Post by Joanna Beaufoy

I’m so proud of Cottia Thorowgood whose beautiful film, La Fée Électricité, has today won Best Short Dance Film at the 2026 Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards. You can see a short extract on Cottia’s Instagram page: https://lnkd.in/eZGxkYQU The concept came from my PhD! I’ve written two articles on La Fée Électricité – here is a short piece from one of them: ‘The place of the magical within late nineteenth-century modernity as first seems paradoxical: how could the great accumulation and propagation of scientific knowledge during this period be coupled with a desire to confuse and confound and, most importantly, a desire to be confused and confounded? A cursory examination of popular advertising material in late nineteenth-century Paris reveals the audience’s desire to not understand how a magic trick is performed, how a set is lit, how an orb of light appears on the wall before them. One Belle époque poster seems full of contradictions, as it implores spectators to come and see, ‘Nouveaux tours de physique amusante et de secrets utiles’ [New tricks of amusing physics and useful secrets]. The transformation of magical crafts that came with inventions of complex optical instruments, allowing, by the end of the eighteenth century, convincing optical illusions, began the trajectory that created modern cinema. Technology was becoming the magic of the modern age, and the incarnation of electricity as fairy shows how readily it was depicted as magic: something that could transform one thing into another. It could transform darkness into light and vice versa, but also conjure one atmosphere, then another, instantaneously.’ If you’re interested in the fée électricité you can read the full article here in this book (open access) https://lnkd.in/eExN9H-X Another one (in French) will come out in the autumn in the journal Arts et Savoirs. Above all, having this research interest turned into an award-winning film is a PhD dream come true! I also think that the story of how the folk figure of the fée électricité became a commercialised goddess of the Belle époque, and then depicted in critiques of modernity, by way of Swan, Edison, the London stage, the Paris opera and the golden age of advertising could be a juicy BBC costume drama… but I’ll wait for the call 📞 🧚 ✨ 💡