Playing to the gallery
Museums are using on-site performances to interpret collections in new ways, says Jonathan Knott
Eight museums with medical history collections, including London’s Royal College of Physicians (RCP), the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in London, and the Thackray Museum in Leeds, put on a series of live performances over the summer.
Together, the institutions played host to dance company Deaf Men Dancing, comedian Francesca Martinez, filmmaker David Hevey and playwright Julie McNamara. The shows were part of the two-year-long Exceptional and Extraordinary project, which is led by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) at the University of Leicester and finishes in January 2017. The project aims to stimulate debate about attitudes to disability and difference.
The work emerged from the dramatists exploring the museums’ collections, says Emma Shepley, the senior curator at the RCP (she has since left to pursue a freelance career). “The thespians involved met curators and immersed themselves in the collections and their stories,” she says. “The performances were then put on in the museums whose collections had inspired them.”
The RCP hosted all four performances that were produced – with each having an audience of at least 100 people – and were followed by a Q&A session, Shepley says.
The project offered a way for the RCP, which acts as a voice for medical professionals, to incorporate the perspectives of disabled people.
“We were set up as a college for practitioners, with the collections of physicians,” Shepley says. “It is important for us to take a contemporary view of how those collections can be interpreted.”
Working on the RCMG project has opened the institution’s eyes to the potential of theatre, says Shepley.
In addition to the Exceptional and Extraordinary performances, the RCP also put on a one-woman play related to an exhibition on the Tudor mystic John Dee this year. “When you’ve got the right match between collections, stories, institution and audiences, theatre is incredibly powerful,” Shepley says.
The growing interest in performance as a way of interpreting collections meant the subject was granted a seminar day in April, hosted by UCL Museums. The event featured presentations about a range of museum performance projects. These included Against Captain’s Orders, an immersive show for children between the ages of six and 12 at the National Maritime Museum, and Dancing in Museums, also aimed at children, which uses contemporary dance to respond to objects.
The seminar grew from the work of the Grant Museum of Zoology with improvised opera company Impropera, which collaborated with a lecturer at UCL in 2015 to develop a performance called Muso. This has since been performed several times at UCL and at other museums.
“The company included four singers, a flautist and a pianist,” says Dean Veall, the learning and access officer at the Grant Museum of Zoology. “We invited people in, they chose an object and the performers improvised a mini operetta about it.”
Veall says the performances attracted a new audience. “Most people were new both to Impropera and to us,” he says. “We asked people for a one-line response in our evaluation. The word that they used most was ‘surprising’.”
Jonathan Knott is a freelance writer
Inside some of the medical museum collections there are walls of pickle jars with remains of foetuses labelled “monstrous births”. The play tells the story of two characters lost inside the Hunterian Museum collection. One is a grief-stricken mother, haunted by the loss of her baby, who searches for her remains among the jars to give her a name and honour her with a “decent burial”.
It seems to me that the way bodies of differently shaped or disabled people were collected has had a shocking impact on society’s stigma towards them today. It is crucial we retain the paperwork and remember the names and the histories of human samples and specimens. As soon as you detach that, you have lost the sense of them as a human being.”
Julie McNamara is a playwright, performer and creative director
Together, the institutions played host to dance company Deaf Men Dancing, comedian Francesca Martinez, filmmaker David Hevey and playwright Julie McNamara. The shows were part of the two-year-long Exceptional and Extraordinary project, which is led by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) at the University of Leicester and finishes in January 2017. The project aims to stimulate debate about attitudes to disability and difference.
The work emerged from the dramatists exploring the museums’ collections, says Emma Shepley, the senior curator at the RCP (she has since left to pursue a freelance career). “The thespians involved met curators and immersed themselves in the collections and their stories,” she says. “The performances were then put on in the museums whose collections had inspired them.”
The RCP hosted all four performances that were produced – with each having an audience of at least 100 people – and were followed by a Q&A session, Shepley says.
The project offered a way for the RCP, which acts as a voice for medical professionals, to incorporate the perspectives of disabled people.
“We were set up as a college for practitioners, with the collections of physicians,” Shepley says. “It is important for us to take a contemporary view of how those collections can be interpreted.”
Working on the RCMG project has opened the institution’s eyes to the potential of theatre, says Shepley.
In addition to the Exceptional and Extraordinary performances, the RCP also put on a one-woman play related to an exhibition on the Tudor mystic John Dee this year. “When you’ve got the right match between collections, stories, institution and audiences, theatre is incredibly powerful,” Shepley says.
The growing interest in performance as a way of interpreting collections meant the subject was granted a seminar day in April, hosted by UCL Museums. The event featured presentations about a range of museum performance projects. These included Against Captain’s Orders, an immersive show for children between the ages of six and 12 at the National Maritime Museum, and Dancing in Museums, also aimed at children, which uses contemporary dance to respond to objects.
The seminar grew from the work of the Grant Museum of Zoology with improvised opera company Impropera, which collaborated with a lecturer at UCL in 2015 to develop a performance called Muso. This has since been performed several times at UCL and at other museums.
“The company included four singers, a flautist and a pianist,” says Dean Veall, the learning and access officer at the Grant Museum of Zoology. “We invited people in, they chose an object and the performers improvised a mini operetta about it.”
Veall says the performances attracted a new audience. “Most people were new both to Impropera and to us,” he says. “We asked people for a one-line response in our evaluation. The word that they used most was ‘surprising’.”
Jonathan Knott is a freelance writer
Remembering specimens as humans
“The play Hold the Hearse! is the first of a trilogy of stories responding to my investigation of six museum collections. Everything in the set – the costumes, the characters brought to life, aspects of the story – I witnessed in museum archives, even the props.Inside some of the medical museum collections there are walls of pickle jars with remains of foetuses labelled “monstrous births”. The play tells the story of two characters lost inside the Hunterian Museum collection. One is a grief-stricken mother, haunted by the loss of her baby, who searches for her remains among the jars to give her a name and honour her with a “decent burial”.
It seems to me that the way bodies of differently shaped or disabled people were collected has had a shocking impact on society’s stigma towards them today. It is crucial we retain the paperwork and remember the names and the histories of human samples and specimens. As soon as you detach that, you have lost the sense of them as a human being.”
Julie McNamara is a playwright, performer and creative director