Bringing Death to life

Posted on 5 February, 2013 by Danny Birchall
The cast of Mortal: A drama

The cast of Mortal: A drama

Wellcome Collection’s Youth Programme is working with producer Elizabeth Lynch and a cast of ten teenagers. Together they have devised a theatrical response to our exhibition ‘Death: A self-portrait’. Here cast member Hannah gives an inside account of the devising process of Mortal: A drama.  

Death lurks near the jostling mass of London Euston station. Wellcome Collection’s exhibition ‘Death: A self-portrait’ leaves no (grave)stone unturned in exploring the visual representation of Death throughout the ages: from contemporary wire sculptures of the Grim Reaper to medieval tapestries of peasants falling into eternal damnation. A company of young actors, myself included, are using this morbid ephemera as inspiration for devising a piece of theatre that brings this exhibition, ironically, ‘to life’.

‘Mortal: A drama’ explores the devastating, gruesome and sometimes humorous aspects of death. Our fascination with death, as humans, has always had a theatrical quality to it, from the spectator sport of medieval witch-burnings to the final speeches of Shakespearian tragedies to the cult following behind the ‘Bunny Suicides’ merchandise today.

This entire play has been devised entirely within the company, from discussions about personal experiences and our ‘gut’ reactions to stimulus material. Director Elizabeth Lynch comments on the challenge of broaching such a sensitive subject matter with a group of relative strangers, commenting: “People come to different things at different stages of their lives. [Someone] may have been bereaved at an early age and therefore have a more profound understanding of death than a 35-year-old”. Although this is not a verbatim piece, the text we are working with has been taken straight from words spoken by members of the company, or directly from the written comments of visitors to the exhibition, and has simply been transposed into the mouths of different actors. This method, according to Lynch, is the best way of generating words that have genuine emotional authenticity, without there being any pressure on the actor to re-live their individual experiences or ‘bare their soul’ on stage.

‘Mortal: A drama’ is certainly not a traditional ‘aesthetically pleasing’ piece of theatre. It is jarring and surreal to watch, with periods of destructive dancing juxtaposed with reimagined reality television that judges the dramatic value of contestants’ deaths. Lynch firmly didn’t want to create a piece of theatre that just allows the audience to sit back and ‘enjoy’; she wanted to stimulate in the individual an ‘intellectual, emotional and sensual’ response.

As a company, our aim is to get the audience to think about the implications of their own deaths. If you died tomorrow, what are the things you wish you’d never said or done? What would your fantasy funeral be like? What objects would your family keep as mementos of you?

‘Life’ is intrinsic to a good performance, because actors need to feed off the energies of the audience and their fellow performers. The physical vibrancy of this piece and the youth of the company mean that this play could be seen to be more of a celebration of life than a dialogue with death. The only thing we know for certain about this life is that we get one shot at it. So let’s make the most of it!

Mortal: A drama can be seen at Wellcome Collection on Thursday 14 February at 18.30, Sunday 17 February at 15.00 (BSL interpreted) and Thursday 21 February at 19.30. Tickets are free.

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Breathing for Speech

Posted on 4 February, 2013 by Danny Birchall

Neuroscientist Sophie Scott will be speaking at The Voice, an evening event on Friday 1 March at Wellcome Collection that explores the unexpected qualities of voices in all their forms. Here, she explains the importance of breathing for our ability to talk.

For animals with lungs, breathing is obviously central to life, making metabolism possible. What can be somewhat less obvious is that for humans, breathing is also central to speech, and the way that we breathe when we speak is very different to the way that we breathe to stay alive (called metabolic breathing). If you use a breath belt to look at the movements of the rib cage during metabolic breathing, you see a very regular, almost sinusoidal profile of expansion as air is drawn in, followed by an elastic contraction that forces air out:

Slide1

When we breathe to speak, we breathe very differently, taking in a breath and then using our intercostal muscles and diaphragm to control a fine flow of air through our larynx. This enables us to produce a (relatively) lengthy utterance and to control aspects of the loudness and pitch of our voice. Although we think of speech as being to do with our larynx and our articulators, our voices are only really possible at all because of how we breathe.

We start to breathe for speech by using our intercostal muscles initially to prevent air from flooding out through the larynx, and to keep a constant pressure of air at the larynx (called subglottal pressure). Towards the end of a breath, we need to use our intercostal muscles to squeeze air out, and if you keep speaking long after you want to take another breath, your voice starts to fall apart, as this soundclip demonstrates:

The next image shows what happens to the movements of my chest wall (reflecting the actions of the intercostal muscles) when I speak this way. You can see that, unlike metabolic breathing, the movements of the intercostal muscles are much more constant, and that as I keep speaking without taking another breath, the intercostal muscles are starting to squeeze the air out – followed by a big inspiration as I take another breath – then some rapid spasms of the intercostal muscles, which is due to me laughing!

Slide2

Strikingly, we can only breathe this way because we walk upright, which means that we don’t need to use our ribcages to support our weight. If you try and speak while using your ribcage to support your weight – for example, while doing press-ups – you get a sense of how hard this would be. The development of this fine control of our intercostal muscles was central to the evolution of human speech, and although we don’t typically think much about how we breathe to speak, we in fact have as much fine control of our intercostal muscles as we have of our fingers.

The fine flow of air from our lungs is just the start of the story of speech, but it’s an essential and often overlooked aspect. Of course, breath control is central to other ways that we use our voices – to sing, beat box or rap – and I’ll be discussing breathing and the human voice in greater detail in my talk.

The Voice takes place at Wellcome Collection on Friday 1 March.

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Stories from the day hospice: The easy tree

Posted on 1 February, 2013 by Danny Birchall
Illustration by Marianne Dear

Illustration by Marianne Dear

Throughout the summer of 2012, Chrissie Giles spent time at the day hospice at Princess Alice Hospice, Esher, running a creative writing group. In a series of posts accompanying our exhibition Death: A self-portrait, she reflects on her experiences there and showcases some of the writing produced by group members.

I’d been going to the hospice for a couple of weeks and hadn’t yet met Brian, but I noticed him straight away this particular Tuesday. An older man, he reminded me of the granddad I knew only when I was a child. He has a wide smile and twinkling eyes and was resplendent in a patterned Hawaiian-style shirt, evidently one of several such items in his wardrobe

Everyone that saw him greeted him with affection, chatting excitedly, catching up on his news. In the writing group, he came up with some fascinating tales from his childhood, including the time his dad went what he described as ‘rootling’ on holiday in Great Yarmouth. Scouring the rocks on the sea edge, he found an iron BC coin – you could still make out the head on one of its faces. Brian still has it today.

Discussing what we might put in a ‘museum of me’, Brian told us about the ‘easy tree’. “The whole gang used to go up there,” Brian said, describing a hawthorn tree that was so loved, the spikes were soon worn away, rendering the tree smooth and no longer painful to climb. Its name came from the fact that it was so easy to climb, even girls could do it.

We asked whether the tree was still there, imagining Brian erecting a plaque next to it. “No,” he said, shaking his head. For a reason he still can’t work out, he and his friends got together when they were around 15 and destroyed it.

Listen to Chrissie read this piece:

Chrissie Giles is a Senior Editor at the Wellcome Trust. ‘Death: A self-portrait‘ is open until 28 February 2013. Find out more about Princess Alice Hospice at www.pah.org.uk.

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Access all objects

Posted on 31 January, 2013 by Danny Birchall
The Thing Is....

The Thing Is….

At Wellcome Collection we aim to make our exhibitions and events as accessible as possible, and this often means thinking outside the box – sometimes literally. As with many other museums, much of our collection lies in glass cabinets, so we have to ask ourselves: what are the ways we can take these objects out of their display cases and make them more accessible to our visitors? Catherine Walker explains more.

We can’t always change the physical space in our exhibitions, especially with valuable or delicate objects, but as Visitor Services staff we can use our skills to make objects more accessible. As a team we work hard to improve our levels of engagement across the board and to break down barriers to the collection. We want to make everyone feel welcome in the museum and it certainly doesn’t make sense to exclude anyone when we are in a position to reach as wide an audience as possible. We therefore provide several different ways of engaging – for example, through multimedia guides, speech-to-text and British Sign Language interpreted tours, audio-described events, and a growing handling collection. These make our collection more accessible, but they also encourage people to enjoy the collection in new ways.

One of the aspects of the visitor experience that I work on particularly is our offer to blind and partially sighted visitors. When developing our offer we considered focusing on audio guides; however, one of the things the Visitor Services team pride ourselves on is our personality. There is a lot of room for each Visitor Services Assistant to have their own interests and to interact with people as individuals. For example, while other venues might have standardised tour scripts, we research and write our own, focusing on our own expertise. We wanted to translate this personality to our provision for blind and partially sighted visitors and offer personalised tours rather than audio guides. This now means that we can offer flexible visits, led by the visitor, that will hopefully encourage a deeper level of engagement. Guided tours also allow us to counter some of the physical difficulties blind and partially sighted visitors might have; we can alert them to physical changes in the space, give them the space to get close to objects and describe the details that might be difficult to make out.

It is also a great experience for the Visitor Services Assistants leading the tours. Orla O’Donnell says: ‘I have really enjoyed doing audio-described tours. They have allowed me to gain a new skill but also allowed me to interact with blind and partially sighted visitors, which has been the best part for me.’ It has also been a really enjoyable experience for me personally. We get to meet lots of really interesting people, and  audio description enables us to have conversations with more of our visitors. It means that we can get their perspective on objects in the gallery and what interests them. It becomes a discussion and a sharing of knowledge – an opportunity you don’t always get, especially when giving a tour to 20 people. It certainly adds to our confidence as a team. We are proud to offer flexible tours, allowing visitors to drop in at any time. Once our Visitor Service Assistants learn audio description skills, these can be applied to any object, creating flexibility and removing the need for rehearsal or too much preparation. The fact that our team is confident enough to provide a tour like this is a testimony to the training and to our staff.

The audio description training was provided by VocalEyes, a charity that provides audio description support for a range of venues, from museums to theatres. Implementing this training has been another enjoyable aspect of the experience, including working with the people at VocalEyes and going out to local community groups to encourage visitors to the museum. Out of this experience, we not only have more people visiting the museum but are also getting repeat visits. People enjoy the museum and want to come back, and we have a really positive presence on many blogs for blind and partially sighted visitors.

Now our offer has developed from audio description tours of the galleries to audio-described events. We have an event series called ‘The Thing Is…’, which is based around a mystery object. It is a discussion-based event exploring objects from our founder Henry Wellcome’s collection. We have adapted it to include an audio-described tour of relevant objects in the galleries, or of library material. We then describe the room in which the event takes place and the object the discussion is based around, so users get a ‘sneak peak’ before the talk begins.

For us it feels like we have achieved a lot in the year and a half we have been developing this offer. We had our first audio description event in April 2011, and now we have a regular audience within the community that wants to engage further with our collection. We have also trained more members of staff, so there is even more flexibility in our offer, and it is going from strength to strength.

For more information about our accessibility offer, please see our website. If you are interested in attending our events or if you have any questions about access at Wellcome Collection, you can call 020 7611 2222 or email access@wellcomecollection.org.

Catherine Walker is a Visitor Services Duty Manager at Wellcome Collection.

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The making of Death: A picture album

Posted on 28 January, 2013 by Danny Birchall

The film above gives a flavour of the hard work that goes into producing a publication like our new publication Death: A picture album. Here is a behind-the-scenes view from Kirty Topiwala, Commissioning Editor, and Marianne (‘Maz’) Dear, Senior Graphic Designer.

1. Concept

We first started thinking about the book early in the summer of 2012. Having spoken to the exhibitions team, we sat down with the images and information we had about the show. Given the visual impact of the work in the exhibition and the limited time we had to produce something, we agreed that the publication should be simple, beautiful and picture-based. We also wanted it to work both as a fitting souvenir of the exhibition and as a book that would standalone and have a ‘life’ after the show had ended.

At first, we considered a postcard book or box. Then, inspired by the black-and-white snapshots and postcards from Richard Harris’s collection, Maz suggested producing an ornate, old-fashioned photograph album, with images that would look as though they had been collected and stuck in. We consulted our printer, Murray Arbiter at Arbiter Drucken, about what would be possible and what we could afford. It was surprising what cost the most! Boxes and metal clasps were out, but a clothbound hardback was just inside our budget. We explored that idea further and after reworking it several times eventually came up with the final concept: an elegant picture book that feels like an old-fashioned keepsake.

2. Cover design

Maz spent many hours rummaging through old source books for antique patterns and then re-drew them by hand to incorporate deathly elements: the bones, clocks, moths and ravens and the skull. Much discussion went into these designs. Maz tweaked the birds to look more menacing, then less menacing, and finally more menacing again. We tried several different skulls, including one looking to the side (too creepy) and one that was almost smiling (too cheerful), before we finally stuck on the current model. The yellow background was chosen to fit in with the colour scheme of the exhibition and the posters. We hoped there would be a subtle visual link between them, and that the colour would make the book stand out on a crowded bookshelf.

3. Images

We thought it would be easy to select the images we needed, as all the works were from one collection. We were wrong. Most of the items hadn’t been photographed and, to make matters worse, they were sitting packaged up in crates in a dock in Chicago waiting to be shipped to London. We had no choice but to send our trusty photographer, Ben Gilbert, on an emergency transatlantic trip to the Windy City, where he set up a makeshift studio and photographed hundreds of the items for us and the press team. Ben, we couldn’t have done it without you!

4. Print

It might look simple, but it took serious work, multiple tests and a few migraines to get the final printed product right. We wanted Maz’s ornate cover design to be pressed into the surface of the cloth cover to make it tactile and feel more special.To get this effect means using an old-fashioned technique known as foil debossing, where hot metal plates stamp the design through a thin layer of foil into the cloth. Murray tried several types of black foil before we found the right one.

In the midst of this panic, we discovered that the yellow cloth sample we had been carefully matching to the gallery paint and posters was, in fact, sun-bleached. This meant that the hundreds of metres of cloth we had ordered from a special supplier in Holland was the wrong colour. It was at this point we started to think we weren’t going to make it…

5. The finished product

I’m pleased to say, however, that we got there in the end. This book did, at times, make us lose the will to live (which was apt for a book about death), but we’re all immensely proud of the result. We like to think that it’s a beautiful object in its own right rather than just a normal ‘catalogue’, and it’s wonderful to see that the buyers in our shop seem to feel the same way.

You can buy ‘Death: A picture album’ at Wellcome Collection, or order it online.

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Stories from the day hospice: Jackie

Posted on 25 January, 2013 by Danny Birchall
Illustration by Marianne Dear

Illustration by Marianne Dear

Throughout the summer of 2012, Chrissie Giles spent time at the day hospice at Princess Alice Hospice, Esher, running a creative writing group. In a series of posts accompanying our exhibition Death: A self-portrait, she reflects on her experiences there and showcases some of the writing produced by group members.

Jackie and I arrived at Princess Alice at around the same time. Softly spoken and thoughtful, she brought a sensitivity and calmness to the writing group. Her stories outlined the importance of the countryside and, in particular, horses in her life.

She didn’t like to be upset and tried hard to suppress any negative emotions she felt. In the Post-its exercise, where we each wrote down a word that we felt had been particularly pertinent to us over the last week, she was the only person to give two words: one she perceived as negative, and a positive one to balance. The positive word was ‘foal’, reflecting a new arrival in her family.

She said being part of the group had helped give her a bit of confidence about writing. “My head’s such a muddle,” she said. “This showed me that I can still get my thoughts down on paper.”

This piece is about her son. When she read it to the group – tearfully – many of us found ourselves welling up too. Jackie said that her family loved the poem, especially her mother, who read it aloud to everyone.

Untitled by Jackie

A huge hug is given, engulfed in love,
A family relationship.
My son,
The very light of my life.

Warm, familiar laugh that warms me through and through
Eddie Murphy’s double.
Country odours, animals and leather,
All is soft, natural browns, warm woolly jumpers
Mixed with stubbly cuddles from a hurried shave.
Never enough time.

Mobile phone – never stops!
No trouble, catch up with you later, sounds good to me.
Always on the go.
Craggy, weathered smile.
Works so hard, my boy.

You ready mum? Car’s outside
What first?
Bedding, duvet and pillows for car journey? Any.
Separate ones for the van?
Case?

Medication, water.
Wait til you see your garden,
Shrubs, trees are in bud waiting for you.
All’s good.
Weather’s on the up.

Listen to Chrissie read this piece:

Chrissie Giles is a Senior Editor at the Wellcome Trust. ‘Death: A self-portrait‘ is open until 24 February 2013. Find out more about Princess Alice Hospice at www.pah.org.uk.

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Stories from the day hospice: Life, death and an egg salad sandwich

Posted on 18 January, 2013 by Danny Birchall
Illustration by Marianne Dear
Illustration by Marianne Dear

Throughout the summer of 2012, Chrissie Giles spent time at the day hospice at Princess Alice Hospice, Esher, running a creative writing group. In a series of posts accompanying our exhibition Death: A self-portrait, she reflects on her experiences there and showcases some of the writing produced by group members.

It was a gorgeous day outside. In the corridor of the ward, I stood, back resting on the pale walls. I was waiting for the nurse to come out of Jack’s room so I could go in and start writing with him.

Across from me, the door of another room was open. In the background, through the patio doors, I could see people working in the hospice gardens, strolling in the sun or sitting on benches, sandwiches unwrapped on their laps.

On the bed was a man. An electric shock of adrenaline shot through me in response to how grey, ill and near to death he looked. Breathing with loud, laboured inhalations, he was otherwise still, eyes closed.

With her back to me, a woman was sitting at his side, head turned towards someone at the end of the bed that I couldn’t see. She had a puzzle book open across her lap. Above the distant drone of a lawnmower I heard them discussing anagrams for the word ‘sulphur’. Further up the corridor, towards reception, a young man with the same face as the man on the bed was pacing up and down.

Three weeks later I was in a similar room in a different part of the country. Sat on a turquoise chair with a spongy seat I was having a low-volume argument with my husband about whether I was going to eat half of the egg salad sandwich I’d just bought from the hospital shop. Between us, his dad lay: eyes closed, breathing quietly, the day before he died.

Listen to Chrissie read this piece:

Chrissie Giles is a Senior Editor at the Wellcome Trust. ‘Death: A self-portrait‘ is open until 24 February 2013. Find out more about Princess Alice Hospice at www.pah.org.uk.

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