The Art of (Re) Performance: Interpreting Theatre and Dance History in the Museum

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The UK's long established and much celebrated performing arts tradition is under-represented within the museum sector, and national performance collections have just one dedicated exhibition space, the V&A Theatre and Performance galleries. Existing curatorial approaches do not meet the dynamism of past performative events, and have not, as yet, benefitted from the demonstrably effective use of re-performance as an interpretative strategy elsewhere in the world. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this research examines how museums can implement a participatory and multi-sensory interpretation of performance history that evokes the embodied, social nature of the performance experience on a sustained basis. With a theoretical framework drawn from performance, theatre, and museum studies, an analysis of current practices internationally, in combination with preliminary exploratory research with performers, informs a practical methodology of experimentation within relevant museum spaces. This experimentation explores how museums can utilise their collections and self-guide re-performance based interpretation to evoke the bodily and spatial physicality of a historic performance experience without the physical presence of performers, focusing on the particular topic of Victorian pantomime. Research on performers felt, emotional, cognitive and embodied performers' experiences of the interpretation will be used to propose a potential approach for interpreting performing arts history within the UK context.