A virtual choir music video of ‘Double Life’ from the electronic musical GUY by leo&hyde with a Lancashire LGBTQIA+ youth chorus and West End performers Vinegar Strokes, Courtney Stapleton and more.

A new electronic music anthem, ‘Double Life’ wich premieres at 8pm on 26 January 2021, explores the complexity of growing up on the internet with its capacity to enable love, connection, community, jealousy, loneliness, empowerment as well as the ability to be someone else.

The song was inspiration for a project funded by Culture Co-op Lancaster and More Music’s Innovate fund where cast members and choreographer of the UK tour of GUY, worked with LGBTQIA+ young people from Lancashire to reflect on their own experience of living a double life online through devised digital performances, and channel them into the Double Life music video as they form part of the LGBTQIA+ chorus.

While another said that after the workshop, which was an open space to explore issues of identity, sexuality and social media, the ‘thought it was only other people who pretended to be other people online…’ and ‘hadn’t realised [they] did it too.’

Many worked with Ashley Luke Lloyd (Dreamgirls, Mama Mia) to devise the choreography in the music video that Ashley and others perform, while the others formed part of the choir of voices in the song.

‘We really wanted to create a safe space for LGBTQIA+ young people on the internet through the workshops’ says producer Dan Mawson ‘one that is separate from the sexualised spaces of apps such as Grindr that many LGBTQIA+ people are limited to in rural areas where services are limited.’

Vinegar Strokes (Drag Race UK, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, Death Drop), Courtney Stapleton (SIX, Dear Evan Hansen), Rodney Vubya (Tina, Book of Mormon) and Evie Rose Lane (Footloose {postponed]) were six LGBTQIA+ performers keen to support this idea by lending their solos to the video.

Mawson, who brought together all these performers, went on to say, ‘even though the internet can be a dangerous place. It offers such a lifeline for LGBTQIA+ young people in rural areas specifically, but for all young people at the moment who might be trapped in homes that aren’t very understanding about the LGBTQIA+ community. It really takes a toll on mental health in a big way. In this project we wanted to both create out own space and celebrate the internet’s diverse potentials.’

The UK touring cast of the critically acclaimed GUY (Steve Banks, Aarian Mehrabani, Ben Raymond and Elliott Wooster) who were meant to tour the UK this February, also feature, as does BSL translator and actor, Ciaran Stewart.

Find the full video at https://www.linktr.ee/leoandhyde