Future Festivals: Making the most of performative techniques.

By Emma Watkins

This workshop was headed by Jacqui Mulville from the Cardiff Osteological Research Group in the School of History, Archaeology and Religion. Firstly, details of past events were given; one particularly interesting venture was the Future Animals Project which attended the Green Man festival. This project set out to engage the public at this festival through many different interactive means, the theme they chose was ‘Back to the future’. A few examples of the games they used to interact with the public are; ‘The Washing Line of time’ where the postgraduate students who attended to aid the project would ask passers-by to peg on the line a land mark point in time where they believed it occurred. Jacqui explained that the value of the exercise was the conversation they had with the public during the task. Another activity used was the ‘How old are your teeth?’ game. Where they told children how old they were by examining their teeth, an effective way to engage younger people.

Jacqui talked about the successes of the venture, other than great public engagement, it was very economical, a great training programme for students who aided the event, it fed into new events and ideas and it increased the confidence of all those involved to carry on with such projects. It is also important to mention PEACE ‘Postgraduate Environmental Archaeology and community engagement’ who train postgraduates in public engagement. The challenges of the event were motivation, encouraging the students to turn up to help at the right times, after all they were in an exciting festival! Although Jacqui explained she had only a few problems with this. Of course camping outdoors in Wales leads to weather problems, all card tools had to be laminated, security was also a problem due to tents and there were thefts. Then there were the issues of breakages and importantly health and safety, they had no advice on this at the time but since their venture the NCCPE Festival Advice is online for anyone planning similar events.

Plans for the future are to deliver similar events at more music festivals, they are going to target the audience more and possibly link to other events such as shopping centres. Ideas they are working on with regards to their interactive engagement are having a dark cave area where participants will crawl into to draw cave paintings. They believe presenting the challenge of a small dark place will entice the public to take part. Towards the end of the workshop when time was running out there was also talk of potentially training the students in performance to make the experience for the public even better. They are excited about the future.