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Performance, Learning & Heritage

Site 3 : Triangle Theatre Company

 

 

The Herbert is a large, regional museum with a resident company, Triangle Theatre. The case study followed Triangle’s performance of the Pollard Trail, a five-hour experience which took visitors from the company’s temporary base in the Hillfields area, picking up (and losing) people along the way, along a structured ‘living history’ trail of selected sites in Coventry. It explored the life of Chico the Clown, otherwise known as Irving Pollard (1898-1975), who lived in Coventry. The Museum houses a collection of Pollard ephemera.


Triangle’s work at the Museum, including the ‘Chico Talks’ project, seeks (amongst other things) to provide something of an institutional critique, and is playful in exploring what museums, collections, and performance might ‘mean’. Although the structure of the trail and key moments were fixed, much was improvised on a daily basis, and the event was always experimental and often challenging. Audiences were varied in composition and recruitment, and consisted of local Hillfields residents, many of whom were from the Kurdish community through whose area the tour passed, teenage participants (participants in the Chico project who helped shape the original tour), and paying members of the public.

Research in Coventry took place around the Pollard Trail in August 2006 and the activities of the CMP Soc (see the CMP Soc website). For more info see the menu on the right.