Are your children fascinated by the world of construction? Do they know more about backhoe loaders, wreckers, piledrivers, and bulldozers than you do? Probably! Kids love to watch demolition and construction, and with that in mind, we wondered what sort of equipment will be coming into our Museum for our renovation in early August.
Our Manager of Exhibits, Rachel Towns, reached out to DPR Hardin Construction, who will be bringing in the big tools, and learned what they plan to use in order to transform our current space into the NEW Children’s Museum of Atlanta.
For all the high work, including installing new lighting and working on our new mezzanine, Step Up to Science, the crew will have a pair of scissor lifts. This is a mechanized access platform, a portable, hydraulic-powered lift that can be raised into the air directly above the base.
They’ll also be bringing a mini-excavator to tear down certain items and help load debris. These are fairly common in the construction industry. It is a fairly small machine with a backfill blade, and moves on treads.
To remove parts of the flooring and install the mezzanine area, the crew will also have a skid steer. The workers doing this part of the job will be using hydraulic powered concrete saws and chipping hammers for concrete demolition. A skid steer is often known by the brand name “Bobcat,” although quite a few different companies make these vehicles. It’s kind of like the way, for years, everybody called every brand of photocopier a “Xerox machine”!
We’re sorry that, for safety reasons, your children won’t be able to see these machinery in operation. On the other hand, if they’re a little blue because they won’t be able to play in the Museum for a few months, perhaps you can share this post with them, break out the toy construction equipment and blocks and make believe with them that you’re building your own children’s museum! Then join us in late 2015 to see what our new space looks like!
For our last little peek behind the pages of the fairy tales in our current exhibit, Once Upon a Time, we’d like to celebrate one of the best-known of them: Cinderella! The beauty with the special slipper has a very, very long lineage. Stories about her, or women very much like her, have been traced back hundreds of years, to China, Greece, and Egypt.
The Greek-Egyptian version of Cinderella is most likely the earliest, although it lacks many of the elements that are more familiar to us from the European-derived stories of the 1700s. In this tale, the heroine is named Rhodopis, and she was one of many servants of a Greek businessman and politician named Xanthes. He had taken a party to Egypt for business, and Rhodopis, bathing in a spring, had one of her slippers snatched up by an eagle, who then dropped it in the lap of the King of Egypt. The king took this as a sign from the heavens and searched everywhere for the slipper’s owner. Rhodopis, also known as Rhodope and as Doricha, was most likely a real woman, a courtesan (or “hetaera”) who lived about 2600 years ago, but the story about the shoe was probably a tall tale, and we can thank her contemporary, Aesop, for that.
More than a thousand years later, the popular tale had made its way to China. Tuan Ch’êng-shih wrote of a heroine named Yeh-Shen, and her story is closer to the version that we know. Yeh-Shen longs for happiness and marriage since her stepmother is so cruel, and she has some supernatural help from a magical fish who grants her wishes. Yeh-Shen attends a ball wearing a beautiful dress and slippers made of gold, and leaves one behind, in the hands of a charming king, when her allotted time expires.
Yeh-Shen and Rhodopis stories continued to be told, with different names, as the centuries passed, with dozens more iterations than we have room to discuss here. In 1697, Charles Perrault’s version, “Cendrillon,” was published, and it’s pretty much the final form that we know it today. Earlier European versions had replaced the magical benefactor with a kind godmother, but Perrault made her a fairy godmother for the first time. She transforms a pumpkin into a carriage, makes the slippers from glass, turns mice into horses, and so on. Basically all the elements of Cinderella that we all recognize are present in Perrault’s version, which has as strong a claim as any to being the most popular of all fairy tales.
Perrault’s was not the final version, of course, because as we’ve discussed, fairy tales are always changing and evolving. In recent years, Hollywood movies like Snow White and the Huntsman and Maleficent have given classic fairy tales a darker edge, but the Cinderella story was taking on heavier overtones quite early on. In 1812, the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, published their seminal collection of European tales, and the Cinderella version that they included, entitled “Aschenputtel,” is much darker than Perrault’s and all the variants that followed it.
What interests me about Cinderella, though, is that the bleak overtones that some writers and folklorists have added to the story don’t actually seem to stick. As we noted in the first of these features, about Jack and the Beanstalk, many fairy tales actually thrive with a little color and backstory and discussion of motivations, even if it’s sometimes darker. Cinderella, however, shrugs off anybody’s attempts to darken it. Perhaps because the core of the story is so bright and happy, and its tale of wish-fulfillment is so encouraging and promising, that darkness just doesn’t belong to it. Cinderella is arguably the most popular fairy tale in the world, and the happiest.
Most of the fairy tales which Americans grew up reading are of European vintage, and a healthy majority of them were compiled by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, who popularized such classics as “The Little Mermaid,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” among many others. Our current feature exhibit, Once Upon a Time: Exploring the World of Fairy Tales could very easily have been an Andersen-only exhibit, but since the intent is to explore the whole world of fairy tales, from many sources, only one of Andersen’s made the cut, and that’s the wonderful and charming “Thumbelina.”
Thumbelina is an inch-high little girl who popped into this world from barleycorn, and who fends off marriage proposals from various members of the animal kingdom. In Andersen’s story, she is nearly wed to both a toad and then to a mole, but finally finds true love with one of her kind, another fairy who emerges from a flower. Her story is related to a human storyteller by way of a bluebird who had also fallen in love with her, and confides to the man about his broken heart.
Hans Christian Andersen wrote travelogues, novels, and memoirs, but it’s the fairy tales that he’s best known for today. Seven or eight of Andersen’s are probably iconic enough that they’ll be on anybody’s list of classics, but he either adapted or created more than two dozen!
About a hundred years earlier, in France, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont penned the best-known version of “Beauty and the Beast,” a folk tale that had been passed around for several decades. De Beaumont’s novel was first published in 1756, and either excised or simplified much of the Beast’s backstory. Interestingly, as later adaptations, films, and cartoons have been produced, based on the story, many writers have sought to bulk up the story behind the Beast’s hideous appearance. There is actually no need for them to go to all that trouble because Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, decades before de Beaumont, had already given the Beast a family and a lengthy origin that includes political scheming and fairy queens, material that de Beaumont later dropped from her novel.
“Beauty and the Beast” has a pretty good claim to be the most popular and well-known of all fairy tales, maybe sharing equal first billing with “Cinderella.” It’s been directly adapted for films almost a dozen times, with Disney’s 1991 animated feature arguably the definitive version, and has inspired heaven-knows-how-many storybooks for young readers, each of which has its own version of what the Beast looks like, and its own storyline. Singing teapots and candelabras are a fairly recent addition to the story!
In our Once Upon a Time exhibit, your children can crawl through a mole’s tunnel and have an elegant dinner at the Beast’s castle, but don’t forget to take the stories home with you after you have played! How will you create your own version of these stories for your children to remember and, many years from now, share with their own?
Children always surprise me when they play, and when they’re in our Once Upon a Time exhibit, they are always finding new things to do that I didn’t see coming. This past Saturday, my son, who is four, spent the better part of ten minutes hiding behind the big pretend “melon,” hollering “Hey, I’m a melon! Don’t you want to eat me?!” at anybody who passed. Other kids would grab the melon and make a thundering “Gobble, gobble!” or such before my son would jump out to say “I’m really a spider! I tricked you!” and the eater would run away in playful shrieks. Repeat, frequently. Not at all bad for a kid who first heard this story about thirty seconds before he ducked behind/inside that melon.
Anansi, the spider hiding inside that melon, features in dozens of folk tales. He’s typically traced back to western Africa, in the region that is now the nation of Ghana, and made his way to the Caribbean and the colonies that would later become the United States in the 1600s, during the days of the slave trade. Anansi lived in oral telling for hundreds of years before his exploits were printed. He is most often literally a spider, but in some variants from Jamaica, he’s a human with four arms and four legs.
The Anansi story that is spotlighted in the Once Upon a Time exhibit is one of his most popular outings and emphasizes how clever Anansi is to think his way out of a bad situation. Writer Eric Kimmel and artist Janet Stevens have recreated many of Anansi’s adventures in storybooks that are published by Scholastic. In this story, Anansi lets his greed get the better of him, and eats so much of a melon, tunneling his way into it as he munches, that he grows too fat to escape it! The only way out is to have someone shatter the melon, so, pretending to be a talking fruit, he starts mocking all the other animals of the jungle, hoping that one of them will take the mysterious melon to the hot-tempered Monkey King.
Learning about Anansi, I was most interested to learn that, between the Caribbean and many of the communities of the southeastern US, he transformed from a spider into a rabbit. Arguably the most famous of the “Uncle Remus” tales of Br’er Rabbit involve the bunny losing his temper with an inanimate statue, striking it, and getting stuck. Remarkably similar stories are also told about Anansi getting his head, arms, and legs stuck in tar traps.
There’s no consensus among folklorists about precisely why the spider of the 1600s was replaced by a rabbit in the 1800s, but both characters, and many other derivatives, are classic examples of a trickster. The character is sometimes portrayed as good, with a mischievous side, and sometimes amoral, and sometimes downright rotten and needing to learn a lesson, but in all the trickster’s forms, he is smart and clever and can think his way out of any situation, even the ones that resulted from his own poor choices.
Ask a dozen academics why fairy tales have such staying power and resonance and you’re sure to get a dozen different answers. Folk tales go back centuries, and the details shift and change in the telling. As books became available, and later, films were made to adapt the stories, they took on new details, additional characters, and often songs to pad out the running time. But even before the possibilities of print or animation, the tales that we know and love from our childhood had evolved and changed as the stories moved around different cultural groups.
We’re thinking about legends and folk tales a lot this week because we’re so happy to be welcoming back a really popular exhibit, last seen on the Museum floor in 2011, Once Upon a Time…Exploring the World of Fairy Tales. If you missed it the last time around, you’re in for a treat. From an African jungle to a giant’s castle, this unique and educational exhibit focuses on the power and significance of fairy tales throughout history and from around the world. Children will enter an enchanted storybook kingdom where they’ll learn the meaning and history of tales they’ve known all their lives, and others that may be new to them.
The featured tales are “Anansi and the Talking Melon,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Cinderella,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Lon Po Po,” “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” and “Thumbelina.” Over the next few weeks, we will be exploring the origins of all of these fairy tales, starting with “Jack and the Beanstalk.”
“Jack and the Beanstalk” is correctly called an English folk tale, dating to the early 1800s, but the metaphorical “beans” came from all over Europe before the version of the tale that you might find most familiar took “root.” The concept of climbing some kind of plant life to reach an otherwise impossible-to-access realm in the sky is centuries old. Norse mythology considered a gigantic tree called Yggdrasil whose branches were in heaven, as does Buddhist tradition, where it is described as a Bodhi tree. The Book of Genesis offered the tale of Jacob’s Ladder, which also reached heaven. The “Jack and the Beanstalk” section of the exhibit features a small “beanstalk” for children to climb, which is really quite fun. Don’t worry, parents, the beanstalk doesn’t stretch quite so high that your children will vanish into the clouds!
Germanic folklore is positively packed with giants and ogres, most of whom selfishly guard treasure and need to be outwitted or defeated. That makes them the perfect antagonist for a traditional, clever, and sharp-thinking hero. England in the 15th and 16th Century brought us just such a hero in a bright young commoner, typically called Jack, who appeared in dozens of folk tales. (There’s a “house that Jack built,” for example.) Mix in a little Shakespeare – the giant’s traditional warning cry of “Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman” comes almost directly from King Lear – and the basic form of the story is pretty typical of 18th Century folklore from the British Isles.
One of the great things about fairy tales is that despite the usual conclusions like “The end” or “And they all lived happily ever after,” they’re still evolving and adapting, with no end in sight. Jack himself has been replaced in dozens and dozens of adaptations over the last seventy years by everybody from Mickey Mouse to Ernie to Nintendo’s Mario to the casts of The Goodies and The Magic School Bus, and they all bring their own spins to the story, making anybody who remembers the version that they heard or saw then retell it differently to their own children. How many trips did Jack make up to the giant’s castle, anyway? Was it just the one, or did he pilfer all the giant’s treasure over the course of a week? Was the giant a lone miser, or did he have a wife who helped Jack bedevil her cruel husband?
And is it really fair to root for Jack, stealing the giant’s gold and ensuring his grisly end? Some adaptations, including a 1952 Abbott & Costello comedy, include some rather important details about Jack and his community’s poverty, blaming the giant for stealing all the area’s gold. On the other end of the spectrum, a 2001 TV miniseries directed by Brian Henson, shown in America on CBS, painted Jack as the villain of the piece, and sent his descendant back to the kingdom of the giants to return the stolen property and atone for the crime.
How will your child interpret the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk”? How will you retell it to him or her at bedtime? We’re sure you will add a detail or two, and your child will tell a slightly different version to his or her own kids down the line as the stories continue to evolve with each new generation.
Once Upon a Time… Exploring the World of Fairy Tales opens this Saturday, May 16, and runs through July 26. We hope that you’ll come and play with us!
Last week, we announced that The Children’s Museum of Atlanta will temporarily close our doors on August 1 in order to begin an extensive and transformative renovation project (check out the story in the AJC).
I sat down with Karen Kelly, Director of Exhibits and Education, and Rachel Towns, Manager of Exhibits, to get a little more information about what Atlanta will be able to expect when the Museum reopens in late 2015.
How do you start a project like this, and turn it from a daydream into something concrete? What is the procedure like?
Karen Kelly: What you really do is, you look back and you think about what’s working and what’s not working, and what works for people and what doesn’t work for people, because it isn’t really about what our wishlist is, it’s about what the guests and their kids, the families and teachers would like to see. We started out by researching and watching people on the Museum floor, and having teachers and educators come in and do evaluations. We did surveys of over 3,000 people. And then we took all that data, and added our wishlist in, which included “Can we reach a broader age range than we do now?” because we’re really supposed to go to age eight, but our floor doesn’t.
So help me understand the timeline. When did this procedure really start?
KK: We started in 2007. We were having conversations and the Museum had been open for about four years, and we were thinking that it was time for the next step. So we took all of that and then we also visited other children’s museums, to find out what was working for them, what they had done right, what they had done wrong. Sometimes it’s more about what they did wrong, and what didn’t work. We wanted to know what worked for them, and their communities. We went to the Minnesota Children’s Museum, we went to Indianapolis, EdVenture in Columbia, and Creative Discovery Museum in Chattanooga… we went to a lot of different places. We pulled all that in to see what worked, looking at the immersive environments. Then we looked at how other folks had done their campaigns and changed their museums over, and again people were very generous, and gave us their secret, behind-the-scenes ideas on how they put together their grand exhibit master plans. Actually, using a lot of those templates, that’s how I created an exhibit master plan based on all the information we had collected.
Rachel, what were some of the children’s museums that you enjoyed looking at?
Rachel Towns: Oh, I really enjoyed the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. I think that especially they have the whole “0-99” age range down, they have something for everyone and I feel like we took a lot from that. I also enjoyed EdVenture in South Carolina, those are two of the main ones!
As we shifted from looking at what our needs were into a funding situation. did it later come down to what we could afford and what we can envision…
KK: Actually, we kind of did it the other way around. The first step came to take all those ideas and put them into an exhibit master plan, and at that point, we invited different exhibit design firms to bid on helping us make this a reality. We went through what I called “Speed Dating,” so we saw seven exhibit firms in two days. This was with senior staff and our advisory committees. They pitched ideas to us based on what we had sent them.
So I know that one of things we’re going to have is a climbing structure. When you put the call out to the design companies, do you say something like “Bring us your ideas for a climbing structure?”
KK: No, we said we wanted an exhibit that made people stop and say “Wow!,” in the center of the Museum, and it should reflect Atlanta and its position as a gateway to the region and the world. We said it would be nice to have a climbing structure, but we didn’t limit them, and one of the firms did not come up with a climbing structure. This one we’re using – Jack Rouse and Associates – did, but they each came back with different ideas and it was very fun to see. But Jack Rouse got the job, and Rachel can guess why…
Why’d they get it?
RT: They are awesome! They’re very inventive, and they listened to our ideas, and somehow they bring it all to life. They’re taking our concepts and making it all real, in the best way possible. They’re not leaving anything out.
KK: They’re really not, and the thing that I liked about them is first off was their enthusiasm for the job, but also the fact that although they’re a huge, huge company, they work with very small museums, with budgets much less than ours, all the way up to very large ones, enormous ones, so they have a wide range of experience. You can take some of the cool things you can do for lots of money for somebody else, and adapt them for much less money for smaller museum.
With that in mind, one of the things that I’ve heard about is that one of the new continent tables is going to have shifting topography…
RT: Yes, we’ll have a shake table on South America to demonstrate earthquakes!
So when you want a shake table to show earthquakes, does a firm like Rouse say “We know exactly how to do that,” or do they go figure it out…
RT: They came up with it.
KK: It’s a mix, and if they know what to do, they’ll tell you, and if not, they’ll come up with a concept like with the glacier interactive on the Europe table, where they’re going to try and drag stuff through ball bearings or other materials to see what happens to the land when a glacier pushes through, then they ask the fabricator as a partner to see if they can figure out how to make it work.
I’m excited about the rockets. Tell me about those!
RT: Well, on the back side of the climber, there are going to be two rocket stations where children can use an air compression pump to power a rocket up and hit different planets. These will be stretch fabric over a frame, so it will make a tight little drum sound when the rockets hit the planet. They can learn all about trajectory and angles and thrust. We’re hoping to make them out of a Nerf-like material.
Rather than an actual exhibit that you’re looking forward to, is there something about the process that’s coming up, the construction, that excites you?
RT: Absolutely. Having an architectural background, I’m really eager to see the general contractors come in and demolish everything and then build everything, from the mezzanine, and then the exhibits coming in, and seeing everything erected is just a dream to me, just seeing the whole process come to life. It’s something I really look forward to, and even then after that, further in the future, seeing the kids come in and get that “Wow,” it just makes me glow. I want to see the diner, and it’s all so exciting.
KK: Yes, I’m looking forward to seeing stuff that we’ve been talking about since 2007, 2008, and finally having it out there. One of my favorite moments has been last week when we were on the phone to the fabricators and they were describing the continent tables and we were all like, “This is so cool! We’re really going to have this!” And THEY were so excited! We’ve got these great fabricators, Heartland, out in Omaha, Nebraska, and they have done work for other children’s museums. They’re great folks and very calm, but our fabricator was so excited talking about the continent tables, and how they’re going to put the layers together, and make the rivers look like they’re flowing, and it was just real after all the years of planning. And if he’s that excited, just think of how a kid is going to feel, when he pushed the button and the Nile lights up, following the path down to the Mediterranean. It’s going to be so amazing!
Want to keep up with our progress? Visit our website or follow us on social media for up-to-date information and more renderings.
Growing Into the World 