Irish outsiders: Performing Irish heritage on the streets of New York

This article analyses how the Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street in Lower Manhattan uses immersive techniques to provide visitors with an opportunity to engage with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrant experiences. My specific focus is the apartment tour entitled, Irish Outsiders, a living history installation curated as part of the Museum’s Hard Times exhibit that recreates the cramped apartment of Joseph and Bridget Moore, real-life residents of 97 Orchard Street in 1869. The Moores left an Ireland traumatized by the Great Famine only to arrive at the challenges of New York City immigrant living. This immersive recreation of Joseph and Bridget Moore’s apartment staged for a Catholic wake links this specific Irish immigrant experience with that of loss, suffering, poverty and trauma. Drawing on Alison Landsberg’s concept of ‘prosthetic memory’ alongside frameworks of heritage performance, this article examines the Irish Outsiders as an immersive performance curated to reflect and shape the narrative tropes essential to the Irish immigrant experience implicit within an Irish-American heritage identity.

Flexible Characterization: Herstorical Performance in Heritage Sites

This article explores how performance and character can be used to represent the lives of real women in spaces of heritage. It focuses on two different site-specific performances created by the author in the South Ayrshire region of Scotland: CauseWay: The Story of the Alloway Suffragettes and In Hidden Spaces: The Untold Stories of the Women of Rozelle House. These were created with a practice-as-research methodology and aim to offer new models for the use of character in site-specific performance practice. The article explores the variety of methods and techniques used, including verbatim writing, spatial exploration, and Herstorical research, in order to demonstrate the ways in which women’s narratives were represented in a theoretically informed, site-specific manner. Drawing on Phil Smith’s mythogeography, and responding to Laurajane Smith’s work on gender and heritage, the conflicting tensions of identity, performance, and authenticity are drawn together to offer flexible characterization as a new model for the creation of feminist heritage performance. Victoria Bianchi is a theatre-maker and academic in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow. Her work explores the relationship between space, feminism, and identity. She has written and performed work for the National Trust for Scotland, Camden People’s Theatre, and Assembly at Edinburgh, among other institutions.

The ‘Manchester Together Archive’: researching and developing a museum practice of spontaneous memorials

On 22 May 2017, a homemade bomb was detonated in the foyer of Manchester Arena as people were leaving the Ariana Grande concert. Twenty-three people (including the bomber) were killed and over 800 were injured. Within hours of the attack, people of Manchester began to leave flowers, candles, soft toys, balloons, written notes and other items in St Ann’s Square and other locations around the city. In June 2017, the Manchester City Council tasked Manchester Art Gallery to oversee the removal and collection of material objects from St Ann’s Square. Manchester Art Gallery ultimately stored more than 10,000 objects to form what is now known as the ‘Manchester Together Archive’ of the public response to the Manchester Arena attack. An associated research project, co-designed by the author with Manchester Art Gallery staff, aimed to document creatively the evolving thinking, interactions with different stakeholders and decision-making about the archive, as well as the impact of those decisions on institutional life, policy and practice.After reviewing the literature on museum practices around spontaneous memorials, this paper goes on to critically reflect on how cultural professionals in Manchester addressed the gap in their experience with spontaneous memorials by adapting or diverting from standard collecting processes. It aims to demonstrate that this was a creative process of negotiating the interaction between their professional ethics and a strong sense of civic and social responsibility, which led to a new museum practice altogether. The paper argues that this museum practice was also the result of accepting and inviting the migration of the memorial’s characteristics (as a public, spontaneous and mass participation heritage performance) into the resulting Manchester Together Archive and the collecting process itself. This meant that the archive was not a ‘collection’ of the spontaneous memorial, but another form and manifestation of the memorial itself, which offered a perspective of cultural remembrance that is driven by a focus on process, rather than permanence. The paper concludes with some brief thoughts on how this new museum practice around the Manchester Together Archive is impacting already on Manchester Art Gallery’s broader policy and practice and its process of rethinking its spaces, activity and engagement with its publics.