Enlightening or embarrassing? This is what the London Science Museum wondered, back in 1993, about putting theatre performances into its exhibits.
Their evaluation showed embarrassment certainly was not an issue. 95% of visitors thought drama in the museum was a good idea. 90% felt actors made exhibits more memorable. 93% agreed that actors tell more than labels. Enlightenment clearly shone through.
Raising the Curtain: Performance in Cultural Institutions, recently held at the National Museum of Australia (NMA), was Australia's first national conference. 3 exciting, inspiring days brought together museum performers - actors, musicians, storytellers, puppeteers, directors and writers - with museum staff from all over Australia - among others, Sovereign Hill, Old Melbourne Gaol, Powerhouse, Historic Houses, even Melbourne Zoo and, of course, Old Parliament House, Questacon and NMA in Canberra.
Talk and performances were given focus by Catherine Hughes, of Boston's Museum of Science and IMTAL (International Museum Theatre Alliance), who began her keynote speech as Mary Anning (who discovered the first complete fossil remains of an icthyosaur at the age of 11 in the year 1812) and ended the conference with a lecture and workshop on how to evaluate the successes - or failures - of performance programs in museums. People will flock to a show with Titanic in the title, she explained, but how do you present the drama to make people face up to the unpleasant facts of the human errors in sinking the unsinkable. She played a very observant, humorous crab for this purpose, but how do you find out what the audience learned from the play? And was it what you hoped they would learn?
I'll get back to that later, but in the meantime how do you deal with a slight figure in an orange boiler suit and spacesuit-looking hat who asks you about the audition? Audition?? I thought I was attending a session on "Structuring a performance program". Well, said Robert Bunzli (Performance Manager, The Excited Particles, Questacon), the audition was yesterday. Ooops! But I've come all the way from Perth and I was sure it's still Thursday. OK, said soft-hearted Robert, I'll give you five minutes to explain, in your own words, Newton's Laws of Motion.
So we learned that if you stand a cow on the stage it will stay there forever if you don't do anything to it. But if you kick the cow into the audience, not counting gravity and air resistance, it will go on in a straight line forever unless something stops it - like that lady. And if you pretend to be a space ship, and the orange person tries to repair you but drifts away, and she's forgotten to attach herself with a rope, then she can throw her hammer away from the space ship and this will make her drift back towards it again.
So the slight orange person got the job as an Excited Particle, and our evaluation was excellent. And in similar vein we found out about "What's happening in Australia"; "Why do we use performance and how does this add value to the visitor experience:perspectives from cultural institutions"; "Who are the audiences we are trying to reach with performance? What is the nature of the experience for these audiences?"; and "What models have been used for performance partnerships? How are they formed and what are the benefits for each party?" and so on.
Put theatrical people together with these typecast conference topics, and you'd be amazed at the laughter, especially from Canberra Youth Theatre's Linda McHugh. Watch a professional performer, a top-class administrator, and a brilliant academic, all rolled in one Catherine Hughes, and you know this was a rare conference, where you actually learned new techniques for qualitative evaluation (Personal Meaning Mapping by John Falk) which shows you short-term and long-term change in people's understanding before and after the museum visit.
Why all this structuring, evaluation and even name definition (like don't say "theatre" - say "performance" so musicians are not left out; or "cultural institution - ugh!")? Well, museums have a long history of continual diversification, from basically natural history in the nineteenth century, adding technology and science in the first half of the twentieth, and social history in the last 25 years. In Canada they call theirs the Museum of Civilisation. So now we have museums with multifaceted all-encompassing exhibits, and lots of specialist museums in places like old gaols or historic houses. All of which can benefit powerfully from integrating performances into their exhibitions, without embarrassment and lots more enlightenment.
It all costs pots of money, expenditure which needs justification. Performance in museums enhances the visitor's experience - it's money better spent than merely static or even electronic displays. The living performer makes the difference, as proper evaluations show.
Before long there will be IMTAL Australia (we'll host the 2005 International Conference). Go to www.mos.org/imtal if you want to keep up with international developments (that's at the Museum of Science website in Boston). If you really want to know about qualitative evaluation (you could use Personal Meaning Mapping for almost any kind of learning program) go to Dr. John Falk, Director, Institute for Learning Innovation, Annapolis, MD USA
www.iinet.org/communicating/aam2000/falktransform.html. And at the National Museum of Australia contact Daina Harvey d.harvey@nma.gov.au or phone 6208 5000.
Raising the Curtain: Performance in Cultural Institutions, February 28 - March 2 2002, was hosted by the National Museum of Australia, Old Parliament House, Questacon and The University of Western Sydney School of Contemporary Arts.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
