Throughout 2016 we will be continuing to share The Imagination Museum more broadly across the UK. Alongside these performances we will be undertaking new research, and making some decisions about what we would like to do next with our work in museums and heritage sites e.g.:
- researching Beneath Our Feet, a promenade performance for caves and underground spaces integrating music, torchlight, story-telling and dance. You can read more about the development of the Dancing in Caves project on the blog here.
- from September 2016, we will be supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to develop the work we have been doing with schools, museums and heritage sites since 2013, specifically exploring ways of delivering the primary school history curriculum using dance. There’s an introduction to this project here.
- developing new work with museums and heritage sites that builds on what we have learnt through the Dancing in Museums project since 2013. Our plans for this are still in the very early stages, but we are interested in pursuing several strands:
- MAKE: developing new ways of responding to artefacts and historical sites through dance, particularly work that enables audiences to consider those sites (and their engagement with them) in a new light e.g.
- creating new dance work for small, ‘lost’ spaces in museums
- testing one-on-one performance experiences for a performer and audience member
- curating responses from other artists
- connecting with the living process of the museum
“We are not interested in simply reenacting or recreating events that we think may have happened in the past, but with a desire to reimagine and remake everything that was radical and alive about the past in the present.” (Louise Lowe, ANU Productions)
- making work about interpretation and about memory; drawing attention to the personal stories of museum artefacts (objects that have been excavated, broken, exchanged, lost (e.g. Michelle Browne talked about Dublin Castle's 'shifting history', where things aren't necessarily what they purported to be, and meaning has been lost, forgotten, or assigned wrongly to something else instead), gifted, discarded, treasured, forgotten; the imperfect objects e.g. see Julian Walker's work Items Held for Norwich City Museum and Art Gallery)
- ENGAGE: creating extraordinary experiences that can engage the broadest audience, including those new to dance and younger audiences; exploring ways of facilitating audience autonomy within a performance; equalising creative process and performance product
I am interested in the impact that sharing cultural experiences (between performer and audience, between audience and audience) can have on the audience's engagement e.g. http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/286/art...
"We need more opportunities in the world that bring people together in a way where they can let down their guard" (The Audience Agency, citing Marian Goodell at #MuseumNext conference, April 2016)
This reminds me about Charles Walker's research into 'social flow' and the question of 'whether doing something together is better than doing it alone'.
- COLLABORATE: e.g. longer term collaborations with heritage partners, including artist residencies or working within a museum team as an artist consultant
- EXCHANGE of skills with other artists and museum practitioners
- EVALUATE: e.g. working with Emma McFarland to explore use of digital feedback devices, including biometric sensors, to find out more about the response individuals have to seeing or participating in a dance performance within a museum context.
We have a lot more work to do on this, and will continue to blog about our plans as they develop, as well as documenting some of the discussions of which we are a part (e.g. with Trinity Laban/the Horniman Museum; PDSW/Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives; the Irish Museums Association and Arts Council England).