Site 3 : Understanding the Content
Chico the Clown, or Irving Pollard (1898-1975), was an accomplished children’s entertainer who, it is said, was born in the circus. At the age of 42, while an air raid warden in Coventry during WW2, he lost his memory and voice in a Luftwaffe bombing raid. Triangle Theatre Company, intrigued by the Irving Pollard collection of ephemera - costumes, props, photographs, notes and newspaper clippings – at The Herbert, undertook some performed oral history encounters. In April 2006, they created "the CMP Soc", a group of curator-artists named after the Coventry Musical Play Society of which Irving Pollard was a leading light.
In August 1955, Alice and Irving Pollard and a small group of friends had taken a guided tour of the Coventry City walls. Inspired by this, Triangle rehearsed a structured ‘living history’ trail of selected sites.
Triangle Theatre: Aims and objectives of Chico Talks project
Triangle Theatre anticipated that it could, as a result of the Chico Talks venture:
devise a new project over a period of four weeks create employment opportunities for artists share methods with artists develop the musical content of Triangle’s work develop new performance personae explore clownesque strategies work with designer with experiences of museum design/curation identify and support performance participantso the older people identified for the project (oral histories)
o teenage participants and older people (august)
o introduce small group of teenagers to the devising process
document the research and development period work alongside The Herbert’s curators.It is worth noting that the emphasis in these stated aims is on Triangle’s methodology, exploration and training. Audiences, or ‘participants’ are only briefly mentioned, and there is no explicit reference to ‘learning’ beyond that implied for Triangle as an organisation. In this respect, the aims are different from those articulated and oft-evaluated in and by other institutions the PLH research project has looked at.
The Herbert’s aims
LearningThe documentation for Chico Talks, the performance we studied, outlines the Museum’s learning team responsibilities as follows: … ‘to develop new audiences for The Herbert by working with local people who may not have been regular users in the past’ (March 2006 Triangle documentation). In this instance, the various audiences developed through and with Chico Talks represented a new and exciting proposition for the Museum. They were both ‘new’ and hard to reach through traditional museum channels and outputs. Young people, minority ethnic groups and even local residents can be notoriously difficult to reach, and thus we increasingly hear the language of ‘outreach’ in our interviews. Although not originally an intention of the project, these were increasingly the terms in which the project was discussed and its relative ‘success’ or ‘failure’ determined.
CollectionsThe history team’s aim is to see the Museum’s various collections used in innovative ways and in order to attract new audiences. That team is made up of those responsible for curating and displaying the museum’s collections. The collection was indeed used in innovative ways in Chico Talks, and was built upon in creative and informative ways. Moreover, the stories which individual objects now tell are forever altered by their presence within the Pollard Trail, alongside one another, and the additional information that has been gleaned about them.
The major outcome of this project, the heritage trail, was subsequently titled ‘The Pollard Trail’.
