Ideology and the True/False Performance of Heritage

Abstract

Performance in a museum or heritage site1 operates within a complex set of interacting and sometimes conflicting jurisdictions: education and entertainment; objects and experiences; space and place; theatre and museum; visitor and audience; presentation and participation. It almost invariably attempts to serve some educational function, as do the institutions of which it is usually a part. For Tessa Bridal, the first element of museum theatre is that its ‘purpose is educational and linked to the institution’s missions and values’.2 Similarly, Catherine Hughes describes museum theatre as ‘a powerful tool to communicate complex ideas and to create convincing real experiences for the visitor’.3 The relationship between the emergent narratives of museum theatre, and the objects and sites around which the performances are constructed and situated, is often considered in terms of museum theatre’s subservience to the goals of the museum. For instance, the International Museum Theatre Alliance (IMTAL) Europe defines interpretation (including museum theatre), as a ‘communication process designed to reveal to a specific audience the significance of a historic/cultural/natural site or museum and the audience’s relationship to it’.4 Hence the interpretative process, or the action of performance, is seen as transparent. However, museum theatre provides not only different ways of telling the stories of objects and sites, but potentially at least, a qualitatively different type of engagement with past and with heritage, and consequently a different way of constructing social reality.