Twilight Takeover - it's time for Masquerade at the Museum!

** FOR INFORMATION ON PARTICIPATING IN OUR DANCE WORKSHOP, 

SCROLL TO THE END OF THIS POST! **

It's all hands to the deck as we prepare for our pioneering Twilight Takeover event on Thursday 25th April...

CONCEPT & TICKETING

We hope to stage several 'Twilight Takeover' evenings a year for the duration of the VERVE project. One group we would like to encourage to engage more with the Museum is young adults, so the Takeover events offer the chance for young people to conceive and take responsibility for an alternative social evening event in the Museum. Liaising with Museum staff, the young people are supported in  thinking about how to best use the space and combine the Museum's message with a fun and off-beat evening of entertainment that will appeal to other curious young people.

Our inaugural Twilight Takeover event is organised by a small group of postgraduate Anthropology students at the University of Oxford. They have approached the task with huge enthusiasm and a limited budget to come up with what promises to a fabulous evening. 'Masquerade at the Museum' will tie into VERVE's first phase focus on dance and performance by featuring mask-making parlours, live bands, interactive tours, contemporary dance and even a belly dancer. A bar and lighting effects will help transform the Victorian space into a buzzing, social venue. The response has been phenomenal. We can only fit 250 people into the Museum at any one time but at least three times that number have expressed their interest! Hopefully, by repeating these types of events every few months, many more people will be able to attend in the future.

** NOTE: we will be releasing 10 extra tickets this Wednesday 17th April at 17.30 via our online ticket sales. **

So, we're busy preparing for our big night - the Mechanisms, who will be performing musical storytelling and vintage cabaret, have been in for their sound check:

MASKS

The students have also picked a 'Mask-a-Day' from the collections to whet your appetite leading up to the event. These showcase some of the Central American masks that will be going on display soon in the Museum as part of the VERVE gallery improvement plan, and will help inspire those who want to make a mask before they come. You will be able to see the masks on the Facebook event page or our Flickr page.

Mask from the Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins
Mexico (PRM: 1987.16.11)

DANCE WORKSHOPS

We've also been thinking about how to make this a participatory event, to help people interact with the Museum and we'll be holding dance workshops THIS WEEK. This is also a way those unlucky enough not to be able to get hold of a ticket can come to the evening!

So, if you're interested in embodiment, art installations, masks, masquerades, alternative forms of ethnography, new ways to engage with museum collections, and/or dancing, then this is for you! You'll be working with choreographer Rosie Kay to create the dance installation as a way of rethinking and reframing the masks collection. You will then perform the piece on the night in the Museum! The installation will use thoughtful, engaged movements and absolutely no previous dance experience (or rhythm, coordination, musical sensibility, etc...) is required!

The workshops will run this week on this WEDNESDAY 17th, THURSDAY 18th and FRIDAY 19th April, 11.00 – 16.00 (there may be some flexibility if you're very keen but can't make every session). For more details , please email verve@prm.ox.ac.uk expressing your interest ASAP.