It is always nice to know that there are local people taking part in the Fringe and The Happiness Project which is a body of work by Creative Electric is born in Leith.
We met Heather Marshall the Artistic Director of Creative Electric. She told The Edinburgh Reporter : “At the Fringe this year we are performing The Happiness Project which is a protest piece.
“We’re working with five performers who are queer, working class and disabled to tell their stories. We wanted to place voices that wouldn’t traditionally be heard within an Army base. And it is an Army base and we have almost created a new type of army – an army for 2019 that’s looking at the importance of self care, of sex education for unrepresented groups. At the moment there’s no LGBT sex education in schools, so that is something that we are looking at.
“Predominantly we’re looking at the need for non-sexual physical contact because after doing some research we discovered that the majority of physical contact young people are having was through sex. We thought that was really scary. You need those moments when you are having a hug or you’re holding somebody’s hand or you’re just close to somebody.
“The premise of the show is looking at our need for non-sexual physical contact in our digital era.”
Creative Electric perform in non-traditional theatre spaces. You will see them popping up throughout Edinburgh in laundrettes, in skateparks or in nightclubs. It is very rare that they are in an actual theatre. For them the Army base was really exciting.
The Happiness Project is on every Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Army@TheFringe at 2.20pm. They aim to have some free tickets every weekend for people who wouldn’t be able to access the Fringe because there is a huge financial barrier to the Fringe for so many people. They don’t want that to happen and have had some very generous crowdfunders. One of the donations came from a couple who got married and asked their guests to contribute to The Happiness Project rather than giving them gifts.
Nicholas Alban is a performer in The Happiness Project. He said : “We are Creative Electric. We are an ensemble company based in Leith and we always perform in Leith and Edinburgh. We love to take theatre to non-traditional venues. We like to bring in non-traditional audiences to our theatre. We always make our work accessible – it is always very topical political and current.
“This is a devised piece and it is verbatim and it is created from our own stories – so we are playing ourselves basically. We are using our own voices.”
Today we also met @Creativelectric who have a play at @ArmyatTheFringe Emma Marshall Creative Director and Actor Nicholas Alban told us about their work @edfringe pic.twitter.com/hytf6gBN7g
— Edinburgh Reporter (@EdinReporter) August 2, 2019
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
