Classical Dracula and War of the Worlds
I'm uncomfortably aware that I haven't written anything other than WIDAWTW posts for over a month, or indeed commented much on other people's entries. The approach of term coincided with the local constituency party that I am chair of having to go into high alert due to the likelihood of a General Election being called at any moment, so it has all been teaching-related activity and campaigning. Last weekend, though, I took myself down to London for an epic weekend which combined delivering a talk on Dracula and Classical Antiquity to the Dracula Society on the Saturday evening with going to the immersive musical version of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds the following day - and today I finally have a day off to write about it.
The Dracula talk was a revised and expanded version of the one I gave at the Children of the Night International Dracula Congress in Brașov almost exactly a year ago (LJ / DW). When I gave the Brașov one, we had only a half-hour slot, but at the Dracula Society I was the main attraction for the evening, so was asked to speak for about an hour. During the summer, I'd also taken the original Brașov conference paper and developed it into a chapter for an edited volume on vampire literature in the nineteenth century, so I had refined some of the thinking and added more material, which meant that I had plenty to say to fill the longer slot.
Though I've been a member of the Dracula Society for five years now, I hadn't been along to one of their London meetings before. Trains between Leeds and London are quite fast and can be relatively cheap if booked in advance, but because the meetings don't really wrap up until 10pm and that's also the time of the last train home, it could only really be done in a relaxed manner if you also stayed overnight - which makes it prohibitively expensive, no matter how amazing the speaker. This time, though, as I was the speaker, I was offered overnight accommodation staying with the chair and her partner, which made it much more manageable and created the bonus opportunity of a free day out in London the following day.
The meeting took place in the upper room of the Rugby Tavern conveniently situated only about a twenty minute walk away from King's Cross. It was packed out with an apparently larger than usual audience, most of whom I knew well from the DracSoc holidays and excursions I've been on, and including as a bonus my old friend James, whom I met when he was studying to become a priest in Oxford and came along to gatherings of the local Oxgoths. Indeed, James wrote up this lovely review of the evening, from which I hope he won't mind that I liberated the following picture of me starting my talk:
It's basically all about how Stoker capitalised on the fruits of his own Classical education, and the fact that he lived in a society where he could expect most of his readers also to have more than a passing familiarity with the ancient world, to enrich his themes of the past vs. the present, aggressive imperialism, the supernatural and monstrous, and (sexual) predation. E.g. when vampire!Lucy is confronted by Van Helsing outside her tomb and prevented from escaping into it by his holy wafer paste, he describes her face thus: "The beautiful colour became livid, the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of flesh were the coils of Medusa's snakes..." That's a great metaphor for a snarling, screeching face, but there is also a lot more behind it when we remember that Medusa was transformed into a monster as a punishment after being assaulted in a sacred precinct (like Lucy), that she is both beautiful and deadly (like Lucy) and that she is eventually defeated by having her head cut off (like Lucy). There are some 25 references like that in the novel, most of which have extensive and important resonances for the story, and whether or not Stoker had thought every one of them through to their logical extent doesn't really matter. Half the reason why Dracula has remained so popular and has been analysed so intensively over the years is that it's a very rich novel with an enormous amount going on in it which can support a seemingly endless supply of different and interesting readings.
All of this seemed to go down very well with the assembled audience, who had all sorts of enthusiastic questions and comments for me afterwards. Things like how it had made them think of the novel in a new way, how they were amazed no-one had thought to write on this topic before, when could they read the book chapter version which I'd mentioned, it was the best Society talk they could remember for several years, would I come back and do another one on Byron and Polidori (as per the talk I did at the vampire festival in July - LJ/ DW), etc. etc. So, yes, I think I can safely say they liked it - which is a good thing as they certainly know Dracula, so really are the perfect audience for it.
Under the heading of the aggressive imperialism theme, I had occasion to make a passing reference to H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. I think this might have gone into the paper anyway, as it is another good and well-known example of a 'reverse colonisation' narrative - that is, a story produced by a colonising culture which involves imagining the tables being turned and finding that they are being invaded themselves. Dracula qualifies as one such because Dracula himself comes to England from an exoticised, othered East to become (as Van Helsing) says, "the father or furtherer of a new order of beings", while The War of the Worlds as another for the obvious reason of being about a Martian invasion, experienced very specifically from the viewpoint of people in England. As it happens, both of them were also first published in 1897, reflecting a well-known climate at the time of anxieties and debates about the British empire. But using The War of the Worlds as a supporting example did become all the more tempting in light of the fact that it was to be my main activity the following day.
I have long loved the soundtrack to Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds. I actually first encountered it when I was thirteen via Ben Liebrand's dance remix of 'The Eve of the War', and then found and downloaded the full original soundtrack during my late twenties. I remember listening to it a lot during the year I lived in Belfast (2004-5). And Facebook obviously magically knows all this, because for the last year or so I have been getting sponsored adverts from these guys, who have created an immersive version of it working directly with Jeff Wayne. With the prospect of a free day out in London on my hands, I flew a flag on Facebook to see if anyone else fancied coming along to it with me, and it turned out that another old Oxford friend, Fiona - this time from DocSoc circles - did.
We met up at Bank tube station, caught up over some lunch together, and proceeded to the venue. You enter into what looks from the outside like an ordinary City of London bar, The Spirit of Man, but which is already decorated inside with all sorts of steam-punk themed gizmos, including projected moving pictures of scenes from the story, and dominated by a gigantic Martian tripod. There we waited, having stowed bags etc. in lockers, until our time came and we were ushered through a doorway into another world...
The most similar thing I've done to what awaited us inside was the Hammer Horror production The Soulless One two years ago (LJ / DW). For that, a full-sized audience started together in a smallish auditorium, and then we were allowed to follow actors around at will as multiple story-lines unfolded simultaneously over different floors and rooms, but we were not supposed to speak to or interact directly with the characters. By contrast, the immersive version of The War of the Worlds is designed to be experienced by small groups of up to twelve at a time, who enter every fifteen minutes or so at an assigned time-slot, and follow each other through a series of rooms and experiences. Obviously most of what happened to us was pre-determined, and most of the actors leading us through rooms and passages and up and down stairs were speaking to us in line with a pre-defined script, but there was a certain amount of scope for interaction on our part, especially as we were transferred from one scenario to the next. We would be asked by the new team waiting to meet us where we had come from and what we had seen, giving us the opportunity to say things like "We were on the common. Something fell from the sky - we don't know what it was. There was some kind of... heat-ray." and so forth.
This was fun and definitely made it feel like it was our, unique experience - a feeling which Fiona inadvertently managed to add to at one point by going the wrong way and getting temporarily separated from the rest of the party. Since this followed immediately on from VR headset experience in which we had seen the inside of a Martian tripod from the point of view of pods ranged all around it, and watched people being plucked out of those pods all around us to be eaten, when we found ourselves 'rescued' by a woman asking how many of us there were, and there were five of us but we kept explaining there were actually six and one had gone missing and she kept asking "Are you sure?" I genuinely wasn't sure for a few moments whether this was supposed to be part of the experience or not - like, was it all planned that one team member would be quietly whisked away at that stage, a victim of the Martians, and we would have to mount a rescue effort or something? No, it turned out not - she had just turned the wrong way when her 'pod' opened and accidentally gone back the way we had come.
The experiences we went through were pretty much in line with what I expected from both the book and the soundtrack of the musical, but with some variations. We were shown first to a Victorian-style theatre where projected digital images of George and Carrie Herbert appeared on the stage to explain that we were about to experience their memories of the Martian invasion. Next, we were escorted to an observatory where Professor Oglivy greeted us and invited each of us to look into our own telescope at the planet Mars, from which of course he explained that "the chance of anything coming from Mars are a million to one" even while we began to see clouds of green gas and flares emanating from the planet through our telescope lenses. The next thing we knew, the observatory was being shaken by reverberations as something landed outside, and in a panic he rushed us all out to the common, where a Martian space-craft had landed and something was emerging from inside it. Assuring us that everything was safe and he, a scientist, would investigate, he approached, only to be burnt to death by the heat-ray - done by having the actor disappear in a puff of smoke followed by another digital projection of a burning man just where he had been standing.
An artillery-man then appeared, to lead us to safety in George Herbert's house nearby, but he wasn't there - only his housemaid, Peggy, who let us in, sat us around the dining-room table and asked where we had been and what we had seen. Suddenly, all the lights in the room went off, leaving us in total darkness, with the only sensations the sounds of crashes and the feel of vibrations in the table we were sitting around as the Martians approached. Flickering light came on for a moment, only to reveal poor Peggy being constricted to death by Martian tentacles. Once again, we were rescued and ushered onwards for further experiences - walking around in VR headsets to witness Martian tripods striding by and artillery-men attempting to bring them down, searching Carrie's house in London (she wasn't there either), sitting in boats as autumn leaves fell all around us and then sailing down the Thames and out to sea to witness the valiant efforts of Thunderchild, entering into a confessional to hear the deranged delusions of Father Nathaniel before finding ourselves in the aforementioned Martian pods, sliding down into the tunnels which the artilleryman had built, witnessing his Escher-like visions for mankind's brave new world projected onto a curved ceiling above us, finding the right box and key to unlock some blueprints (escape-room style), and finally stepping into the baskets of hot-air balloons to sail over London watching the Martians die and George be reunited with Carrie before sweeping onwards to Mars and learning that the invasion was far from over....
Obviously all the way through this we were surrounded by beautiful detailed set-dressing, treated to the appropriate parts of the soundtrack, and bombarded with all kinds of multi-sensory experiences. I think probably one of the cleverest and most enjoyable bits was the boat-trip, which was largely conveyed using VR headsets, but also involved us sitting in real wooden boats which moved around in synch with the water we could see in the headsets, while a gentle breeze also flowed past us, again designed to match the movements we were seeing. We all felt a bit sea-sick after that bit! It was only my second real experience of VR (the first being just this June, at the film museum in Berlin while there with DracSoc), but we had four separate goes with it during the show: the interior of a house followed by artillery-men shooting Martians from a bridge followed by a London street; the boat-trip; the confessional which then turned into Martian pods; and the hot-air balloon trip, so I had a good chance this time to experience properly the range of what it can do. The house / artillery-men / London street sequence was probably the best bit, as for that our head-sets were attached to backpacks containing batteries, so we could walk around freely, including being able to see each other within the projection in avatar form. But for the boat-trip, confessional / pod and hot-air balloon trip as well, you could look all around you, lean in different directions for different views, etc. Very clever and well-thought-out all around.
Our little group of six consisted of three pairs of people who didn't know each other at all when we went in, but the nature of the experience of course meant we quickly bonded over our shared experiences, so that by the time we reached the 'Rescue Center' aka the Red Weed bar where we were invited to relax for a short interval at the half-way point, we were all sitting round as a group sharing our enthusiasm for how good it all was. Then at the end, we were invited to pose in our pairs for pictures in front of a green-screen, of which this was very much the best final result for me and Fiona, pretending to be menaced by Martians:
I'm normally pretty cynical about that kind of add-on money-making ploy for an experience which you've already paid quite a considerable amount of money for, but given that it had actually been a really enjoyable afternoon, and that the full set of pictures came complete with a digital download code which meant that we could both access them, I decided to go for it. All in all, A++ would fight my way through red weed again.
Dreamwidth version |
comments | Leave a comment
The Dracula talk was a revised and expanded version of the one I gave at the Children of the Night International Dracula Congress in Brașov almost exactly a year ago (LJ / DW). When I gave the Brașov one, we had only a half-hour slot, but at the Dracula Society I was the main attraction for the evening, so was asked to speak for about an hour. During the summer, I'd also taken the original Brașov conference paper and developed it into a chapter for an edited volume on vampire literature in the nineteenth century, so I had refined some of the thinking and added more material, which meant that I had plenty to say to fill the longer slot.
Though I've been a member of the Dracula Society for five years now, I hadn't been along to one of their London meetings before. Trains between Leeds and London are quite fast and can be relatively cheap if booked in advance, but because the meetings don't really wrap up until 10pm and that's also the time of the last train home, it could only really be done in a relaxed manner if you also stayed overnight - which makes it prohibitively expensive, no matter how amazing the speaker. This time, though, as I was the speaker, I was offered overnight accommodation staying with the chair and her partner, which made it much more manageable and created the bonus opportunity of a free day out in London the following day.
The meeting took place in the upper room of the Rugby Tavern conveniently situated only about a twenty minute walk away from King's Cross. It was packed out with an apparently larger than usual audience, most of whom I knew well from the DracSoc holidays and excursions I've been on, and including as a bonus my old friend James, whom I met when he was studying to become a priest in Oxford and came along to gatherings of the local Oxgoths. Indeed, James wrote up this lovely review of the evening, from which I hope he won't mind that I liberated the following picture of me starting my talk:
It's basically all about how Stoker capitalised on the fruits of his own Classical education, and the fact that he lived in a society where he could expect most of his readers also to have more than a passing familiarity with the ancient world, to enrich his themes of the past vs. the present, aggressive imperialism, the supernatural and monstrous, and (sexual) predation. E.g. when vampire!Lucy is confronted by Van Helsing outside her tomb and prevented from escaping into it by his holy wafer paste, he describes her face thus: "The beautiful colour became livid, the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of flesh were the coils of Medusa's snakes..." That's a great metaphor for a snarling, screeching face, but there is also a lot more behind it when we remember that Medusa was transformed into a monster as a punishment after being assaulted in a sacred precinct (like Lucy), that she is both beautiful and deadly (like Lucy) and that she is eventually defeated by having her head cut off (like Lucy). There are some 25 references like that in the novel, most of which have extensive and important resonances for the story, and whether or not Stoker had thought every one of them through to their logical extent doesn't really matter. Half the reason why Dracula has remained so popular and has been analysed so intensively over the years is that it's a very rich novel with an enormous amount going on in it which can support a seemingly endless supply of different and interesting readings.
All of this seemed to go down very well with the assembled audience, who had all sorts of enthusiastic questions and comments for me afterwards. Things like how it had made them think of the novel in a new way, how they were amazed no-one had thought to write on this topic before, when could they read the book chapter version which I'd mentioned, it was the best Society talk they could remember for several years, would I come back and do another one on Byron and Polidori (as per the talk I did at the vampire festival in July - LJ/ DW), etc. etc. So, yes, I think I can safely say they liked it - which is a good thing as they certainly know Dracula, so really are the perfect audience for it.
Under the heading of the aggressive imperialism theme, I had occasion to make a passing reference to H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. I think this might have gone into the paper anyway, as it is another good and well-known example of a 'reverse colonisation' narrative - that is, a story produced by a colonising culture which involves imagining the tables being turned and finding that they are being invaded themselves. Dracula qualifies as one such because Dracula himself comes to England from an exoticised, othered East to become (as Van Helsing) says, "the father or furtherer of a new order of beings", while The War of the Worlds as another for the obvious reason of being about a Martian invasion, experienced very specifically from the viewpoint of people in England. As it happens, both of them were also first published in 1897, reflecting a well-known climate at the time of anxieties and debates about the British empire. But using The War of the Worlds as a supporting example did become all the more tempting in light of the fact that it was to be my main activity the following day.
I have long loved the soundtrack to Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds. I actually first encountered it when I was thirteen via Ben Liebrand's dance remix of 'The Eve of the War', and then found and downloaded the full original soundtrack during my late twenties. I remember listening to it a lot during the year I lived in Belfast (2004-5). And Facebook obviously magically knows all this, because for the last year or so I have been getting sponsored adverts from these guys, who have created an immersive version of it working directly with Jeff Wayne. With the prospect of a free day out in London on my hands, I flew a flag on Facebook to see if anyone else fancied coming along to it with me, and it turned out that another old Oxford friend, Fiona - this time from DocSoc circles - did.
We met up at Bank tube station, caught up over some lunch together, and proceeded to the venue. You enter into what looks from the outside like an ordinary City of London bar, The Spirit of Man, but which is already decorated inside with all sorts of steam-punk themed gizmos, including projected moving pictures of scenes from the story, and dominated by a gigantic Martian tripod. There we waited, having stowed bags etc. in lockers, until our time came and we were ushered through a doorway into another world...
The most similar thing I've done to what awaited us inside was the Hammer Horror production The Soulless One two years ago (LJ / DW). For that, a full-sized audience started together in a smallish auditorium, and then we were allowed to follow actors around at will as multiple story-lines unfolded simultaneously over different floors and rooms, but we were not supposed to speak to or interact directly with the characters. By contrast, the immersive version of The War of the Worlds is designed to be experienced by small groups of up to twelve at a time, who enter every fifteen minutes or so at an assigned time-slot, and follow each other through a series of rooms and experiences. Obviously most of what happened to us was pre-determined, and most of the actors leading us through rooms and passages and up and down stairs were speaking to us in line with a pre-defined script, but there was a certain amount of scope for interaction on our part, especially as we were transferred from one scenario to the next. We would be asked by the new team waiting to meet us where we had come from and what we had seen, giving us the opportunity to say things like "We were on the common. Something fell from the sky - we don't know what it was. There was some kind of... heat-ray." and so forth.
This was fun and definitely made it feel like it was our, unique experience - a feeling which Fiona inadvertently managed to add to at one point by going the wrong way and getting temporarily separated from the rest of the party. Since this followed immediately on from VR headset experience in which we had seen the inside of a Martian tripod from the point of view of pods ranged all around it, and watched people being plucked out of those pods all around us to be eaten, when we found ourselves 'rescued' by a woman asking how many of us there were, and there were five of us but we kept explaining there were actually six and one had gone missing and she kept asking "Are you sure?" I genuinely wasn't sure for a few moments whether this was supposed to be part of the experience or not - like, was it all planned that one team member would be quietly whisked away at that stage, a victim of the Martians, and we would have to mount a rescue effort or something? No, it turned out not - she had just turned the wrong way when her 'pod' opened and accidentally gone back the way we had come.
The experiences we went through were pretty much in line with what I expected from both the book and the soundtrack of the musical, but with some variations. We were shown first to a Victorian-style theatre where projected digital images of George and Carrie Herbert appeared on the stage to explain that we were about to experience their memories of the Martian invasion. Next, we were escorted to an observatory where Professor Oglivy greeted us and invited each of us to look into our own telescope at the planet Mars, from which of course he explained that "the chance of anything coming from Mars are a million to one" even while we began to see clouds of green gas and flares emanating from the planet through our telescope lenses. The next thing we knew, the observatory was being shaken by reverberations as something landed outside, and in a panic he rushed us all out to the common, where a Martian space-craft had landed and something was emerging from inside it. Assuring us that everything was safe and he, a scientist, would investigate, he approached, only to be burnt to death by the heat-ray - done by having the actor disappear in a puff of smoke followed by another digital projection of a burning man just where he had been standing.
An artillery-man then appeared, to lead us to safety in George Herbert's house nearby, but he wasn't there - only his housemaid, Peggy, who let us in, sat us around the dining-room table and asked where we had been and what we had seen. Suddenly, all the lights in the room went off, leaving us in total darkness, with the only sensations the sounds of crashes and the feel of vibrations in the table we were sitting around as the Martians approached. Flickering light came on for a moment, only to reveal poor Peggy being constricted to death by Martian tentacles. Once again, we were rescued and ushered onwards for further experiences - walking around in VR headsets to witness Martian tripods striding by and artillery-men attempting to bring them down, searching Carrie's house in London (she wasn't there either), sitting in boats as autumn leaves fell all around us and then sailing down the Thames and out to sea to witness the valiant efforts of Thunderchild, entering into a confessional to hear the deranged delusions of Father Nathaniel before finding ourselves in the aforementioned Martian pods, sliding down into the tunnels which the artilleryman had built, witnessing his Escher-like visions for mankind's brave new world projected onto a curved ceiling above us, finding the right box and key to unlock some blueprints (escape-room style), and finally stepping into the baskets of hot-air balloons to sail over London watching the Martians die and George be reunited with Carrie before sweeping onwards to Mars and learning that the invasion was far from over....
Obviously all the way through this we were surrounded by beautiful detailed set-dressing, treated to the appropriate parts of the soundtrack, and bombarded with all kinds of multi-sensory experiences. I think probably one of the cleverest and most enjoyable bits was the boat-trip, which was largely conveyed using VR headsets, but also involved us sitting in real wooden boats which moved around in synch with the water we could see in the headsets, while a gentle breeze also flowed past us, again designed to match the movements we were seeing. We all felt a bit sea-sick after that bit! It was only my second real experience of VR (the first being just this June, at the film museum in Berlin while there with DracSoc), but we had four separate goes with it during the show: the interior of a house followed by artillery-men shooting Martians from a bridge followed by a London street; the boat-trip; the confessional which then turned into Martian pods; and the hot-air balloon trip, so I had a good chance this time to experience properly the range of what it can do. The house / artillery-men / London street sequence was probably the best bit, as for that our head-sets were attached to backpacks containing batteries, so we could walk around freely, including being able to see each other within the projection in avatar form. But for the boat-trip, confessional / pod and hot-air balloon trip as well, you could look all around you, lean in different directions for different views, etc. Very clever and well-thought-out all around.
Our little group of six consisted of three pairs of people who didn't know each other at all when we went in, but the nature of the experience of course meant we quickly bonded over our shared experiences, so that by the time we reached the 'Rescue Center' aka the Red Weed bar where we were invited to relax for a short interval at the half-way point, we were all sitting round as a group sharing our enthusiasm for how good it all was. Then at the end, we were invited to pose in our pairs for pictures in front of a green-screen, of which this was very much the best final result for me and Fiona, pretending to be menaced by Martians:
I'm normally pretty cynical about that kind of add-on money-making ploy for an experience which you've already paid quite a considerable amount of money for, but given that it had actually been a really enjoyable afternoon, and that the full set of pictures came complete with a digital download code which meant that we could both access them, I decided to go for it. All in all, A++ would fight my way through red weed again.
Dreamwidth version |
comments | Leave a comment