Staging the Performance Gallery: a dramatic, theatrical gallery, with robust bold sights and sounds from performance around the world.

Performance is transitory, but the objects that are used in performance are often highly decorative or sculptural, and have been preserved in museum collections.

The gallery uses these often dislocated objects in installations which evoke the movement and drama that they once held. It presents the objects in their relationships with the people that once animated them - as performers, or spectators - to suggest the living role that these objects once had.

Performance Gallery opened in May 2002. Find out more about the ideas behind the staging of the Performance Gallery:

- Safeguarding the transitory
- Staging
- Texts
- Contemporary sculpture
- Audio-visual material
- Interactives
- Related galleries

Safeguarding the transitory

	Mother Time Keeper lantern, New Year Procession © Simon Dack, The Argus 2000

Museums safeguard objects. These are chosen for many different reasons by people as worthy of keeping. Museums are about preserving objects and their ideas across time.

Performance is about the here and now - a living, breathing communication between people, using the body, the stage, music, props, beliefs. Performance can involve all of the senses, of sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste.

Museums can only keep the objects that are left behind when the show is over - at best they can hold film or video archives, or sound to capture living performances.

In making Performance Gallery at Brighton, the curators chose to focus on people in performance. Dynamic performance seems a world away from the objects that are left behind. It is about the transformation of the human body, using those objects. It is about how a mask is danced alive by a performer, with a costume. About whether it is meant to be seen from above, below, behind, or by god. About how an instrument is played. About how puppeteers breathe life into their puppets.

How could we do this with static displays necessary to preserve these objects?

Staging

	Performance gallery installation

At all times curators tried to show the relationship of these museum objects to people through performance.
First, we divided our performance objects into two groups - those which were used and worn by people and those which performed in place of humans, the puppets.

We suggested a procession of people through the gallery, using the costumes and masks which once transformed their wearers. Large-scale backdrop images put these figures in their context. Western stage and theatrical tradition, street processions and festivals, folk traditions, African masquerade and contemporary sculpture are explored.

We avoided re-creating puppet stages, which would simply emphasize the lifeless quality of puppets out of context. We grouped the puppets in display cases, keeping their power as sculptural forms. We then used graphic silhouettes to suggest how these figures are animated by people.

Texts

Performance is about an experience at a particular time. That experience is very different if you are the performer or the spectator.

In writing texts for the gallery we tried to present these very different perspectives for the different performances. For example, to suggest how it feels to be the masker, dancing in the heat under the weight of the costume, vision obscured, crowd pressing in; or how the spectator feels, their emotions manipulated, their senses bombarded. Or consider the maker of the costume, mask or puppet, as their creation takes on a life in performance.

We tried where possible to work the direct quotes of performers or spectators or makers into these texts.

Contemporary sculpture

	Naked Big Fish, Sokari Douglas Camp, UK, 1998, WA508365

Sokari Douglas Camp is a contemporary artist whose work challenges the ways in which European and American museums represent mask performance from Africa. She contends that museums have traditionally extracted masks out of their performance context and presented them as exquisite carvings. Displays of these disembodied masks have misrepresented mask performance.

Performance Gallery houses Naked Big Fish by Sokari Douglas Camp. It is one of a series of large scale steel sculptures which explore the process of becoming masquerader, the process by which a young man shoulders a mask, wraps his body in fabric and transforms himself into a deity.

In using this contemporary sculpture, Performance Gallery includes a powerful comment on the process of performance, and the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between museum displays and the performances they represent.

Audio-visual material

	Punch and Judy booth

Performance gallery makes selected use of sound and video recordings of performance. We present recordings made by researchers who collected the objects for the gallery - for example, the sounds of Bedu mask performance from Cote d'Ivoire, video of Bamana puppet performance from Mali, or a mini-documentary about marionettes from Burma.

Interactives

Museums safeguard objects. The objects made for performance are often quite ephemeral, not made to last. The handling of these items over time will result in their destruction. Yet how else can we experience the weight of a mask on our face, the magic of animating a puppet, the cramped confines of a puppet kiosk? Performance gallery has brought selected objects out of their glass cases for visitors to touch. The Bedu mask installation lets visitors put their faces into masks and hear the drumming and chanting of the Bedu performance. A Punch and Judy booth constructed in the gallery by Brighton Punch Professor Sergeant Stone lets you try your hand at being a Punch Professor.

Performance gallery curators have aimed to reinvest with life the objects that remain from living performance - while respecting the conservation needs of the objects and using a relatively low budget. The principle of the gallery was to focus on invoking the relationship of those objects with people, and using imaginative text and graphics to suggest rather than describe the performance experience.

Related galleries

The Performance Gallery works in conjunction with Body Gallery and the Fashion and Style Gallery. Three inter-cultural galleries that explore the body as a means of expression, as a social object which each of us uses in different ways to issue statements about ourselves, our identity.

The galleries explore the startling ability of humans to create themselves, to change, to become what they ordinarily are not.
By juxtaposing powerful local images and those from cultures and times which are less familiar to us, this approach provides new ways of reflecting on cultural diversity.

Performance Gallery presents the dramatic presence of the body and its props in secular and ritual performance. It is about the human body on show, publicly displayed.

Body Gallery is an exploration of the ways that people interpret their own bodies and the bodies of other people. Unique objects from across the collections are juxtaposed; each is looked at individually - each reflects an instance of how the human body is transformed or represented by people of different cultures and times.

Gallery of Fashion and Style explores how people clothe their body to express their identity or affiliation. This gallery uses a context of international fashion to explore Brighton's role in inventing, creating, collecting, subverting and following fashion.