Tag: interpretation

Trigger Warnings

On By kittycalashIn Events, History, Living History, Reenacting
Reenactors portraying Philadelphia Associators take part in the real time tour of the Battle of Princeton, Princeton, NJ, January 3, 2015. Beverly Schaefer, Times of Trenton
Philadelphia Associators January 3, 2015. Beverly Schaefer, Times of Trenton

It’s upon us, this Princeton event, and Peale’s, too. And the overnight march I missed two years ago. I’m so glad to be part of this, and I’m interested in seeing where it goes from here– partly for me, and partly for the way we do living history. Now, I’ll miss some of what I’d like to see (like Mr. White’s tour of the second battle of Trenton, but when you’re plundering in Princeton, you’re committed.) A formal media release may be downloaded here.

A little more than two years ago I was asked if I wanted to join the Peale’s March to Princeton. I said no, because women couldn’t march and that was the experience I wanted. Someday, I will have the hallucination that allows me to square experiential learning with authenticity, and, at the same time, the world will care about having a women’s Tour de France.

Anyway: there’s a point. This event became a pivot point for me in thinking about accuracy and authenticity of all kinds.

Accurate impressions rendered in a place of shared value will transport you to the past, and give you insights you did not expect. That is the point of these exercises: insight and understanding. It’s how to get high on history.

Test run: bedspread petticoat. Girl's gotta keep warm.
Test run: bedspread petticoat. Girl’s gotta keep warm.

In Palmer Square and at Morven, that means stealing (from each other), soldiers arresting Quakers, Loyalists and Whigs insulting each other, arguments about loyalty oaths, and women being attacked. (When you see the grey gown grabbed off the square by the red coat, please know that this is acting.) It means rough justice in a drum head court martial.

Will it work? I think so. Will it change my life, the way not attending two years ago did? That will depend on what I regret.

Staging Christmas

On By kittycalashIn Events, Philosophy2 Comments
The house on High Street, Noank CT, 2000
The house on High Street, Noank CT, 2000

It’s pretty stagey to begin with, isn’t it? Full of ritual, some so old we don’t know why we still perform them. What I like best is the food, not the cakes and cookies, delicious as they are, but savory meals and the warmth of a full table. Second to that, decorating.

The past year has given me opportunity to reflect on the tasks I love, and why, and the basis for the work I’m passionate about. Curiously, it began in high school, as the props mistress for drama productions, morphed into installations, performance art, and site specific sculpture in college, before metastasizing into exhibition development, installation, and historic house interpretation with a side line in living history because, you know, costumes. Things and I go way back, and thinking about that made getting ready for yet another Christmas more fun.

Providence, 2016
Providence, 2016

Embracing the staginess makes the sometimes uncomfortable family closeness easier; I have proposed celebrating by reenacting a Don Draper Christmas, as long as someone else does the driving. Adding a layer of actual performance somehow made it easier to understand, a phenomenon opposite to what happens when you write a word over and over until it makes no sense. It’s the same distance you feel when you really try to understand someone’s past, and how they think. It’s familiar, but somehow unrecognizable.

This is probably the last Christmas in this apartment, which adds a poignancy to the proceedings, and it’s the first interactions for some participants, so, as with What Cheer Day, I’ve set a stage and we’ll see what happens.

Christmas with Katie, Chicago.
Christmas with Katie the Cat, Chicago, ca 1978

Every year, some things are the same: a balsam fir, candles, apples, cats. The characters and locations ebb and flow, with some consistency. Cats come and go, the boy grows. The love remains the same.

Museum Fail: Icon, not Replica

On By kittycalashIn Art Rant, Fail, History, Museums
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What am I?

Do you know what this is? Do you think it’s real? Here’s a clue: it’s a relic of an iconic event in early 21st-century North America.

On the last visit to the National Marine Corps Museum, I watched the tourists circle objects at the end of the traditional galleries and displays, and overheard a woman ask her companions:

What’s this a replica of?

Reader, I cringed– and not for the sentence construction.

What's this a replica of?
What’s this a replica of?

And then I stepped back. I thought that for someone my age it would be obvious. Here, have some additional museum context.
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In a museum where everything is real, how does a visitor come to ask not only if that World Trade Center steel beam is a replica, but what is it replicating? I’m not sure semiotics can save us here. My first, New York Times-reading, media-soaked, Northeast Corridor response was, How can you miss that? How can you not recognize that, let alone mistake the steel and concrete relic for a replica?

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Ah, hubris. There is a label, though I have seen better. Would it be more helpful in a larger font, turned perpendicularly to the I-beam? Possibly. But the lesson that’s deeper than label formatting and placement is recognizing how much we take for granted. Our visitors, even those we assume to be educated consumers of media and information, may not share our knowledge base. They may not read objects or images as readily as we think they do; we certainly cannot assume they’re all taking away the same information– and that has nothing to do with education or background.

Everyone truly sees the world differently. How, and what, we choose to put on a label should always be grounded in remembering that we do not all share the same information. Context is critical, and probably would have made these relics more real, and less replica.

Change

On By kittycalashIn Philosophy

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Changing seasons, change we can believe in, be the change you want to see in the world.

This dumpster fire of a year is nearly over, and the commonplace is to note how much has changed: that’s our human instinct. But much does not change, most often within ourselves.

It’s our perception or understanding that changes, and, if we are lucky, causes us to act. That’s the mechanism behind the progressive movement in enacting/reenacting/living history. It’s the mechanism behind organizational change, and personal change. Sometimes it’s the sole inspiration to get me to clean my house. Holy cats, that’s a lot of kitty fur! As the sun finally shines in on the rug.

Sometimes we push as hard as we can to make change happen, but lack access to all the levers: then we have to wait. I am waiting now: I have pushed every lever and turned every knob within my reach, and the waiting is agony.

High school seniors applying to college know this feeling: when will I know? People starting new habits wonder, when will I see a difference? As a species, we have trouble with time. But tiny changes and tweaks aggregate, accrue over time like compound interest. We’ll get there.

Think about what you used to know, and what you know now, how you’ve learned more about what (or who) you love, how the way you approach a problem from collar stands to coat names. All those little changes make a difference– all the difference, the only difference.