TY - JOUR
T1 - Performing witnessing
T2 - dramatic engagement, trauma and museum installations
AU - Hughes, Erika
N1 - Funding Information:
Whereas ‘Daniel’s Story’ focuses the museumgoer on one central story about an ever-present eponymous protagonist, the main exhibit of Humanity House begins by placing the museumgoer at the centre of the action. Promotional materials from the museum describe Humanity House as a place where ‘you can experience what it feels like to live in a place gripped by conflict or hit by a disaster’ (Humanity House n.d.). Humanity House opened in December of 2010 as an initiative of the Dutch Red Cross, and is supported by the European Commission’s European Fund for Regional Development and the city of the Hague, which is also home to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Humanity House counts among its partners the International Red Cross, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and sponsors include corporations such as IT company Cisco and consulting firm AON as well as the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The museum works with school groups and has designed programming for children as young as 10 years of age, although it does not consider itself a children’s museum. In December 2016, museum curators closed the original exhibit for a substantial revision that reopened to the public in February 2017. Here I discuss both versions of the permanent exhibit as I believe that the revision offers insights into both the power and the limits of process drama as a form for remembrance, engagement, learning and understanding.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2018/4/3
Y1 - 2018/4/3
N2 - This article offers a discussion of two interactive museum installations, ‘Remembering the Children: Daniel’s Story’ at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and the main exhibit at the Humanity House Museum in the Hague, Netherlands. Both are examples of what I term self-guided dramas, taking the viewer/participant on an interactive journey through which they will experience a story or event that follows a dramatic narrative structure. These exhibits take as their subject the experiences and perspective of a protagonist forced into refugee status and turn the act of witnessing into a performative engagement for the museumgoer.
AB - This article offers a discussion of two interactive museum installations, ‘Remembering the Children: Daniel’s Story’ at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and the main exhibit at the Humanity House Museum in the Hague, Netherlands. Both are examples of what I term self-guided dramas, taking the viewer/participant on an interactive journey through which they will experience a story or event that follows a dramatic narrative structure. These exhibits take as their subject the experiences and perspective of a protagonist forced into refugee status and turn the act of witnessing into a performative engagement for the museumgoer.
KW - Museums
KW - holocaust
KW - process drama
KW - refugees
KW - story drama
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U2 - 10.1080/13569783.2018.1441709
DO - 10.1080/13569783.2018.1441709
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85045282088
SN - 1356-9783
VL - 23
SP - 274
EP - 281
JO - Research in Drama Education
JF - Research in Drama Education
IS - 2
ER -