Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Leeds Beckett students to light up the city
Celebrating the diverse and thriving creativity of Leeds, Light Night Leeds is an annual free multi-arts and light festival that takes over the city centre for two nights in October.
A group of first year BA (Hons) Performance, Dance and Performing Arts students from Leeds Beckett will be performing a four-hour durational performance, Wannabe Leodis on 5 and 6 October from 19:00 in the Arena Zone, Queen Square.
Mark Flisher, Course Director - School of Film, Music & Performing Arts said: “This is a really exciting project for our department, partly because all of the performers and makers are first year students who have just finished Induction Week with us and gone straight into an intensive two week making process, to create a large scale public performance.”
Wannabe Leodis is a fifty-person interdisciplinary ensemble piece on the backdrop of an ever shifting temporal reality, this performance is a set of targeted theatrical case studies of key Leeds personalities and figures.
It asks what would happen if Harry Houdini’s failed escape from a locked cask of Tetley Ale was performed to Kaiser Chief’s ‘I Predict A Riot’, or what would Lord of the Rings feel like if JRR Tolkien had been inspired by Alan Bennett’s ‘Talking Heads’; Could Charles Dickens have loved Leeds if he of met Ernie Wise?
What would Northern Ballet’s Wuthering Heights look like performed by orcs? Musicians, Theatre Makers and Dancers in Wannabe Leodis explore the contamination of past and present artistic and cultural practices that have helped to inform Leeds.
They wear skeletal corsets and codpieces, with flat caps and Adidas. Their words are the Bronte’s, but their actions are Mel B.
Our students have enjoyed preparing for their time in the limelight, here are some of their comments:
"I have never laughed so much in my entire life" - Aimee Grieve.
"I'm so excited because we've got straight into making, it's invigorating" - Leanne Crichton.
"Making Wannabe Leodis has been a great way to meet the rest of my class mates" - Mia Flora.
"Wannabe Leodis is something very different from what I've done before, I'm so excited" - Annie Bradbury.
More information on the performance can be found on the event page here.