Performing People's History the background to the work of Time Travellers in historical character interpretive performance.

Jon Price Director, Time Travellers December 1997

A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION

In writing this article I am very conscious that there has been very little published in this area. As a director of Time Travellers I am regularly contacted by students writing dissertations and theses, who want to know everything about performance in museums, and one of the things we discuss is the dearth of publications. This is partly a reflection of the state of publication in the museum field. I hope this article will go some way to rectifying this.

My interest in the performance of history goes back to school in the 1960s. An otherwise unloved chemistry teacher took on the role of an eighteenth century chemist in the time before Lavoisier's discovery of oxygen, and got us to argue with him to try to disprove the then current phlogiston theory of combustion. At this point the tinder of history began to smoulder.

A few years later, in the long aftermath of the student led uprising in France, I was at the Cartoucherie, a disused ammunition factory in the Bois de Vincennes in Paris to watch (or so I thought) a performance of 1789 by Ariane Mnouchkine's Theatre du Soleil. Those who wanted to experience the performance stood in the middle, surrounded by runways and stages, whilst those who wanted a more conventional theatre experience sat on the raked seats to one side. As the performance began we realised that we were being treated as if we were the Parisian mob: demagogues harangued us, soldiers pushed us into corners, bystanders talked to us. In the joy of the false dawn of the revolution we celebrated, we drank wine, we jostled with jugglers, and dancing bears. And then the revolution was betrayed. We were thrown from the heights of liberation to the depths of the terror. We were disorientated, at a loss to know what had happened, in despair. A demagogue leapt onto a platform. "We have been betrayed by the bourgeois. They are not part of us. They hold themselves apart from the people. They look down on us. There they are!" And suddenly the lights lit up the audience sitting above on the raked seats looking down on us, watching the people, watching the mob. And we began to shout at them, and call for their destruction. We were performing history. At this point the match of history burst into flame.

MUSEUM VISITORS AND PERFORMING HISTORY

Our museum audience, whether young or old, is already exposed to a wide variety of presentations on film, on video, on television, which purport in varying degrees to represent history, before they reach the museum. Time travelling teenagers from the USA find out about the cool and not so cool dudes in history in Bill and Ted's Amazing Adventure. Jane Austen's characters are brought to life before your eyes. Parliamentarian troopers hunt children loyal to the king through the New Forest. Shakespeare's King Hal rushes into the breach on St.Crispin's day.

All these presentations tell us as much about their own times as the do about the past. Bill and Ted "demonstrate" the superiority of modern America, in the guise of dumbed down teenage culture, over all preceding cultures. One of Jane Austen's characters goes skinny-dipping. The Parliamentarians are given black leather jerkins for modern resonance instead of the bright yellow originals to be found in museum collections. King Hal behaves like a sixteenth century monarch instead of a medieval prince.

Should performing history in museums follow the same path, presenting history simply as a narcissistic reflection of our own immediate fashions and concerns,or should our performances be predicated on the attempt to be true to such collected evidence as we have? We think the latter. Our visitors are exposed to plenty of distorted perspectives on history outside the museum. Inside the museum we should at least be true to our own evidence. This is why characters in our performances need to appear as accurate to the evidence as is possible.

THE COMPANY

Time Travellers is a performance company. We perform history. As a company we have performed history since 1991. Individual company members have been performing history since 1978. The company also encompasses members with training and experience in teaching, museum practice, history and archaeology. Many of our performances are interactive and improvised. Some are fully scripted stage productions. We modify our presentation to conform to the requirements of the content, the likely audience, and the requirements of the client. As an experienced performance company we reserve the right to know what is best with regards to the mechanics of the performance.

In order for our performances to improve we evaluate constantly. This must however be done with care. We are aware of varying agendas in peoples' responses to evaluation surveys. We do not consider teenagers to be, for example,necessarily difficult; or small children to be, for example, necessarily incapable of debating ethical issues; or adults to be, for example, necessarily better informed than children. We observe how our visitors respond to our activities and adjust accordingly. Our theory informs our practice, but our theory is not a dogma and so our practice informs our theory. By letting people discover what was hitherto hidden, see what was not so obvious and admit what seemed impossible, museums can foster a true widening of intellectual scope.

Museums should also serve to transfer the entire human experience thus enabling people to orientate themselves and to make independent decisions in the face of new situations. I believe that by acquiring a wider intellectual approach and understanding of historical experience one becomes tolerant, and that is what is needed so desperately in this world. ( Sola 1987 )

THE THEORY

There are many theories relating to education, learning and communication. Many of these theories are concerned with methodology and shy away from underlying structural essentials. We do not initially concern ourselves with how much each visitor gets to handle objects, or whether visitors are allowed to play with ideas, or whether there is a physical component in the experience of the performance, or whether our performers are in or out of role; these elements all follow on from the underlying structure.

We start with communication. By conversing we communicate and this conversation contains within it symbolic elements which groups recognise in different ways. These symbolic meanings interact with the symbolic meanings a group invests in artefacts and aspects of the world outside. Our aim is to offer a communicative experience which allows the visitor to access the symbolic meanings of a past society. This does not mean we can simply attempt to replicate a culture in all its aspects, for even if we could do this it would not allow the visitor access to the meanings.

Neither should we attempt to interpose our own interpretation in a didactic manner, it should be possible for the visitor to construct their own reality from the symbols and meanings we offer. In practice any of our performances has an agenda, whether driven by curriculum requirements, or exhibition content, or even curatorial whim, but within that agenda the symbols and meanings are offered to the visitor in a way which allows them to select their own avenues for discussion. We consider the process by which people learn, to be cyclical and continuous.

People experience things physically or intellectually, they formulate a theory as to the reality underlying their experience, they test that theory against the observable evidence, this test produces a new experience and a new set of evidence which in turn is used to develop a new theory and so on. Our performance must not prevent that cyclical process, and further must assist the visitor to carry out the process. Where this process is carried out with physical objects in the museum it is referred to as "hands on experience", it is not however necessary to manipulate objects to achieve the result: the manipulation of abstract ideas is just as useful. It is in the manipulation of ideas, of symbols, and of models of reality that we focus our efforts. (See Eilean Hooper-Greenhill 1997 for an overview of communication and constructivist learning theory. We prefer humanist to constructivist as a term, if only because it refers to people rather than process, and in the end it is people and their societies which we are concerned with. See Dr Terry Russell 1994 , for the application of constructivism in museums)

THE PRACTICE

We are a performance company. We do not operate in a post-modernist free fall state where we invite visitors to decide how we perform. The reason for this is fairly clear. It takes many weeks to research the material, prepare the replica costume and artefacts, and train the performers: these are then fixed elements. We do not go to a performance of Hamlet and demand to see Death of a Salesman. We do not go to see a brass band and demand that they play Drum and Bass dance music. We do not go to an exhibition about dinosaurs and demand information on WWII.

We are dealing with two physical presences: artefacts and people. These are real and not virtual. Throughout history people have been constrained by time and the physical environment. We represent that constraint. We open it up for examination. By communicating through conversation we allow the visitor to question and challenge the symbolic reality structure of past societies. Although a society's histories are made in its own image, and although we can play with ideas and compare experiences as visitors, this is not the function of a performer of history.

The humanist (constructivist) learning activities of contribution, evaluation, feedback and expression derive not from the selection of the approach, but from the methodology of the communication. It is not necessary for a performer to step out of role to achieve this communication, indeed to do so would be wrong because the symbolic meanings inherent in a society's reality can only be sensibly analysed by the learner if viewed in their place as part of that society. By stepping out of role our performers would fall into the didactic trap of conveying knowledge rather than aiding understanding: the performer and the performance are the learning medium, they are not the teacher and the presentation method.

Visitors come to us with differing levels of awareness. To learn, a visitor must be able to make comparisons with their own experiences. The more alien the subject matter of the performance, the more difficult that comparison becomes. In order to overcome this factor our performances become more information-content rich the further the subject matter is from the visitor's experience. This is necessary to enable the visitor to participate in useful discussion. Conversely the closer the subject matter is to the visitor's experience, and hence the more familiar the material is, the sooner the discussion will develop, and the deeper it will go. By understanding and preparing for this range of our performers are able to respond to differing knowledge or ability levels in consecutive groups, or within the same group without disrupting the integrity of the performance.

Our performers and performances may have more in common with a hypertext database than they do with a conventional teaching experience. The visitor can use the character to jump to any point within their life experience just by asking. Unlike unfocussed wandering on the internet all our programmes are focussed on a particular person or group of people, the database to be examined concerns their reality only, the external hypertext links are made by the visitor and are not inherent in the performer.

A significant element in our performances is behaviour which is categorised as "play". Play is a behaviour common to many animals as well as humans. We do not involve ourselves in physical play. Largely we are constrained by environment, but also by a desire to deal with the social meaning of technologies rather than to become focussed on the mechanical practices divorced from their symbolism. Our interactive performances do however usually involve social/emotional play, and intellectual play. This conforms to our view of learning as an experimental zone for the learner. Through play the visitors engage with the symbols and reality of the performed character, testing theories of behaviour, exploring limits and juxtapositions, and discovering the boundaries that existed for the represented society. (See J.Moyles 1989 for an analysis of types of play in the context of young children. We believe that play is a relevant communication concept at all stages of human development. )

We assume that the performance is an experience which visitors go away from whilst continuing the learning process. We do not provide stand alone workshops in this context because the museum visit is of necessity for any group, and for most individuals, an occasional anomalous event in comparison to the range of activities they experience. We consider that the pure facilitator role should be carried out within other social groups beyond the performance, such as for example by a class teacher back at school, by parents at home, or by the peer group in the pub after the visit. Nevertheless for the most part the checklist of characteristics provided by Peterman is valid for all our performances. (see Francine Peterman 1997 , for a constructivist approach to learning events. The author deals with a facilitator based workshop structure which is inherently different to a performance based structure)

SO WHAT?

So what does this all mean? It means we perform history. We start from the basis of recovered or preserved artefacts, we use replicas and reconstructions, we make use of whatever documentary sources exist, and where it exists we use first-hand accounts and testimony, to create a complex, interesting and entertaining performance. Duringan interactive performance we talk and listen to the visitors. During a staged performance we open up avenues for imagination. The visitors, of whatever age, make up their own minds.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 'Museum learners as active post-modernists: contextualising constructivism' JEM 18, 1997, pp1-3.

Moyles, J. Just playing? The role and status of play in early childhood education. Open University Press. 1989

Peterman, Francine. 'Becoming constructivist educators' JEM 18, 1997, pp4-7.

Russel, Terry. 'The enquiring visitor: useable learning theory for museum contexts' JEM 15, 1994, pp19-21.

Sola, Tomislav. 'From Education to Communication' keynote address ICOM International Committee for Education and Cultural Action, Paris. ICOM news, 1987, 40,3/4, pp5-10.