Theatre & Museums by Susan Bennett, and: Theatre & Architecture by Juliet Rufford (review)

Theatre artists have always wrestled with the interplay among space, performer, and audience, seeking a deeper understanding of the three. Performance shapes and is shaped by the social and physical areas it inhabits. Questions regarding the relationship between performance and space lead scholars and practitioners alike to examine the structures they occupy, paving the way for performance to leave traditional theatre spaces. Two new entries from the Theatre & series offer accessible introductions to current trends in theatre and performance, and give interdisciplinary insight to museums and architecture by use of practical and theoretical examples.

Theatre & Museums aims to give readers a brief introduction to the state of the field at the intersection of theatre and museum studies. The book begins with the series editor’s preface and is divided into seven sections based on the idea of re-performance as archive. The layout finishes with a “further reading” list, including a short introduction from the author pointing out the most prominent works. The list is a wonderful resource, including an alphabetized list of books, websites, journal articles, and chapters for further study. Author Susan Bennett is a perfect candidate to write Theatre & Museums because of her published work on historicizing the audience, and the challenge that museum spaces offer to the role of the audience.

While the phenomenon of theatrical performance in museums is not new, there has been little work on the attempt to capture theatrical performance in a museum from theatre scholars. Bennett’s survey of the failures and successes of entering the ephemeral elements of performance into the archive make for the most entertaining and enlightening sections of the book. Through her personal experiences with experiential museum installations and exhibits of theatre in museums, she encourages an appreciation of the challenges of curating performance.

Bennett introduces her contribution to the series using the MoMA retrospective on Marina Abramovic as a lens to view the ideas of archive, re-performance, and repertory in relation to theatre and the museum. She considers the problem of capturing the uncapturable essence of performance, and questions the effectiveness of documents, photographs, and video as a performance archive. Although Bennett limits her survey of museum theory to the mid-twentieth century, she highlights the recent trend of curators troubling the idea of a simple chronological display of objects and brings up the major discrepancy between theatre and museums: “Museums traffic mostly in material designated as representing the past, while theatrical performance takes place resolutely in the present, ephemeral, resistant to collection” (5). Bennett also points out the overlap of artistic movements that bled from theatre to art, writing “what major collection of twentieth-century art would not hold works by artists of Dada, the Italian futurists, surrealism, or the avant-garde?” (6). In highlighting the similarities between performance art’s mission to democratize art and the museum’s educational mission, she encourages the reader to see the common ground the two share when united in the MoMA retrospective.

The next section, “Re-performance,” traces the birth of the modern public museum as a system for the state to control culture and posits re-performance, performing the same piece with different bodies, as a kind of performative archive. Breaking with traditional museum theory, Bennett places more emphasis on the display of the performance itself, as opposed to those material artifacts from the performance. Of importance is Bennett’s examination of divorcing a performance from the body of its creator; she questions, for example, whether the Abramovic exhibit at MoMA in 2010 was a true re-performance of her work.

In the next two sections, Bennett shows how a shift from lifeless archive to living experience can invigorate patrons. Taking a fascinating look at the troubled history of the London Theatre Museum, with its artifact-centered curatorial practice that contributed to its closure, Bennett shows us the trouble of displaying theatre in museums. Next, she uses music as a proxy for...