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.

Light Night 2015: It’s Electrifying!

The Housekeeper - in two minds about electric light.
The Housekeeper – in two minds about electric light.

On Friday evening, 9 October, we put on a special performance in the Brotherton Library’s Brotherton Room with the help of four student actors from the School of Performance and Cultural Industries (PCI). Called ‘It’s Electrifying!’, the show was organised as part of Leeds Light Night, an annual evening of free arts events (exhibitions, performances, installations) all based around the theme of light that takes place across the city, including the University. As this ties in so well with the themes of our project, this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Working closely with a colleague from the School of PCI, George Rodosthenous, who is also one of the lecturers supervising the production of our Electrified musical, we recruited four drama students as volunteers to take part in our show. Fitting in planning, script writing, rehearsals and organising costumes around everyone’s busy schedules was a challenge, but the students worked hard, and other members of PCI staff were also very helpful; special thanks go to Allana Marsh and Steve Ansell for helping to sort us out with costumes and props at quite short notice!

The show started with the maid cleaning outside the room and humming, before noticing the audience and inviting them in.
We started with the maid cleaning outside the room and humming, before noticing the audience and inviting them in.

We used the performance to address the hopes and fears surrounding the introduction of electric lighting into people’s homes around the end of the nineteenth century. There were four characters, representing a range of classes and opinions, for example the young lady of the house, excited at the aesthetic possibilities of the electric light, and her mother-in-law, who was sceptical, didn’t understand what electricity was or how it worked, and didn’t think it should be brought into their home.

The older lady - didn't understand electricity.
The older lady – didn’t understand electricity.

We also had the housekeeper, who was happy that the new lights didn’t give off any soot or smoke to blacken the paintwork, but who was sad to need to make redundant the boy who had been in charge of the candles and oil lamps. Finally, the maid was wary, knowing that people had died through accidents involving electricity.

The 15 minute show ran four times over the course of the evening, and over 110 people came to see it. We even had a song about the electric light from the 1880s, which the characters sang and hummed over the course of the performance. The Brotherton Room itself was also the perfect venue for the show; dating back to the 1930s with the rest of the main body of the Brotherton Library, it is an incredibly atmospheric space, and made a very passable country house library for the performance. It looked great lit up with electric candles.

One half of our display of objects....
One half of our display of objects….
...and the other side.
…and the other side.

Also forming part of the event was a display of historic electrical objects from the University’s Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, which we used to tell the story of domestic electricity from its generation to its use in the home, from the 1880s until the 1940s. These included an old battery, a copy of a Mrs. Beeton book from the 1920s which dealt with electric cookery, and an Overbeck Rejuvenator, a 1920s electrical therapy kit for use by individuals in their own homes. The audience was encouraged to take a look at this display after the performance.

We got great feedback on the creativity, the costumes, and of course the singing! We’d like to thank our colleagues in PCI, in the Brotherton Library and in the Museum, and in particular the PCI students, for all their help making this event possible.

The cast.
The cast.