When questioned about where my site is and I explain that I’ll be performing in a museum, it tends to bring on a confused look on peoples faces which to be fair I did replicate when I was first told my site was in a museum. Theatre and a museum in my eyes were polar opposites and then to force them to merge seemed like a disaster in my mind, theatre is loud, in your face and explosive whilst a museum is a place of knowledge, wonder and history however Susan Bennett explains that “Theatres and museums have increasingly become symbolic and actual neighbours, sharing the task of providing entertaining and educational experiences that draw people” (2013, 3). I now find it unbelievable to think that I previously didn’t consider the two could mix and have one without the other which led me to think about how our performance will enhance our audience’s understanding of how theatre and a museum can work together and have strong similarities.
Following from my previous blog post me and my group created the basis of our idea which is:
James Usher only presented beautiful and valuable items that represented his era from around the world, what we want to do is bring to life the unattractive and less valuable items that represent Lincoln and bring back Lincoln to The Collection. For this to be done we would take our chosen item, the ceramics we have collected from Lincolnshire people, to break then and then to create something new from them that represent Lincoln. All of this would be done with audience participation from the breaking and re-making so it becomes the Lincoln people’s creation into The Collection, all preparation would be done outside, with health and safety bearing in mind, with set stations for audiences to go to.
After a discussion with our lecture, it became clear we had to rethink certain aspects of our idea but also we did not completely understand what was expected of us. We believed we needed to repeat our performance throughout the day which was not intended, also we had to carefully think about our piece and how it was becoming more of an arts and crafts fair rather than an installation piece, baring all this in mind our original idea had to evolve as well as what we wanted to demonstrate to our audience. Leslie Hill and Helen Paris states “since the late 1980’s Live Art practise have become more and more concerned with the specificity of their time and place, urging audience to consider what it means to be here, now, wherever and whenever here and now maybe”. (Hill and Paris, 2006, 12) Our original idea had not been asking these questions and what we needed to do was create a piece that would make the audience consider their surrounding and make them question The Collection as to what it is now and what it had been.
Work cited:
Bennett, Susan (2013) Theatre and Museums, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Hill, L. and Paris, H. (2006) Performance and Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan