There’s something witty happening at the Banff Park Museum.
In conjunction with Mountain WIT, a local theatre troupe, the museum will present History Comes Back To Haunt You, a theatrical tour running Oct. 25-29.
A rehearsal of the tour was held Oct. 7, with Susan Kennard, manager of heritage programs with Parks Canada, in attendance. Kennard oversees the national historic sites in the Banff Field Unit.
“We’re looking at opportunities to find new ways of bringing the public back to the museum and ultimately to the Cave and Basin,” she said. “And with programs like the still-life drawing course, stargazing, the hikes and now this Halloween program, we’re piloting it all out the Banff Park Museum, mainly because Cave and Basin is closed until Christmas of 2012. But when it reopens, we want to move the programs that we’ve tested here over there and have them even bigger and more scary and more fun.”
The tour is led by performers Laurie Schwartz and Tangle Caron, members of Mountain WIT. With two one-hour tours nightly, at 7 and 9 p.m., the event is aimed at families with children aged 10 and up. Tickets can be purchased in advance at the museum or at the visitor’s centre.
“We are looking to create some new and exciting programming at our national historic sites and we looked at this collection,” said Schwartz. “Susan approached us to ask if we’d be interested in creating a fun program for the museum and I had always thought that this collection could use a little after-hours jolt and how fun it would be to be in here, after dark, looking at the collection with a flashlight, and I think people are enjoying it so far.”
As the museum is not meant to change, being a museum of a museum, this tour gives people a new way to interact with the collection, she explained.
“So to turn out the lights and find out what the ghosts are that are haunting this place is pretty fun,” said Schwartz. “We’re pulling from some historic characters to source our ghosts. They are people that, if this museum were to be haunted, they would be the most likely haunters.”
WIT stands for World Heritage Interpretive Theatre, said Schwartz.
“We have been active in the mountain national park since 2003 and our job is to tell the stories of the mountain national parks through song and story and poetry and puppetry and we tour to Alberta and British Columbia schools and even as far as the Yukon,” she said.
“In the summertime we participate in special events – anywhere that Parks Canada needs an energizing artistic presence.”
Mountain WIT was brought on board to design the theatrical tour as a pilot project to engage the public with the Banff Park Museum National Historic Site, said Caron.
“I’ve been involved in writing the more theatrical side of things, putting together props, figuring out the logistics of what we need to know,” she said. “I think it’s really exciting – I’ve been around historic sites for a long time and I think it’s a really exciting way to engage people in a site in a way that they normally wouldn’t.
“To walk around a museum like this at night with a flashlight, it’s like something out of a storybook, and I think it’s really appropriate for the time of year that it’s being piloted; it gives that spooky experience people are looking for at this time of year, while it still honours what we’re trying to get across with the museum.”
The WIT members put a lot of research into creating the tour, said Kennard.
“Mountain WIT isn’t just doing theatre here, they spent a lot of time getting to know the people and stories of the real characters attached to this museum – Norman Sanson, Bill Peyto – and those are the characters they’re basing this program on,” she said.
Martha Lee Marpole, the visitor experience product development officer for the park, was also on hand at the rehearsal, and explained where the idea for the Halloween tour came from.
“This program idea came from our community consultation and stakeholder consultation. During the fall of 2010 we had workshops and one-on-one meetings with community members who had expressed an interest in the type of programming and visitor experiences that were going to be offered at the Cave and Basin and the Banff Park Museum. The idea of having a haunted Halloween theme program evolved through that consultation,” she said.
“This is the first time we’ve done anything like this in the Banff Field Unit for special programming,” she added. “I think it’s important for our community to see that this is the direction that heritage programs is going in Banff National Park. So if people have any questions or comments or other ideas that they’d like to see our department bring to fruition, they can feel free to contact me – all of our good ideas are coming from the community.”
For the next special programming event, Parks Canada will present a series of performances leading up to Christmas, said Marpole.
“Our next thing after this will be bringing in the best practices of interpretation from national parks and national historic sites from across the country,” she said. “The Halifax Citadel will be coming to visit us and be putting on a very grand series of different performances, so we can all learn and share ideas and tell our stories.”
Cost of admission for History Comes Back To Haunt You is $10.80.
