Hello!

I've just completed Underworlds Live in Leeds, a major performance project - one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, classics outreach events in the north of England this year - and thoroughly enjoyed scripting, directing and costuming all the characters, and especially improvising one of them for five hours(even though I never planned to). The challenge was to help the general public to connect to the texts and characters of the ancient world and the medium of a city's public art and architecture, in conjunction with the performances, seemed to bridge that gap really well. At least the requests for repeats as a single 'walk' for a group - 'walking theatre' with a narrator/tour guide - seem to indicate that's the case. So my outreach work is now generating some performance-based research data and seems to have legs!

The experience got me thinking about all the other productions and theatre-related projects I've been involved in and how that background has shaped the way I approach the dramatic authors I work on, lecture on, and write about in my academic persona.

So, because I don't want to waste what I've learned about blogging and wanted to catalogue my ephemera anyway, I thought I'd start a new blog that will come to encompass my theatrical experience and as much evidence of it as I can accrue. If you can help me out with any more photographs, programmes etc. please get in touch with me (Eleanor OKell - without spaces or dots) via googlemail.

As a professional lecturer/researcher and a theatre practitioner, I'm also available to give talks, lectures and workshops and for that am beset contacted on my Visiting Research Fellow address (e.r.okell) through the University of Leeds (@leeds.ac.uk).

Eleanor

Eleanor as Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, St. Joseph's College, Stoke-on-Trent, April 1993.
Press photo for The Sentinel.