Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1835.
Melissa Nightingale takes a curiouser and curiouser journey down the rabbit hole
You can see a Wonderlandthemed exhibition at Te Papa this summer. “There’s something disorienting and tension-building about walking through the exhibition,” writes Melissa Nightingale, who checked it out in Singapore.
In front of me are two doors, and I have a choice to make. If I’m feeling “adventurous”, it’s the door on the left, according to the museum staff member at the beginning of the Wonderland exhibition in Singapore.
And I am. With a feeling of childlike excitement, I crouch down beside the tiny door and push it open, crawling through on my hands and knees. Down the rabbit hole I go. I’m not the first person to shuffle through the start of the exhibition this way. I wonder whether anybody has taken the regular-sized door on the right, or whether, like me, everyone decided to channel their inner Alice and take the more nostalgic path.
The travelling exhibition, which will open at Te Papa on December 7, is magic from the beginning. Wonderland celebrates the screen history of English author Lewis Carroll’s timeless stories — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) — in an experiential exhibition. Even from the moment you walk in, before you choose which door you want to enter, you are sucked into Wonderland.
Former Auckland girl Malia Reinders’ favourite part, in fact, is the very first thing you see when you walk through the entrance.
Malia, 7, and her mum Sieva Jackson visited the exhibition at the Art Science Museum in Singapore, where they have been living for three years.
“I liked it when we saw Alice, she was swirling,” said Malia, referring to the black-andwhite moving spiral projected on to the first wall, with a silhouette of Alice tumbling in the middle.
The exhibition made such an impact on Malia, she immediately wanted to do it all again once she came out, ranking it “100,000” out of five. “I liked everything,” she announced.
It’s not hard to see why. Even for children who haven’t grown up with the movies and books, Wonderland has something for all ages.
For the adults it’s the fascinating history behind the classic tale and its many renditions, for the kids it’s whirlwind of sensory
experiences.
There’s something disorientating and tension-building about walking through the exhibition. Sounds play all over the set. In the distance you hear the sound of someone knocking loudly on a door. In the background a clock chimes. Above you, a pocket watch ticks urgently.
The noises are always moving, taking you by surprise when it sounds like someone is knocking right behind you.
After I crawl through the tiny door, there are several more to choose from. I take the far left one, and am immediately confused. Am I looking into a mirror? No. There’s the faint image, past my reflection, of a teenager on the other side. He hesitantly raises a hand and waves, and I wave back.
The fun of Wonderland is that you’re not only interacting with the exhibition, but with the visitors around you.
At one point I bend down to look at a framed hole in the wall — is it a picture? A mirror? A window? I’m startled to see a face looking back at me. She is just as startled. It is simple: a hole. We could reach through and shake hands if we wanted to.
Throughout the exhibition there are numerous doors to open, drawers to pull out, and places to close yourself in. The walls are filled with photographs, illustrations, pieces of writing and more, all telling the story of how Alice in Wonderland came to be.
There are projected movie clips on the walls showing old movie scenes, some silent and sepia-toned.
I sit in a room filled with eight wooden, leather-bound chairs and watch a scene flicker across the wall, while the sound of the projector whirs behind me. I can hear an eerie, echoing dripping sound somewhere nearby.
You could spend a long time in Wonderland and still feel there’s more to see.
There are more than 300 unique objects including costumes, puppets, magic lantern projectors, props, concept drawings, firstedition publications and illustrations, and animation cels.
Carroll’s tales have been made into more than 40 films and 30 television programmes. The exhibition also charts the evolution of special effects from pre-cinema and silent films, to animation, puppetry, live action, and CGI. It ranges from the cute and child-friendly to the bizarre and somewhat disturbing. I watched one film clip in which the white rabbit tries to cut off Alice’s arm with a hacksaw.
There’s a Mad Hatter’s tea party involving an immersive light display, and a long wall with card soldiers running back and forth, painting roses from red to white. Visitors can have their photo taken and pasted on one of the card soldiers, then watch as their own face zips across the screen.
Sieva Jackson said it was “like a sensory overload” for Malia.
“It was just fabulous,” she said. Jackson’s favourite part was seeing all the pictures she’d never seen before, telling the story of the people behind the tale.
“I just think it’s a fun thing to do with your child because I would have grown up with it, and she’s seen bits and pieces of it . . . it’s nice to have something in common that you can share together, from my childhood to hers.
“I think it’s one of those things where you can go through it again and again and find something different each time.”
Jackson recommended Kiwis visit the exhibition when it opens in Wellington, saying it was great to learn the behind-the-scenes facts of the story.
Wonderland was conceived and created by Jessica Bram and Sarah Tutton at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne, and designed by exhibition and