Usher Gallery and The Collection, Lincoln
In the run up to our first seminar, we were asked to read the introduction to Mike Pearson’s’ Site-Specific Performance in which he quotes “site specific performance engages with site as symbol, site as story teller, site as structure” (Pearson, 2010). Elaborating on how the role of site is to lend the story and demand the performer to perform it. We do not bring our own tales into the process, only extend on what is already there, for the site is full of a variety of tales to be told. This can be said in particular for my group’s site; The Collection & Usher Gallery, where hundreds of items and paintings, hand crafted and previously owned by James Usher himself, have been gathered and arranged in what is known as ‘The Collection’. These items and paintings all have their own unique stories within them, as the book Theatre & Museums proposes, “today’s museum is a theatre, a memory palace, a stage for the enactment of other times and places, a space of transport, fantasy, dreams” (Bennett, 2013), in attempt to deliver education in entertaining ways. Such collections present questions rather than giving an established point of view, therefore it is our job as a performer to acknowledge these questions and develop them further, in hope to create a continual cycle of questioning the spectator.
Works Cited
Bennett, S (2013) Theatre & Museums. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Pearson, M (2010) Site Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan