Auditions have started!

So far, so good. We've seen some good people - all castable - but there are roles still available and we're auditioning for another hour. As we're likely to be a couple of people short and don't want to disappoint, we will be holding further auditions by arrangement over the next few days and on Thursday 30th September from 4pm to 6pm in Room 101, Parkinson Building, University of Leeds.

Unfortunately, using a computer with a really old version of Explorer to upload the last few scripts meant that neither they, nor the previously uploaded scripts actually appeared at all! This was because the updated page (if you're meant to be able to see it, you'll know its address) reverted to an earlier version. My apologies to anyone who couldn't audition for their prefered role because of this. I think everything is now OK, but if the script you want isn't there, please email Eleanor (e.r.okell) at her university (leeds.ac.uk) address and she'll send it you as an attachment.

For a full list of characters, locations and an indication of the amount of improvisation required, see the original audition poster.

Egyptian Stuff...

Just because material on the Egyptian Underworld isn't up yet doesn't mean that I haven't been researching it!

In fact its been terribly difficult because 'Egyptian' covers such a broad span of time and wide geographical spread. This means that ideas and worship vary a great deal, so acheiving a degree of consistency is hard. Taking our inspiration from Leeds architecture means that we'd inadvertently picked the Roman period in Egypt, while my knowledge was more of the Pharaohonic period - the pyramids to the Valley of the Kings - which is rather more what people expect. This means that for LightNight there will be some of both...

 

In the meantime, if you'd like to see some genuine ancient Egyptian textiles in Leeds, the University of Leeds International Textiles Archive has just finished cataloguing its Egyptian textiles collection and some rare examples of Egyptian costume will be on show during the exhibition: A Catalogue of World Textiles.

The exhibition runs from 5th October 2010 to 27th May 2011 and is open Tuesday – Friday 09:30 to 16:30 (except for University Closed days). The database of all the collections is searchable online too!

University of Leeds International Textiles Archive,

St. Wilfred's Chapel,

Maurice Keyworth Building,

University of Leeds,

Leeds LS2 9JT

Tel: 0113 343 3919

www.leeds.ac.uk/ulita

Psychogeography talk

I forgot to take the recorder and the PowerPoint slides reformatted themselves when I changed machine *sob*, but it went down well. I'll sort out the formatting and record myself at home and get it up here asap.

Very many thanks to the audience for being so helpful when discussing the actual map to use in the leaflet we're going to give people on the night. It's great to have a concept validated and it had been causing us real stress - imagine how much information I can't fit on 2 sides of A4 if most of one is taken up with a street map of Leeds from Temple Works to Parkinson Building!

Other than that the whole Open Media night was really interesting and we saw and heard some cool things - especially a late addition to the programme that involved taking shots of light with a digital camera while walking the same route repeatedly, inverting the colour and layering the shots on top of each other to create really beautiful abstract landscapes. It was a great visualisation of the way that events and stories layer themselves in a space, making it a place.

Highlights for me were that I've never had a question session when I was praised for my story telling and it's also the first time I've been asked where I teach so that someone could come and learn a subject they'd previously thought was boring from me! So thank you, you lovely people...

Auditions

Date and Time now sorted, so thought I'd put the poster (in Classics, PVAC and Fine Arts during Freshers Week) up here too. It gives the character's locations away, but that lets people look out for them a bit more easily. The advertising already refers to some of them anyway...

Photoshoot

Well, that went well! The costumes and masks looked really great - we will post pictures as soon as we have copies - so we just wanted to say a big thank you to all the people who helped out by wearing them and also to those who helped model various items while they were pinned or had elastic attached or did some sewing:

THANK YOU

We didn't quite have enough people to wear all the costumes, so you won't see The Sibyl or An Egyptian Lector Priest, who will be around for Light Night. But the picture has all the other characters you can expect to meet as part of Underworlds Live in Leeds.

From left to right: Persephone - garlanded with spring flowers and holding a pomegranate; Demeter/Ceres - a corn goddess and Persephone's mother; Circe - the goddess who knows the way for living mortals to enter the Underworld; Charon - the Ferryman who takes souls across the River Styx; Aeneas - the Roman hero who travels to the Underworld and, being alive, nearly sinks Charon's boat!;  Horus - the Egyptian god, with the feather of truth against which he weighs souls for them to gain entry to the afterlife; Orpheus - the bard, who went to the Underworld to bring his wife back to life, with his lyre; Eurydice - Orpheus' (dead) wife.

For more information on these characters, see the Denizens page.
A larger version of the picture
A version of the picture (albeit with us incorrectly identified as "Underworld Live in Leeds") is used to advertise "One of Leeds' most ambitious programmes of entertainment" - The Yorkshire Evening Post and Leeds City Council's Town Hall events series.