

Performances of Electrified will be on Thursday, Friday and Saturday the 10th, 11th and 12th of December at 7:30pm, Stage One, Stage@Leeds.  Tickets are now on sale here.

Lights, Camera, Standen! (And Cragside!)

I’ve recently been busily travelling around the country visiting Standen and Cragside with film crews to film and photograph various rooms for our digital interactive. At Standen we were joined by the very helpful Leeds Media Services, who will also be doing all our editing, and at Cragside we worked with the University’s own Digital Learning Team, and also filmed material which will be used in first year teaching in January.

Taking photos in the Drawing Room at Standen.
Taking photos in the Drawing Room at Standen.

The main body of the digital interactive will comprise three floor plans, one for each house, and within each floor plan users will be able to click on four rooms to find out more about the history of electricity in that room of the house. Clicking on a room will display a large photo of the interior of the room, within which will be a clickable hotspot, for example an electric lamp, a telephone, or an electric call signal board. Users will have to find this hotspot, and hovering over it will generate a larger picture of the object, and a question about electricity, which, when clicked on, will open a video answering the question and giving more information.

On these visits we had very little time as we needed to fit around the respective houses’ schedules, so we needed to be very efficient and well organised. We were also very aware of the potential dangers of using filming equipment in small spaces filled with so many invaluable artefacts! Nevertheless, we knew beforehand exactly what we wanted to film and photograph, and we got it all done carefully and in good time.

Not allowed on the carpet!
Not allowed on the carpet!

It was interesting to move around some of the rooms in areas which are normally roped off, and which the public can only see from a distance; in one room in Standen this necessitated us all removing our shoes, a slightly surreal experience which made me glad I had, however unwittingly, managed to find socks without holes in them that morning. We were very grateful for the hospitality of the teams at both houses, and especially for accommodating our requests to move interpretative materials, rope barriers, or occasionally some of their display objects around in order to improve the shot or the photograph.

The library at Cragside. ©University of Leeds Digital Learning Team and Leeds Media Services
The library at Cragside. ©University of Leeds Digital Learning Team and Leeds Media Services

One of my favourite shots, which I am looking forward to using in the interactive, is one in the Library at Cragside, where we simulated a power failure by filming the lights slowly going out. Early electrical installations often weren’t very reliable! We will be filming at Lotherton Hall, the third partner house, in December.

Not just a pretty space: using country houses to teach science and technology

One of the key project outputs I’m currently working on is an interactive resource for upper Key Stage 2 pupils (years 5 and 6, age 9-11 years) that tells the story of the electrification of each of the three houses together. This will be hosted on the MyLearning website, a repository for a variety of teaching resources developed by museums and other heritage organisations; please pay them a visit to have a look at other examples of interactive school resources hosted on their site.

Designing this resource is a challenging process because there’s so much involved that needs to be kept in mind. At the centre will be material from Graeme and Abigail’s research, but in order to apply this effectively it’s important to emphasise themes to which school pupils will be able to relate, and which also mesh well with the aims and objectives of the national curriculum guidelines both for history and for science. The interactive needs to draw out common themes from the histories of the three houses, Cragside, Lotherton Hall and Standen, but also must highlight what makes them individual and special.

An electric dinner gong at Cragside
One of two electric dinner gongs at Cragside – these could be used as a starting point for teaching a range of topics including science, technology and history. ©Paul Coleman

Something we’re really keen to promote in this project is that country houses were in the past – and often still are – important sites for technical innovation, and as such can be used as venues for teaching science and technology topics, for example electricity (obviously), but also energy self-sufficiency and sustainability (as I mentioned in a previous blog post). Whereas school groups are more likely to visit country houses to support history and art teaching, this interactive could encourage teachers to consider bringing pupils to a local country house for a trip to tie in with teaching about science and technology.

As demands on teachers’ time are many and varied, this interactive will provide an opportunity to investigate the potential of country houses for this in the classroom both before and after the visit. Even if a visit is not possible, the resource can still enable teachers and pupils to consider the scientific and technological heritage embodied in country houses. We’re hoping for example that teachers might be able to use this resource when putting together the local history study which is now a compulsory part of the new history curriculum.

I’ll write again soon about the specific elements we intend to include within this resource. I’m also going to put together a focus group of teachers to consult with in order to discuss the content and structure of this resource and make sure it will be useful in the classroom. If you’re a primary teacher, do you think you’d run a visit to a country house to teach about science and technology as well as art and history?