{"id":307,"date":"2020-04-28T08:11:42","date_gmt":"2020-04-28T08:11:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/?p=307"},"modified":"2026-06-22T10:49:41","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T10:49:41","slug":"the-live-history-company-museum-theatre-four-spectators-and-that-guy-a-complex-relationship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/the-live-history-company-museum-theatre-four-spectators-and-that-guy-a-complex-relationship\/","title":{"rendered":"The Live History Company, Museum Theatre, \u201cFour Spectators\u201d and \u201cThat Guy\u201d: A Complex Relationship"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Rick Cousins<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Costumed historical interpretation has been widely used by history museums to bridge the gap between past and present, but this form of presentation frequently fails to give museumgoers a sense of fully embodied participation in enacted versions of bygone times. For the past five years, a Canadian theatre company called Live History has attempted to strengthen and widen this bridge by presenting interactive shows with historical content in museum spaces. Thus far, interactivity has proven to be more a laudable hope than an attained goal. Uncomfortable with exchanging the role of detached observer for the role of performative participant, audience members unknowingly compel Live History\u2019s performers to generate imagined performance identities for them. This, in turn, tends to work against museums\u2019 and Live History\u2019s shared aim of making the stories they tell familiar to contemporary visitors while retaining a sense of the often unfamiliar social conditions which created these stories.<\/strong>
Keywords: <\/strong>historical interpretation, museum theatre, interactive theatre, audiences, diversity<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who\u2019s going to be \u201cThat Guy\u201d today? <\/em>That is a question I take with me every time I go to a museum or historic house and prepare to portray some notable figure from the past for a company called Live History. Founded in Ottawa in 2015, and now featuring two companies which tour Canada, the United States, the British Isles, the Caribbean and Australia, Live History company creates and performs interactive site-specific shows for museums and historic houses which \u201cinclude a mystery or quest based experience\u201d (\u201cFAQ\u201d).  The \u201cmystery\u201d element of the shows involves finding clues in the form of written notes and found objects, all strategically hidden in plain sight throughout the museum. By solving word puzzles, logic problems and math equations contained in these clues, the audience works towards its \u201cquest\u201d\u2014the solution of a greater problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In shows such as Mary\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>, the quest is to find a fictional treasure hidden in an historic house by a previous owner; Circa<\/em> involves helping a museum exhibit who has come to life discover their identity; for In Time<\/em>, the stakes are rather higher\u2014solving the mystery gives the audience a chance to change history at one of its turning points. A S\u00e9ance in Time<\/em>, the version of this particular show I\u2019m going to refer to most often in this account, takes place in August of 1942, just before the ill-fated raid by Allied forces on Dieppe in World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n

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A S\u00e9ance in Time<\/em>. Live History, Laurier House, Ottawa. Rick Cousins as William Lyon Mackenzie King, Caroline Bowden as Henrietta Wreidt, Dan Desmarais as Nicholas Treffen, Jasmine Bowen as Mary. August 15\u201317, 2018. Photo: courtesy of Parks Canada<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The central figure in A S\u00e9ance in Time<\/em> is the person I have portrayed most often since joining Live History during its inaugural 2015 season: William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874\u20131950). As well as being Canada\u2019s longest-serving Prime Minister, Mackenzie King is a complex figure whose canny braiding of incrementalist progressivism with cool, calculating realpolitik<\/em> is often overshadowed by his current reputation as one of Canadian history\u2019s great eccentrics. The release of his diaries into public record during the 1970s revealed his fascination with spiritualism and s\u00e9ances: it is fairly safe to say that more people these days casually associate this oddball hobby with Mackenzie King than the reams of sometimes ground-breaking, sometimes controversial legislation he was responsible for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In principle then, a format which combines a little playful sleuthing with entertainingly quirky people from the past should be a springboard to an interactive free-for-all spectacle; in reality, Live History\u2019s audiences are typically slow to interact when presented with a show\u2019s puzzles, which frequently have to be solved by the performers themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, audiences for Live History do not seem quite so slow to interact if their interaction can disrupt the show. Company founder and performer Jasmine Bowen\u2019s coppery complexion seems to be reason enough for more than the occasional Caucasian to voice nativist sentiments that obviously never occurred to her British-descended father when he met and married her Burmese mother. Words to the effect of \u201cyour missing boyfriend has probably met some nice white girl\u201d have been said to her just often enough when she is in character that when she says something like \u201cit happened again\u201d after a performance, we all know exactly what it was that happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first time I can recall this happening was at Mackenzie King\u2019s former home, Laurier House in Ottawa, in 2015. It led to the company hanging the collective label of \u201cThat Guy\u201d on racists or anybody who disrupts for the sake of being disruptive. This also includes people who object to the solutions to the show\u2019s clues, people who object to other people solving the clues before they do, people who muscle past cast members and into restricted areas to get at clues and people who reject the idea that the show requires any level of audience participation, clues or no clues.     <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of the reason the members of Live History were so quick to categorize members of their audiences lies in the company\u2019s reluctance to subscribe to the easy categorical labels others place on it before even attending one of its performances. Is it historical interpretation? Kind of . . . <\/em>Except these are professional actors who have gone through screening auditions, not minimum-wage interns somebody has thrown a \u201cperiod\u201d costume on. Is it interactive theatre? You will find out it is not if you talk over a line an actor has to say to advance the plot. An escape room? Well . . . solving puzzles is part of the experience, like in an escape room\u2014but when there is a time limit for a Live History show, as there is for In Time<\/em>, the stakes for puzzle-solving involve real historical events rather than the imaginary fates of individual members of the audience. Is it sui generis<\/em>? Well<\/em> . . . The truth is, it is all these things at once, none of them at all and not a single one of them in total. \u201cThat Guy\u201d has a lot of different things to mess with, if left unchecked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which brings me back to the question I have had at the back of my mind ever since my first appearance in Live History: who\u2019s going to be \u201cThat Guy\u201d today?<\/em> It is actually the second of a pair of questions I ask myself as I make the final transition from preparation to performance. The first question, which informs the second, is also about the audience I am going to encounter and (on my terms) interact with: Who are these people, anyway?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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Publicity photo for Mary\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>. Live History, Laurier House, Ottawa. Rick Cousins as William Lyon Mackenzie King, Jasmine Bowen as Mary, Dan Desmarais as Sir Wilfrid Laurier. November 19, 2016. (Also pictured is the crystal ball used in s\u00e9ances by Mackenzie King, part of Laurier House\u2019s collection.) Photo: Robin Andrew, courtesy of Parks Canada<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I already have a partial answer based on experience with these performances, experience with museums and experience within the ongoing need to properly investigate and comprehend history which museums and historic houses try to address. It is something along the lines of \u201cpeople whose presence and appearance would have to be accounted for in the time period of our show.\u201d Despite this, both presence and appearance usually do not receive any accounting at all. I almost never bring up unconscious anachronisms such as women arriving for a formal gathering unescorted by a man or children arriving for a formal gathering at all. I say nothing about the decidedly casual dress that is appropriate for a twenty-first-century tourist but might have gotten a prosperous nineteenth-century homeowner looking for the almsbox to send these bedraggled, ill-clad unfortunates to the nearest reputable low-cost tailor. I absolutely do not bring up anyone\u2019s non-European ethnicity unless it is brought up by an audience member. The next time that happens with anyone other than Jasmine will be the first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While this in itself is an obvious tribute to everyone\u2019s good common sense, there are times where it really ought to be brought into issue, as a way for everyone to discuss and understand the history we are trying to portray. One such time involves an old friend of mine, named Roger Taguchi, who came to one of the performances of A S\u00e9ance in Time<\/em>. Roger\u2019s Japanese-Canadian parents were both placed in internment camps during World War II . . . and here I was, face to face with him playing Mackenzie King, the man ultimately responsible for it. Roger is  a retired high school teacher, so I knew that he could bring up this sticky subject in an intelligent fashion\u2014and really stick it to King while doing so. Not only that, the door was open for subjects like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923 (passed by a Mackenzie King government and still in effect in 1942), and the fact that East Asians in Canada had not yet received the right to vote. Yet, neither of us thought to bring it up, even though the show gave us a few opportunities to quietly confer on the structure of a quick scene we could improvise between us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That truly was a missed opportunity, because it could have sparked a lively\u2014and necessary\u2014debate about how we view the times we live in now in relation to the past. The audiences for Live History\u2019s performances are diverse and reflect the neoliberal discourse underlying modern museums, which cultural theorist Tony Bennett has described as an attempt \u201cto inveigle the general populace into complicity with power by placing them on this side of a power which it represented to them as its own\u201d (Birth <\/em>95). This means that my performance has to inveigle audiences into complicity with the attitudes and practices of current public policy by reconstructing a documented personage in a way that suppresses much of its character-restricting historical context. I admit as honoured guests and equals people whom a privileged white male of a given period would not necessarily have had to acknowledge, much less treat like guests. I neglect to invite my friend Roger to use my performance persona as a verbal punching bag for what happened to his family. Heaven only knows what other sins of omission I have committed in the interest of papering over the sins of yesteryear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In that sense, what I am being is less of a historical personage than an amusing embodiment of an imagined inferior past and an object of anthropological curiosity, a living exhibit whose purpose is to make visitors feel better about who they are in the here and now. Like \u201cprimitive\u201d artifacts in a glass case, all we who perform for Live History unwillingly bolster a naively meliorist teleology of history, \u201cunderlining the rhetoric of progress by serving as its counterpoints\u201d (Bennett, \u201cComplex\u201d 92).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This rhetoric can make life difficult for those trying to embody people who have been deemed redundant by meliorists. The following words from Scott Magelssen\u2019s \u201cLiving History Museums and the Construction of The Real Through Performance\u201d should be the motto of anyone looking to hire a theatre company like Live History, or of anyone looking to work for such a company: \u201cthe institutional history is real by the conventions of the museum and by audience agreement, not by ontological essence\u201d (63).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ontology is to some extent what you make of it. Live History\u2019s audiences are invited to make ontologies for themselves in a somewhat improvised pre-show spiel which encourages people to get into the spirit of a past era by thinking about who they might have been at that time. In theory\u2014in theory<\/em>\u2014those present then take a moment, review what they already know about the time period they have just been told the performance is set in and cobble together a rough characterization that will allow them to interact with me and the other Live History performers in a way that makes the performance plausible as a potential lived experience and not just a piece of one-sided light entertainment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In practice of course, this hardly ever happens. I have seen one blank look too many to humour anyone\u2014even myself\u2014by saying that things work any other way. Live History aspires to a participatory model; unfortunately, its audiences do not necessarily share such aspirations. Faced with one group after another whose upper threshold of tolerance for participation is not appreciably higher than that of attendees of non-participatory theatre, my work in museum shows has tended to discard anything that could be considered legitimate stagecraft in favour of the low cunning of the fairground fortune teller. If the marks won\u2019t give me a clue about who they are by what they say<\/em>, I will have to make some educated guesses based on what they do<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n

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S\u00e9ance in Time<\/em>. Live History, Laurier House, Ottawa. Jasmine Bowen as Mary, Rick Cousins as William Lyon Mackenzie King, Mike Kosowan as Nicholas Treffen, Caroline Bowden as Henrietta Wreidt. June 8, 2018. Photo: courtesy of Parks Canada<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

My informal educated guesswork has a certain affinity with part of my formal education in theatre theory. Thirty years ago, Eugenio Barba articulated a rough typology designed to  help his Denmark-based but cosmopolitan Odin Teatret prepare for performances in front of audiences whose composition could be drawn from any number of European nationalities and cultural groups. Like Live History, Odin Teatret can\u2019t assume a common set of particular cultural referents and competencies for those who attend its performances; to compensate for this, Barba conceptualized an audience composed of four essentialized and somewhat idealized types:<\/p>\n\n\n\n