Creative engagement - 'Seized Books! The Musical'

1. Can you tell us a bit about your event/activities?

Our event focused on research from the Seized Books! Project, which explored queer reading and the censorship of LGBTQ+ literature in 1980s Britain by focusing on a 1984 raid at Gay’s the Word bookshop, the UK’s oldest LGBT bookshop. That project brought together staff from Senate House Library and the School of Advanced Study, University of London and drew heavily on collections material from the Haud Nominandum Collection – the personal collection of Jonathan Cutbill, one of the founding directors of Gay’s the Word.

The main element of the event was a 40-minute performance of a work-in-progress musical dramatising the lives of the booksellers, the raid and the grassroots defence campaign that challenged the seizures. The performance involved six actors accompanied by a pianist and followed a staged reading model, with performers using scripts and standing in front of music stands. We followed the musical with a panel discussion featuring members of the creative team, researchers and queer elders from the Defend Gay’s the Word campaign who provided valuable context about queer literature and government censorship. Attendees also had the opportunity to engage with copies of the books that had been seized in the raid, reflect on their own experience with reading queer literature, and experiment with censorship in large language models like ChatGPT.

We used the event venue at ImpactHub Euston, which is a co-working space in central London. It was easily accessible and provided enough space to host both our performance and the interpretive material we brought.

2. How did you go about working with the creative team and your community partners on this event?

We actually met several of our creative partners at a previous Being Human Festival event! The idea for the musical grew out of that and so we spent almost a full year developing the project with them. Early in the process, the creative team worked more independently – taking trips to visit material at archives, developing a script outline, and exploring possible collaborations. We met once a month to discuss their progress and would pop into the occasional development session to check in.

We were able to secure funding to cover their time during the development process, which was essential in ensuring we could support them beyond just the festival delivery period. We also worked with the creative team to identify additional funding sources, beyond the SAS Public Engagement Fund grant, which included other internal university grants and Arts Council England. This allowed us to expand the scope of the project to include additional artists, as well as hire a producer who could help coordinate a lot of the logistical elements on the creative side.

Starting in August, we began to meet more regularly. The producer and I were in constant email contact, deciding which elements should be managed by us (like venue hire and contracting) and which should be managed by the creative team (like casting and rehearsal schedules). We were able to provide rehearsal space at the university, which allowed the creative team to use more of the budget to pay our performers. 

We really benefited from the creative team’s professional networks – they were able to assemble an amazing team of collaborators in a way we never would have been able to on our own.

3. Who were the target audience for this event, and how did you and the creative team go about reaching them? 

We wanted our event to reach a number of different (but overlapping) audiences including intergenerational LGBTQ+ communities, those interested in history of censorship and publishing, and those interested in new musical theatre. Each part of the team played to their particular strengths. The academic members reached out to their networks and collaborated with the university’s communications team to use our social media. The creative team are particularly well embedded in grassroots LGBTQ+ organisations via past projects like The Log Books podcast and past work and memberships with groups like ACTUP London, Positive East, and London Dyke March. The team all contacted their personal networks via email and social media. Our producer Joly took specific charge of contacting people in the theatre world. It helped that our partner organisations, especially Gay's the Word, have their own social media reach, which cast the net even wider.

4. How did you approach incorporating the archival and research material into the event? 

Insights from the books in the Cutbill Collection, as well as archival collections at the Bishopsgate Institute, were integral to the artistic development process. The creative team’s impression of the bookshop’s directors, as well as many of the specific anecdotes in the musical, came directly from reading witness statements, legal memos, and other material from the archives. They took several weeks to work through and absorb material from the collections very early in the development process, which gave them time to shape a coherent picture of the story before diving into the creation of the musical itself.

One of the challenges of working with material held in special collections is that you usually can’t bring them out of the library. We felt that it was important for people to see the books that form such a central part of the story, so we printed postcard-sized reproductions of all 140 book covers to bring to the event. These cards had information about each title printed on the back, so people could gain a better understanding of the material. We also purchased some copies of the books, so we could bring physical copies with us. Attendees responded incredibly well to both the cards and the books, and the creative team has used them extensively in subsequent outreach activities, including four public workshops across England with LGBTQ+ community organisations where participants develop creative responses to the 1984 raid and the material from the collections.

5. Are there any legacies or outcomes from the event? What’s the future of this project looking like?

During the development process for the Being Human event, the creative team successfully applied for an Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant to fund further development of the project. This will allow them to run a series of community outreach workshops sharing the story with LGBTQ+ community groups across England. They will also continue working on the musical and plan to perform an updated version of it later this year.

6. Do you have any top tips or advice for future event organisers?

• We tried to resist the urge to do everything within our team and instead intentionally budgeted for external expertise where it was necessary, for example paying a freelance producer to coordinate artist contracts, rehearsal schedules, and community outreach. Identifying these needs with our creative team before we developed our budget ensured that we could allocate money for this role in advance and pay the appropriate day rate. The producer brought a wealth of experience and community connections, so proved integral to the success of the event.
• Schedule a walkthrough at your venue and don’t be afraid to ask a million follow-up questions – we must have sent a dozen (very polite) emails to our venue contact to clarify specific issues, from small things like access to coffee in the break room to big things like a wheelchair ramp for our stage. When it comes to accessibility in particular, it’s worth checking what specific resources are available. For example, our venue was fully wheelchair accessible except for the stage, so we had to rent a ramp to ensure all of our performers could access the stage.
• Make a plan for both setting up and taking things down – we made a really good plan for setting up our event that assigned responsibility for bringing items over to the venue, setting up specific activities, and testing equipment. We completely forgot to make a plan for getting all of our supplies back to the university after the event! (Some very generous colleagues and a last-minute cab ride saved us from complete disaster.)
• Test all of your technology in advance – because of the specific sound needs for the musical, we had to rent additional microphones and speakers. We weren’t able to test these in advance of the event, so spent longer than planned troubleshooting them during our set up period. We weren’t able to resolve every issue with the system, so the sound quality on some of our recordings isn’t great.