This year we have collaborated with Royal Holloway, University of London creating Staging Suffrage, a performance project working with archival research into the lives of 6 diverse suffragists and suffragettes. The performance examines the diversity of activities of the suffrage movement, including Mary Neale’s folk dance, Mary Garrud’s Jujitsu movement, Actresses’ Franchise League founder, Winifred Mayo, and student’s experiences from the diaries of Kate Perry Fry.
Staging Suffrage has hit the headlines, on the centenary of the Representation of the People Act on February 6th, we staged a protest march in Egham which gathered press attention locally, nationally and internationally, with pictures of our student participants featuring in BBC Online, TIME magazine, The Times, The Washington Post, the Sunday Post, and as one of the Guardian’s photos of the day,
We went on to examine the lives of legacy of suffragettes in performances around Royal Holloway on International Women's Day, and in the college's Play! Festival and Festival of History. Performances takes place around the spaces and places of the new Emily Wilding Davison Library on campus, the library which has been names to commemorate Royal Holloway's former student who died in 1913.
Our performances take audiences on an intimate walk around the library, with audio tracks written and performed by studets exploring different experiences of people involved in the suffrage movement, from Selina Martin, to David Lloyd George, to Emilinie Pankhurst's call to militancy. Alongside these audio sroties are performances around the library, moving from level to level, interweaving the college's past with its present.
