A Scottish charitable organisation promoting health improvement, citizenship and environmental issues through the medium of the performing arts.
School Shows
Live Wire Productions Outreach Programmes
As part of its quincentenary celebrations in 1995, the University of Aberdeen asked Live Wire Productions to develop 'Living History' characters depicting the lives and work of three of its most eminent scientists with a view to these characters touring primary schools in the North East of Scotland. William McGillivray, Patrick Copland and Patrick Dunn initially visited 60 primary schools, performing to approximately 1,800 pupils.
Between 1997 and 2001, Patrick Dunn was annually used by Aberdeen College of Education as part of their post graduate induction course to demonstrate to potential teachers the art of teaching and the value of drama as a teaching resource.
This profiles the way that Live Wire Productions designs and redesigns its programmes to suit the needs of specific clients and target audiences in an organic way.
The changing awareness of young people, society and education has meant that shows originally aimed at one target group have been changed to fit the needs of an entirely different audience profile as required, eg, 'Snow Ice and the Second Shorts', a pupil based show on the effects of alcohol on the body,
originally developed with S3/4 pupils in Orkney, has now become a drama workshop for P7 children. Also, 'Ooh! My Back Hurts!', a back care programme originally written for primary schools, was adapted to address safe handling problems in the workplace and metamorphosed into 'Back in 20 Minutes' with the emphasis on safe working practices in an office environment.
Outreach involves not only delivering the programme to where the audience is, but understanding and delivering what is required.
Mobile theatre is cost effective, apposite, customised and minimally disruptive.
This adaptability has meant the expansion of the Live Wire outreach programme from 60 performances of 3 shows to 1,800 people in 1995, to 233 performances of 23 shows to nearly 15,000 in 2005.
Alistair Harvey
Artistic Director