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Page history last edited by Nina Simon 14 years, 4 months ago

Live Interpretation

 

    One of the most frequent ways that objects are activated socially in museums is through staff performances, tours, and demonstrations. For the purposes of this book, I am not focusing on the many fabulous ways that live interpretation helps people understand and experience the power of museum objects, but instead, looking solely at the ways that interpretation socializes the experience. In the previous chapter, we looked at ways that staff can transform one-way content delivery into more networked pathways for conversation and learning. This section provides a brief look at the ways that staff can socialize experiences around objects, in many cases by accentuating the content as personal, relational, active, or provocative.

    What does it take to make a good live interpretation experience a social one? There are some obvious answers. Demonstrations that involve "guests from the audience" or encourage small groups of visitors to engage personally with objects allow visitors to confidently connect with objects in a personal way. In some programmatic experiences, visitors are invited to act as guest experts, or to compete against each other to use objects creatively to develop new ideas or meaning around them. These kinds of experiences don't just use visitors as a prop but engage them personally and actively in connection with museum objects. Relatedly, staff who ask meaningful questions, give visitors time to respond, and facilitate group conversations lead unique and powerful social experiences. Unfortunately, many museum theater programs are moving towards more highly produced shows, designed more to "wow" visitors than to engage them socially. The more theatrical the overall experience, the less visitors feel like they have a voice in the matter, and the less likely the show is to accommodate dialogue.

    There are some museums experimenting with interpretative practices that are deliberately and explicitly social. In the world of art museums, the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) interpretative method, developed by museum educator Philip Yenawine and cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen in the late 1980s, is a constructivist teaching technique used to encourage visitors to learn about art by engaging in dialogue with the art itself. VTS is simple on the surface. Staff use three basic questions: "What's going on in this picture?" "What do you see that makes you say that?" "What more can we find?" to facilitate discussion. Staff neutrally rephrase visitors' comments to validate the interpretations, and use the three questions to keep the conversation going.

    This simple set of questions keeps visitors focused on the art object itself, while supporting the value of different visitors' interpretations. Unlike traditional museum art tours, VTS facilitators do not provide historical or art historical context for the art that is discussed; in most cases, they don't even give basic information about the artist and the piece. The point is not for the staff member to confer knowledge, but to encourage visitors to think openly, vocally, and socially about what art means and how it works. By encouraging visitors to talk through their observations, VTS models a kind of dialogue that visitors could continue to employ outside of the facilitated experience.

    The Exploratorium has been experimenting with a related group inquiry technique in which staff teach visitors a simple game that encourages them to explore scientific phenomena in an inquiry-based method which visitors are then intended to use on their own throughout their visit. There were two goals: to help visitors develop inquiry learning skills, and to provide visitors with some support that could help them improve their group experience at the museum.

    While visitor behavior in hands-on science centers and art museums is quite different, the perceived educational value of visitor-driven inquiry and group dialogue is shared. After experimentation with different game types, the Exploratorium team settled on a game called Juicy Questions. Here's how Juicy Questions works. Visitors play with an interactive exhibit in small groups, and after about a minute, the facilitator asks each visitor to come up with a juicy question--an unanswered query that could be determined through use of the exhibit.  Juicy questions often take the form of "I wonder..." or "What would happen if..." or "How come..." The group then selects a juicy question to pursue, and uses the exhibit to try to investigate and answer the question at hand. Then, as a group, the visitors would explain what happened and what they had discovered.

    Through their research, the Exploratorium team was able to confirm that compared to a control group, families who were taught the Juicy Questions game made more interpretations of the exhibits, built their explanations more collaboratively, and conducted more linked investigations, pursuing a series of increasingly sophisticated and related inquiries. Staff were able to teach families how to play the Juicy Questions game in about 20 minutes, after which visitors were sent out into the museum with simple cards to remind them of how to play the game. In follow-up studies, the team found that the game format was memorable, and some Juicy Questions families reported using the game throughout exhibit experiences as well as in their regular lives (for example, to engage in group inquiry about how a bridge on the commute home was built).  But as of 2009, the Juicy Questions technique has only been tested with a facilitated entrypoint, and the staff introduction to the game seems like a necessary element of its success.

    The Follow the North Star experience at Conner Prairie, a living history site in Indiana, is an incredibly affecting live interpretative experience with significant social aspects. In Follow the North Star, visitors portray groups of Kentucky slaves trying to escape while in the free state of Indiana in 1836. In contrast to the first-person interpretative techniques common at living history sites, Follow the North Star employs a “second-person” interpretation, in which you, the visitor, are in the middle of the action. As one reporter put it, “As visitors, we are not only performing "old-timey" tasks. We are central actors in a drama, taking on a whole new identity, as well as the risks that identity entails.”

    This second-person approach leads to powerful interpersonal experiences among visitors in the group. Visitors may be pitted against each other or forced to make decisions about which of them should be sacrificed as bargaining chips with costumed staff along the way. Hearing a fellow visitor yell at you to move faster is in its own way much more emotional than hearing it from a staff member who you know is paid to act that way. And all groups are debriefed after the reenactment is over, which often activates intense interpersonal dialogue among visiotrs. In 2009, historian Carl Weinberg wrote about his Follow the North Star experience and a discussion with staff member Michelle Evans about the social aspect of the program. He wrote: “Michelle Evans recalled a mixed race group that began their debriefing on a tense note. After a white participant spoke about his experience, a black woman commented, shaking her head, ‘You just don't get it.’ But this fortunately opened up such an engaging conversation that the whole group headed to Steak and Shake afterward to continue to the discussion.“

    Designing experiences like Follow the North Star is incredibly complex. You have to balance the intensity of the planned experience with the social dynamics of strangers working in groups. I was the experience developer for Operation Spy, another guided group enactment experience in which visitors portrayed intelligence officers on assignment in a foreign country throughout an hour-long narrative game in a themed environment. We were constantly balancing the desire to have visitors engage with each other and their hesitancy to do so in a high-emotion environment in which each wanted to perform as well as he or she could individually. As in Follow the North Star, we also had to balance visitors’ desires to hash things out in conversation with the need to keep the story (and the energy) moving. The Operation Spy guides are part actor, part facilitator, and it isn’t easy to maintain dramatic intensity while managing visitors’ interpersonal and individual needs.

    When it comes to museum theater, while many museums are building black boxes for "4-D" highly produced experiences, others are finding ways to integrate theatrical experiences into exhibition spaces, more naturally connecting visitors to objects in low-key, potentially social environments.

    One of the best examples of this I've seen was in the Power of Children exhibition at the Indianapolis Children's Museum. This exhibition features the stories of three famous courageous children throughout history: Anne Frank, Ruby Bridges, and Ryan White. There are three spaces in the exhibit that can transition from open exhibit space to closed theater space via a couple of strategically placed doors. There are several 10-15 minute shows in the exhibition per day, each of which features a single adult actor. I watched one of the Ruby Bridges shows in an exhibit space designed to simulate the classroom in which Ruby took her first grade classes alone. Ruby is the black girl immortalized in the Norman Rockwell painting walking to school between two US marshals. She spent a year going to school by herself because all the white parents chose to remove their children from school rather than have them contaminated by an African-American classmate.

    In the show I watched, a male actor portrayed one of the US marshals, reflecting back on his time protecting Ruby as she walked to school. The piece was incredibly written. The actor bridged past and present, fiction and reality, in a way that allowed the experience to feel emotionally powerful but also respectful of our intelligence. There was some interactivity, and he used historic props (photos from the time, artifacts in the room) and questions to connect us with the story and the real person. It was the most gentle, elegant piece of theater I’ve ever experienced in a museum. I spent about half of the time with tears in my eyes.

    Yes, this museum theater experience was emotionally powerful.  But it was also a distinctly successful social object experience. The choice to use an adult actor who was both a fictitious "insider" to the story and an outsider like the rest of the audience enabled him to facilitate personal connections among all of us as a community of observers to the story. We could relate to the personal conflict he was expressing, and he treated us as complicit partners, or confessors, to his experience. Visitors weren't asked to BE Ruby Bridges—instead, we were treated like citizens of her time, scared, confused, uncertain.  We also connected to the objects increasingly through the show because we were sitting in the set--the classroom desk chairs facing the blackboard. The whole show allowed us to live in the imaginative space of the set. What if I was a student alone in my own classroom? What if people were yelling horrible things at me on my walk to get here every day?

    Rather than breaking the fourth wall, the show let us onto the stage, to share it with the actor, the objects, and the story at hand. And when the show was over, we got to stay onstage. The fact that the room was both an exhibit space and a theatrical space meant that the show was situated in a space that I could continue to explore on my own. I could layer my own meaning onto the artifacts and props in the space in greater detail before and after the show without being rushed out, and there were opportunities to discuss the experience further with both the actor and other visitors.

    In contrast, I've experienced many painful museum theater experiences that seemed to willfully ignore visitors' desire to engage with each other socially. At the National Constitution Center, home to some very popular large-scale theater experiences, I joined a small group of visitors in 2009 for a museum theater piece about the real-life situations and issues behind major constitutional questions like the illegal immigration, search and seizure laws, and students' rights. Four actors presented a series of vignettes and then concluded by asking us to vote by raising our hands to indicate how we would have decided in each of the cases. There were only ten of us in the audience, and as we raised and lowered our hands, it was painfully obvious that there was an opportunity for some really interesting facilitated dialogue about our different opinions on the issues. Instead, we were thanked, given surveys, and shuttled out. As a small group of adults, it felt condescending and almost bizarre to sit silently through a long show by four actors when they could have easily broken out opportunities for discussion. But the educators were actors, not facilitators, and our experience was disappointingly one-way.

    But there are several museums eschewing museum theater altogether in exchange for facilitated dialogue. In 2004, the Levine Museum of the New South mounted a temporary exhibition called Courage about the early battles for school desegregation leading up to the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court Decision. Courage was accompanied by an unusual programming technique: "talking circles" in which visiting groups would engage in facilitated dialogue about the issues raised by the exhibition. These talking circles were designed for intact groups--students, corporate groups, civic groups--and have become an intrinsic part of how the Levine Museum supports community dialogue and action based on exhibition experiences. When the Science Museum of Minnesota mounted their Race exhibition, they also used the talking circle technique with intact groups to powerful results for local community and corporate groups. While the talking circles may not have involved the complex theatrics involved in programs like Follow the North Star or Operation Spy, the pressures on the facilitator to balance and move forward the dialogue are the same.

 

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Comments (1)

hadrasaurus said

at 4:49 pm on Nov 8, 2009

These experiences sound wonderful but difficult to scale up.

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