An Invitation to ‘Play’: Interpreting Performing Arts History in the Museum

This thesis proposes a framework for interpreting performing arts history in museums that invites visitors to engage with movement-based interpretation to deepen their understandings of historic experiences of performing. The embodied knowledge of performing arts is traditionally shared via a physical transfer from body-to-body: learning occurring through the bodily application of techniques demonstrated by experienced practitioners. However, within the museum context, conventions of museum display, as well as funding and resource limitations, pose barriers to offering such physical encounters between performers and visitors in museums on an ongoing-basis. This research suggests that, by participating in a process of movement exploration, visitors can build up their own embodied knowledge through which they can relate to performers’ experiences, despite the physical absence of their bodies. The interpretation framework provides guidance on how movement-based interpretation can be practically implemented within museums by offering a movement score and tactile prompts to initiate movement explorations throughout an exhibition space. In inviting physical exploration throughout the museum this interpretation approach has the potential to reconnect collections within performing arts museums to their prior active use, or the experiences that they represent: highlighting the inherent relationships between tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Such an approach requires challenging existing perceptions about permissible behaviour in museums which may dissuade visitors from undertaking such embodied engagement. This thesis argues that in order for the possibilities and potentials of movement based interpretation to be realised, museums have to adopt the ‘playful’, open ways of being that enable performers to enact transformations of identity, space, and time within the theatrical context. By using these ways of being to inform how they frame the encounters between visitors, objects, and the museum space, museums have the possibility of creating environments that encourage the emergence of exploratory experiences: opening up opportunities for embodied knowledge to be shared.