Museums Showoff comes to Brighton – sign up to take part!
Museums Showoff is great fun: it's an open mic night where people who work in arts and heritage, or who just love museums, galleries and archives, get together to celebrate and share quirky or entertaining stories.
It's open to everyone: curators, conservators, librarians, collectors, Museum Studies students, archaeologists, social historians, educators, multimedia developers, explainers, visitors, theorists and everyone else associated with museums, galleries and library special collections. It brings together people from different areas of the museum and gallery world, and gets them to show off their skills, knowledge and passions.
I spoke at the first Museums Showoff about Museums at Night, and was overwhelmed by the sheer loveliness of the friendly, supportive crowd. It had a great atmosphere, more like a Fringe comedy show than any other gathering of museum folk I'd ever been to!
I'm delighted to help bring this special night down to Brighton: it'll be taking place upstairs at the Temple Bar in Hove on the evening of Thursday 20th September.
You get 9 minutes on stage to do anything you like about museums or galleries: sign up for your 9 minute slot here!
So, what sort of thing might you do with your 9 minutes of glory? At the last 2 Museums Showoffs, I've marvelled at and been entertained by things as diverse as a shrunken head that smelled like a goat, songs about dinosaurs, a collection of preserved tattooed human skin, and interpreters from the Roald Dahl Museum performing a pantomime version of Cinderella.
If reading this has got you feeling inspired, please join me and sign up now to grab yourself a Museums Showoff slot! You'll need to leave a short comment explaining what you'd like to talk about, but it really is that simple.
If you can't make it to the Brighton event, Museums Showoff will be back in London this autumn too – but I hope to see lots of you at Temple Bar, whether or not you decide to show off!