Serious Play

Bill Adair, Director, Heritage Philadelphia Program, The Pew Center for Arts &
Heritage

“Don’t play what’s there – play what’s not there” – Miles Davis

Miles recognized that he was building on decades of playing that came before him, but he
also understood that a break with the past was critical for the survival of jazz. He knew
that improvisation and innovation were the future of the medium and so he played what
was not there – and he played and played.

I propose that the future of history museums lies in such improvisational playing – the kind
of serious play that breaks people’s expectations, challenges the hushed reverence, and
allows for healthy dissonance. At the Heritage Philadelphia Program, funded by The Pew
Charitable Trusts, we attempt to support such serious play within history organizations and
are aiming to create a regional ecology in which playful and thoughtful risk-taking can
flourish. We do this for one reason – because the preponderance of evidence suggests that
the safe and predictable approaches to public history interpretation no longer work. They
don’t engage the audiences we need to stay alive and fresh and relevant as a field.

Several organizations in Philadelphia are beginning to experiment with sophisticated play

as an important interpretive strategy, including some of the most revered and venerable
of institutions. Some of these projects have been funded by the Heritage Philadelphia
Program and others we just admire. All of them have stretched these organizations beyond
their comfort zone and playfully engage new audiences. These projects include:

Performance Art at the American Philosophical Society(APS)

Founded by Ben Franklin as a think tank for the 18th century Enlightenment, the APS
continues to this day as an elite membership organization with a world-class history
collection and an expanding portfolio of public programs. In the last several years, the
director of the APS museum has commissioned actor and performance artist Brett Keyser
to create one-person shows in which he becomes a fictional professor who “lectures” on
the factual and fantastical nature of scientific learning. These hilarious presentations
reveal the epistemological underpinnings of empirical research, classification systems, and
other scientific orthodoxies and provide a wonderfully accessible romp through the history
of science.

Channeling Lincoln’s Ghost at the Rosenbach Museum & Library (RML)

This past February 12, the RML, one of the world’s most well-regarded rare book
museums, launched a multimedia and multidisciplinary website entitled 21st Century Abe,
which marries rigorous (and accessible) scholarly analysis of their Lincoln materials with a
variety of irreverent artist-created and visitor-generated projects about Lincoln. One of the
most provocative was produced by an Oakland-based artist collaborative named Archive,
in which they commissioned a psychic to channel Lincoln so that they could interview him
about his life and legacy. Another commission by a Philly-based theater group unveiled a
series of comic webisodes, which plays off of Lincoln’s consistent use of humor as a
survival skill. www.21stcenturyabe.org.

Beer Bash at Cliveden of the National Trust

Last summer Cliveden, historic home of Benjamin Chew and site of the Battle of
Germantown, held a day of 18th century beer brewing and tasting in the park surrounding
the Georgian house. Hundreds of people joined them for a hybrid party/program that
included talks on 18th century food and spirits, including discussions of significant issues of
class and race (Chewwas a major slaveholder). The day was so successful it became an
immediate signature program -- Cliveden now sells and bottles its own brand of beer.
Cliveden’s curator recently announced that he has changed his title to Curator of
Collections and Fermentation.

Beheading at Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP)

For several years now ESP, a historic ruin and museum of penology and criminology, has
hosted a Bastille Day celebration on the roof of the prison, with thousandsof onlookers
gathered on the streets below. Actors playing Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI are marched
through the streets and heckled by the mob. They are led to the roof of the prison where
they loudly announce “Let them eat cake!” and begin to throw hundreds of
Tastykakes to the expectant crowds below. They are then promptly beheaded and the
crowd roars its ugly approval. The masses are then permitted to stream into the prison,
where they view exhibitions on the history of the American prison system, the innovative
architecture of Eastern State, and stories about famous ESP prisoners.

Tatoos at the Independence Seaport Museum (ISM)

This past spring, ISM, a previously sleepy and predictable maritime museum, opened
Tatoos in the Life of the American Sailor, an exhibition that makes a compelling case that
American tattoo culture originated on the high seas. This ground-breaking exhibition
rigorously and playfully elucidates the history of body ornamentation in the U.S. and its
connection to maritime culture. Public programs have included tattoo-based films, mini-
conventions, and discussions, which have brought in a vastly younger and more diverse
audience than the museum has ever seen, and which earned the museum its first rave
review in The New York Times.

Heritage Philadelphia Program (HPP) is working to support such playful and risk-taking
approaches within our constituency through professional development programs and
grant-making. We offer PD trips to visit sites, exhibits, performances, etc. from all
disciplines from which we might learn. We have a regularly updated blog on which we post
book reviews and program critiques, attempting to generate conversation about
imaginative public history practice. HPP offers Discovery Grants of up $10,000 to
organizations for exploration of experimental project ideas, with the assumption that some
(most?) ideas may never come to fruition. We’ve just launched a new HPP Scholars
Program, which offers $5000 grants to individuals for the support of R and D of inventive
public history projects. And we offer large grants of up $200,000 to organizations to fund
projects that enable them to go beyond business as usual, reaching new audiences in
meaningful, relevant ways.

In Philadelphia, with its embarrassment of historic riches, we are working to suggest one
model for moving the public history field forward, with serious play as a fundamental
strategy, thoughtfully and pointedly improvising our way to an uncertain future.