Making a scene: the Electrified musical and filming at Lotherton Hall

Last month was a big one for our work with the 3rd year Theatre and Performance students; on 10, 11 and 12 December they performed their new musical, Electrified at the University, and on the 16th we visited Lotherton Hall to shoot material for our digital interactive and our short film.

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The dancers of Iolanthe lament the harsh new electric lights in the theatre. ©Alan Firth

The musical, based in December 1882, addresses the aftermath of the death of William Dimmock, a labourer at Hatfield House, the grand ancestral home of the Gascoyne-Cecil family near London.  Dimmock died of an electric shock when he accidentally came into contact with electrical wires in the Hatfield garden a year before the events of the play, and the characters, both the family and servants, have differing views about the desirability of having electrical lighting in the house.

Robert Arthur Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury and three times Prime Minister, was a pioneer of domestic electrical technologies, installing a system of electrical call bells as early as 1869, shortly after the death of the 2nd Marquess.  He later experimented with arc lighting, powerful lights usually employed outdoors, but which he for a time had installed in the dining room at Hatfield – much to the distress of his female relations and guests.

In the musical, Lord Salisbury still feels guilty for Dimmock‘s death, and Dimmock‘s two sisters Ruth and Mary have begun working at Hatfield House and at the Savoy Theatre respectively.  Mary is a dancer in the new Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Iolanthe.  The theatre had been electrified shortly before – the first to be so lit – and Iolanthe was the first production to be staged with the new electric lights.  However, as the musical illustrates, not everyone was comfortable or convinced about the safety of this arrangement – least of all William Dimmock‘s mother.

The songs and music are a mixture of period songs, contemporary lyrics set to new music, and brand new pieces; highlights include a tea party sing-along about the excited possibilities of electric lighting, and the dancers of Iolanthe lamenting their pale and pallid appearances under the glare of the new lights in the theatre.  The three performances were very well attended, and the students were excellent.  The musical was filmed, and can be viewed online in its entirety here:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc2_Rwwz-nU]

 

Ben as the butler at Cragside.
Ben as the butler at Cragside.

We followed up this success with an intensive day of filming at Lotherton Hall, working with Leeds Media Services to capture content for our online interactive, such as shots of some of the rooms and green screen footage of the guide characters.  This was a new challenge for the students, but one which they handled very well, and was a great experience for them – and for me!  Getting everything right took a lot of patience, a fair few retakes, and of course the calm, efficient expertise of Steve and Mark at Leeds Media Services.

Finally we shot the short film, Lotherton Electrified, which we managed to wrap up in just two and half hours.  The experience has taught me a lot about interpreting academic research imaginatively for portrayal on film.  The most important lessons for me have been allowing plenty of time for reshoots, resting and costuming considerations, and the need for flexibility on location with matters of framing shots and scripting – if something isn‘t working out, it‘s better to change it quickly and move on.

Lotherton Electrified will be used in the house as required, either on a tablet or in the cinema room, as well as providing a great advert for the project as a whole, and demonstrating the general themes of Professor Gooday’s book Domesticating Electricity in an engaging and accessible way.  It will also be available online in February.

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.

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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.

Domesticating Electricity: The Musical!

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?