How does a site-specific performance piece for children become an interactive visual art exhibition? Sue Buckmaster, the Artistic Director of theatre-rites, explains how the company’s three-way collaboration with the Unicorn theatre company and a children’s museum spanned both a production and installation.
Three five-year-old boys are having a great time with life-sized shadow puppets: one is projecting a cowboy, the same size as the boys themselves, onto a wall and is manipulating its movements, while his two friends engage in pretend fisty-cuffs with the image. The role-play is completely spontaneous and improvised – and it’s taking place in a museum in South London.
Museums are increasingly encouraging children to touch and interact with exhibits. Earlier this year, for example, Australian group the Museum of Modern Oddities worked with London school children to create a performance set in the Natural History Museum as part of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). Meanwhile, the British Museum regularly holds ‘sleepovers’ for children and families to camp out (or in) overnight as well as ‘hands on’ displays to encourage interaction with exhibits.
But theatre-rites, a company which creates site-specific works for children has taken both these ideas one step further and combined a production with an ongoing museum exhibition at the Livesey Museum for Children. The company, who also took part in LIFT this year with Shopworks, a production created in a disused corner shop, collaborated with Unicorn theatre Artistic Director Tony Graham, and the Livesey Museum, to create Finders Keepers.
The site-specific installation was designed to accommodate a three-week performance piece for children under six and their families, but also, the ‘set’ was created with longevity in mind so it could function as an interactive exhibition for up to nine months.
Sue Buckmaster, theatre-rites Artistic Director, says the three-way partnership was mutually beneficial.
Firstly, Unicorn theatre is preparing to build a new children’s theatre in Southwark and wanted to start reaching out to the community. Having worked with Buckmaster on Unicorn productions before, Graham introduced her to the Livesey Museum as a potential venue for a new site-specific work.
‘When I walked in I thought, yes, this is a very friendly building. It’s interesting enough to be site-specific in that it’s an old library building, it’s got a bit of character,’ Buckmaster recalls.
‘Every year, [the Livesey] create an interactive exhibition for children that lasts for about nine months and the rest of the time is spent making it…And they’ve never had a company come in and help them [to make it]. And we thought, well, if we create this show it would be a bit sad to take it all down and leave after three weeks which is what we do in theatre.’
Theatre-rites set about creating a show with materials that would endure being handled for a lengthy period of time as part of an interactive exhibition. The result is Finders Keepers, an exploration into the parallels between how museums collect objects and children’s own boxes of ephemera cluttering bedrooms.
But creating both a performance and installation that would stand the test of time provided its own challenges. To meet the practical requirements of such a venture, the company applied to the Regional Arts Lottery Programme and won funding to purchase the right kinds of materials.
‘One thing we used in the show was shadow puppets – I’d never actually seen shadow puppets in an interactive exhibition, because they are so fragile,’ Buckmaster explains.
‘You can’t leave them out for the children to play with. So we’ve tried to design something that actually does allow children to play with shadows. That has been a first for us.’ Without performers to move the shadow puppets in the installation, a series of pulleys and other mechanisms were devised, to allow the children to become the performers.
Finders Keepers also features ‘Cabinets of Curiosity’ – drawers placed strategically at children’s eye-level so they can peer in and poke about the contents – as well as a room exploring the theme of ‘beachcombing’ through pebble puppets and shells, and a character called Maude created from household items.
‘She is a puppet and now she is there to play with, and have tea with,’ Buckmaster says, explaining that Maude is, in fact, made from a teapot. ‘It’s up to the children to play these games, it [the performance] is not lead anymore. We leave the spark of the idea in there to say, it you find that game that’s fine but if you find another game, that’s fine also.’
Buckmaster observes that museums are definitely becoming more and more child-friendly. And she adds, the term ‘site-specific’ is considered ‘trendy’ now – taking performances beyond conventional venues – and museums are an obvious choice because they ‘have these wonderful stories to tell.’
‘Finders Keepers’ has completed its three-week run but the ongoing installation, for children up to 12 years, at the Livesey Museum for Children will run until May 2004. Entry is free.
The Livesey Museum for Children, 682 Old Kent Road, London SE15 1JF, PH: 020 7639 5604 Email: info@liveseymuseum.org.uk, Web: www.liveseymuseum.org.uk Opening hours: Tues-Sat 10am-5pm
