The Playmakers Exhibition Celebrating Birmingham MAC’s 50th Anniversary.
From Renaissance pantomimes and festivals,
to the ‘happenings’ of the 50s and 60s, guerrilla street art/theatre of the 70s
and 80s, 'impromptus', pop-up galleries and raves of the 90s, to the Secret
Cinema of last month, there have been many names for ‘performance art’ or as
they are more popularly called currently ‘interventions’. On 10 July, Dr. Viv
Golding and I attended an artist talk, ‘Game On’, hosted by The Japan
Foundation in London. The seminar/talk featured the work of interventionist
artists Takashi Tsuchiya and Chishino Kurumada, and their most recent
collaboration exhibit project with Birmingham’s MAC (Midlands Arts Centre).
Takashi Tsuchiya and Chishino Kurumada are
a husband wife artist team that create ‘interactive opportunities’ based upon
‘mochitisu motaretsu’ or the ‘give and take’ fostering of community spirit.
They consciously manipulate, rearrange and re-envision the practical structure
and social use of spatial environments to encourage the development of human
interactions and wellbeing. It was a fascinating seminar that reaffirmed the importance
of visceral experience and I think inspired everyone in attendance to go to
visit the exhibit in person; which is precisely what a few of us from Leicester
Museum Studies subsequently did.
The MAC itself has a cozy-yet-exotically-labyrinthine
quality about it; not unlike what I imagine the isles of the lotus-eaters would
be like. The MAC’s ‘Bridges Café’ serves pleasant food while vestiges of
previous MAC projects whisper from every corner, telling stories of an active,
delightful past. Time ceases to have any importance; the Centre is enchanting.
Fortunately for Amy, Trina and I, research museologists are, upon induction
into graduate studies, inoculated against such charms. We were women-on-a-mission,
not to be trifled with, nor be swayed by the wiles of red velvet cake and tea.
(We were perhaps momentarily ‘delayed’—but
not ‘swayed’. Weakened by the brisk forty-minute walk between the rail station
and MAC, we reasoned that in order to do justice to our work, we needed a bit
of fortification before continuing almost immediately ‘onward and upward’ to
review ‘The Playmakers’ exhibition, where through happenstance, we were
fortunate enough to visit with Craig Ashley, the Visual Arts Producer for MAC.)
During a brief conversation, Craig Ashley
intimated that the choice of the artists, and the outcome of ‘The Playmakers’, could
not have better fulfilled expectation. Celebrating the 50th
anniversary of the MAC, the display honours the history of the MAC by paying thematic
homage to the founders and to the children’s theatre, fine art and puppetry
that composed the early purpose of the MAC.
The exhibit in its production process also brought
the community together. Pointing to the shapes strung from the gently turning
overhead mobiles, Craig reminded us that these works were based upon drawings
by local children—young participants that may, just as their parents brought
them to the MAC to take part in this project, perhaps eventually bring their own
children and grandchildren to the MAC fifty years from now.
Standing in the midst of Playmakers, the visitor is completely
surrounded by the imagination of the artists (and the community children) that
produced the exhibit. It is difficult not to be amazed. Giant puppet
effigies of the MAC’s founders are brought into gesticulation through the
physical interactions of visitors. Lights cross the shapes of the mobile
characters, casting the shadows against the walls in all directions. Large
counterweighted pulleys cause dancing movements in various elements of the
displays on opposing sides of a large bridge slide that divides the exhibition
space. The entire exhibit was a joyful invitation to play!
Walking away from the exhibition itself however,
the intellect begins to consider the inherent analogies of interpersonal
relationships insistent within the dynamics of the exhibition space—of how we
all have an impact upon the world around us. We may not always realize the
impact of our actions; we don’t always know who or what we are changing through
what we do—or don’t do; through the strings we do or don’t pull. Often, we have
to learn through trial and error.
‘The Playmakers’ potentially reminds the
visitor that each of us are intimately connected with others, based upon the interactive choices we make. Additionally, with its
references to the origins of the MAC itself, the exhibit also reminds the
visitor that the world we know now, was created by people and events that have
gone before us—just as we are creating a world for those not yet born. This
truly extraordinary exhibit continues through to the ninth of September.
For more information please visit MAC’s The
Playmakers exhibit site:
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