Theathre museum states at their website: “The Theatre Museum offers information, insights, joy and entertainment. In our exhibitions liveliness, interactivity and easy access to information are brought to the fore. At the Theatre Museum, the visitor is an active agent, an explorer, a player, and a seeker of information.” After reading this, before visiting museum, I was pretty curious! I started to think questions for example: “What is an active agent in the museum? A player? Is there some games to play or what does this mean?”
Theathre Museum was a mystery for me and thanks to our great museum pedagogical course I got the chance to go there together with our super nice group. This museum is one of the many where you get in with just showing your museum card (if you don’t have one already it’s time to get one!).
First we met our super nice guide Milla Kortemaa who asked us to play astronauts while entering the elevator. At first this felt pretty weird but I decided to try it out and in the end it was super funny! We did the same thing when we were leaving and that time everyone was playing the role 100%. It was funny that they also said on their website that “things that first strike you as strange or odd become more familiar and more understandable”, because that was exactly what happened with this astronaut thing and in many other situations during our visit.
Milla told us that they have many different workshops and they all focus on engagement. We got the chance to try out so many engaging things like dressing up, playing with the puppets, making a dress from paper and other recyclable materials. Making the dress in our group was lot of fun and our task was to make a dress about love. Of course we made a wedding dress (see the picture above).
It was so great that all the things you can do in Theatre Museum are linked with the theatre world, for example: set design, light design (they had a super nice stage with a ligh monitor table where you can try out different light situations), acting, costume design, character design. I was really blown away! I’m so used to museums where you just go around, look at some items and read some written info. Now I got to do stuff and really be engaged with theatre world and it was amazing! I really love the fact that this “engaging the audience” is coming more and more popular in the museum field because it really makes the visitor’s experience deeper. And when you’re having fun you actually learn stuff so the learning process is not boring at all.
This visit was really useful because one of our main goals in this museum pedagogical course was to come up with and idea for an workshop for a museum. I started to think about making a game or something fun and engaging!
Text: Elisa Rauma