Museum Night

On Saturday evening, the museum next to my office stayed open all night. This happens once a year to mark… well, nothing in particular as far as I can tell. The night also had a theme – ‘negotiators’. Let’s just say it wasn’t an un-confusing night.

INTERRA was asked to organise an ‘event’ as part of the museum night, which had to be in line with the theme. So Zuzana and I sat down together and brainstormed, and here’s what we came up with:

•           Brexit
•           Hostages
•           Haggling (Krasnoyarsk’s Chinese market?)
•           The Apprentice
•           Charades

As much as we’d have loved to have made a game out of Brexit, we felt like that had already been done by British MPs, so we decided to work with the charades theme in the end. Our idea was to send all the groups who came to our ‘event’ to one of four different ‘stations’. At each station, one of the people in each group would have to explain a given word to the rest of their team so that they could guess it. At the first station, this would be done using body language; at the second station, they’d use a pencil and paper; at the third, they’d use plasticine; and at the fourth, they’d use words. We’d time how long it took for the groups to guess their word, and then compile an average time for each group. At this point we felt we’d gone down the sciencey route with our ‘event’, so we decided to go all-in and declare it a ‘search for the most effective language’. At the end of the night, we promised to announce which method of communication was the fastest.

The ever-enthusiastic Danil was very proactive in trying to get people involved. He wasn’t even phased when three consecutive groups totally blanked his ‘how about a game of charades then?’, and walked robotically past us, trying not to make eye contact. Oddly, plasticine was by far and away the most popular choice of communication. This was particularly challenging given that the plasticine that we were working with looked as though it was from the late Stalin era, and was almost rock-solid. Zuzana’s genius response was to go and get a heater from the INTERRA office and use it to heat up the plasticine. In fact, this worked too well. We ended up with a few pools of liquid plasticine, which burned to the touch, and were about as modellable as a carton of milk.

After about half an hour, we were bored. After an hour, we were trying to make molten-plasticine models ourselves, and after another twenty minutes we were competing to come up with the most ridiculous ways of attracting crowds: ‘hey you. Yes you! Do you want a free car? Please, come on over, take a seat. So. Here’s some plasticine…’ Danil eventually resorted to standing in people’s paths, gesturing to me and going ‘he’s English. Wanna play our game?’, which worked dishearteningly well.

When it was finally time to pack up, Cicely arrived. Cicely is a friend from uni, who is also studying in Novosibirsk. She’d come over to visit Krasnoyarsk for the weekend, arriving on the night train at 6:30 in the morning and leaving at 8:30 the following evening. She’d sleepwalked her way around the city earlier that day, and now was somehow still awake enough to make it to the fabled ‘museum night’. I suppose I must be desensitised to the randomness that Krasnoyarsk life can entail, because Cicely pointed out a whole bunch of aspects of the museum night which simply didn’t make sense, but which I’d completely taken for granted. Every now and then we’d walk through a room and she'd say ‘what is this? What’s it there for?’ then I’d spend the next half hour wondering exactly why they did have recorded voices coming out of pipes in a room with a wavy silk floor. And in case you were about to conclude that this is more a question of modern art than of Krasnoyarsk, it might be worth noting that Cicely’s most perplexing question was also her first one: ‘what is this museum night? What’s it for?’ Maybe there was a reason behind this  fancy evening, something that people felt strongly enough about to come to the museum in droves, both as spectators and as organisers of the most varied and incomprehensible ‘events’, linked only by a shared consideration of the enigmatic theme ‘negotiators’. There were tiny rooms where you have to sit down with your eyes closed opposite a volunteer who will read you poetry, there were small tables where you could try your hand at oil painting, volunteers showing guests round blindfolded, and a bunch of people in stripey tops doing some alarming interpretative dancing which made them look possessed. The terrible thing is that I had no response. I’d walked through all of this when we were setting up the stand, and it never once occurred to me to ask ‘what the heck is going on here?’ In fact, I’d been asked off the cuff to organise an ‘event’ with the theme ‘negotiators’ for a ‘museum night’, and my answer was just ‘sure.’ No attempt to understand what they wanted, or why it was happening, I just rolled with it. To say that this is akin to some sort of Russian or Krasnoyarsk mentality which is so used to the inexplicable that it simply accepts stuff and tries to participate in its own way would be patronising and unfair. But something about being here (perhaps because I’ve become accustomed to those subtle differences between life in England and in Siberia, and extended that unconscious recognition to the huge gaping differences too), means that I’ve started taking a lot of the weird and wacky stuff I see for granted. ‘Maybe it’s the influence of the city; maybe it’s just the sudden change in my everyday life, but I’m sure Theo last year would have been asking himself questions about some of these things’, I think to myself as I wander through a corridor with stars projected onto the ceiling and a load of well-dressed visitors sprawled across beanbags fast asleep.