Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation ed. by Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd (review)

In Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation, editors Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd have selected essays that address what they describe as a recent shift in museum exhibitionary practices from displaying heritage to performing it. The result is an edited volume that not only further defines "museum theatre" but also raises important questions about what "performing heritage" means for the museum viewer, touching on topics ranging from authenticity of heritage to the performance of the museum space. The 16 essays present a spectrum of case studies to add theoretical diversity and expand the under-researched field of museum theatre and performance.

The book is a culmination of the three-and-a-half-year Performance, Learning and Heritage research project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council in the UK. The project's purpose was "to undertake research into the increasing and varied use being made of performance [...] as an interpretive tool and a medium of learning for visitors to museums and historic sites" (249; for more information visit the project's website at www.plh.manchester.ac.uk/). Performance and heritage, however, take focus in this edited volume. In their introduction, Jackson and Kidd acknowledge that learning is less emphasized, but it is "nonetheless implicit in a number of the chapters" (5). Prior research on learning through museum performance is most apparent in the close attention many of the essays pay to the museum visitor and his/her experience of performed heritage.

Despite a wide variety of case studies, the book as a whole focuses on the argument that performance is important in the construction and dissemination of heritage. Heritage here is a loose term used in different ways to largely refer to the past; the content and viewership of this past changes with each essay. Jackson and Kidd divide the book thematically into four sections that address the relationship between heritage and performance. The first part, "Visitors, Audiences and Events," further defines the act of performance in museum interpretation. For example, Jackson explores the transition that takes place from museum visitor to audience member, and Alke Gröppel-Wegener moves beyond performative events at museums to explore how museum architecture interacts with the visitor to create its own performance. Here, theoretical frameworks are also introduced, in particular when Paul Johnson identifies potential binaries (history-fiction, internal-external, and risk-safety) as additional frameworks for analyzing heritage performances.

In parts two and three, the book investigates heritage. Part two, "Re-visioning Heritage: Recovery and Interpretation" presents case studies that demonstrate the diversity of "heritage." Essays in the third part, "Re-creating Heritage(s)," push "at the boundaries of what constitutes heritage" by examining processes by which heritage is constructed (6). In these sections, Jackson and Kidd have compiled a diverse collection of case studies to define heritage as indefinable, an entity that changes depending on condition, location, and subject matter. Laurajane Smith best exemplifies this conception when she argues that heritage is a cultural performance; it is not an object for display but rather a "meaning making and negotiation" process (80).

The fourth section, "Impact, Participation and Dialogue" examines the dialogical relationship that museum performance creates between audience and heritage. Kidd's essay complicates the idea of viewer participation when she identifies different models of participatory performance, exploring power relationships involved in audience participation. The edited volume fittingly ends with Mark Fleishman's essay: he describes the Clanwilliam Arts Project in rural South Africa to propose that heritage is not a preservation of the past, but an event connected to the present, located within place and landscape. In doing so, Fleishman returns us to the underlying argument of the book—performance as necessary for heritage—adding that heritage, itself, is an event.

Jackson and Kidd provide a wealth of material in these 16 essays...