Darwins Worms

a theatre piece by Bent Architect

Saturday 1 September 2007

Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre



This is where our new friend Chris Knight works - he's cool. He studys evolution in real time. Thanks Chris for explaining your work to a layman like myself! Here's his ace essay that put me on to him... worm essay though I must point out he's moved on from worms - they ain't fast enough for him! J!
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During the course of this week, we have looked at how the ideas and central themes of evolution and natural selection and the forces that work in them, could work for us as a dramatic entity.

‘Cataclysmic event’, ‘random action’, ‘chance’, ‘energy’ and ‘brute force’ - these are all terms that we pulled from our reading and research of how natural selection works, but they also all have a great meaning in terms of how character & dramatic action is generated too. What if our play was catapulted into life by a huge cataclysmic seemingly random chance event? One that generates masses of energy and propels our characters onto consequential courses of action that they do not appear to have any control over?

October 1st,

The paragraph above was written a month ago at the end of August. Well it’s now the end of September and things are evolving steadily! We’ve just spent 2 days working with 3 actors on creating and exploring characters in further development of the themes and ideas behind the piece. I shan’t go into huge detail now as to what or who they are but suffice it to say they are designed so as to illustrate the themes of the piece we are intending to create, which is ultimately about Darwinian theory, so each of them has a role to play in terms of the instinctive desire for order that human beings have and search for in the universe around them, the search for ‘spiritual meaning’, also they represent the brutality of random chance but also the sheer beauty of it too, the sheer violent chaos that can assuage us both in terms of the external world we live in where wars and upheaval subvert the normal order, but also the chaos within is too if direction and hope is absent.

It was a fascinating and very thrilling weekend, I spent the whole of it scribbling down notes and Jude has lots of ideas from it as well, we are hell bent on doing another week at the end of October, the 22nd to the 26th to be precise, at Wakefield Arts Centre, where we’ll then have the designer, Barney, a smashing chap and the film maker Will in for the week too as well as the actors and science people to draw upon too.

I want to thank the actors, Richard Vergette, Mini Suhawardy and Adam Beresford for their efforts and input over the last 2 days, they will all be with us again later in the month and their contribution over the past 2 days has been excellent, moved all sort of things on for us. Some of the thoughts that have come to us over the past couple of days that came out of the work they were doing by accident couldn’t or wouldn’t have emerged by any other process and that’s what it’s all about!

Suffice it to say that this whole process is very exciting and altogether stimulating!
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DARWIN’S WORMS

2009 is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. There are many things planned to mark it and many of them are beginning later in 2008. The keenest brains in the land tell us that the man’s life, legacy and work are more important now than ever and we believe this project to be of utterly vital current importance and necessary relevance to the issues confronting us now, both in terms of the environmental problems and also the philosophical questions as regards evolution and the ongoing assault on reason that some aspects of religion seeks to make.

One of the many statements that abound on the subject of Charles Darwin is that his ideas and view of the world touches and shapes our daily lives in every degree, it is in many ways through his eyes that we see the world.

Darwin was fascinated by worms. He used to lay them out on his billiard table and ask his children to play the bassoon and the piano to them and then study their reactions! Any man who could do this clearly has a sense of humour, but his interest in them was more to do with the way in which the worm in it’s own miniscule fashion, affects and shapes the very earth we live and walk upon. For the earth itself has passed through and been fed by the worms.

It seems to us that there is an important truth here in fact several. That the smallest of God’s creatures ( geddit? ) is as important in the grand scheme of things, and that it is as vital to look at the micro in order to gain some understanding of the macro.

We have in mind the beginnings of a story about a young boy and an old man whose allotment the boy consistently vandalizes. It is too glib and easy and not relevant at this stage to say that these two characters in anyway represent Darwin and the worms! They might, but they might not. It is our intention to work hand in hand in terms of both exploring and deepening our understanding of Darwinian evolutionary theory, of his broader philosophical implications, especially in relation to man’s relationship with this earth, this clearly relates to our understanding of climate change too, at the same time as developing characters, narratives and stories in relation to the above two characters that have a sharply contemporary feel. At this point we can perhaps go no further on these subjects as we simply don’t know at this stage. It is also why we feel it is imperative to have some genuine scientific input to the process from one whose primary speciality is Darwinian science and philosophy.

It is not our aim to get hung up on dry science. We are about creating lively, irreverent visually exciting and very funny theatre!

In an age of increasing religious fervour, of faith schools and creationist theory seizing the agenda ( where no less a person than the President of the United States can say of the creationism versus evolution debate that he believes both points of view should be taught and we are allowing state funded schools to be privately run by creationists! ) the importance of asserting not just the secular principle is also on our agenda, but of asserting the value of science over religious fundamentalism. The idea of Intelligent Design is basically creationism by another name.

That is perhaps as far as we can go on the ideas and initial themes of the fortnight. We will be developing them as time goes by right up to the beginning of the fortnight and then obviously throughout.

Our eye is on the entertaining and intelligent at all times. We do not want to spout scientific theory just to prove how intelligent we are, we believe this is a vital and extremely prescient subject matter and we want to tell a story that engages an audience on a deep and very thoughtful level about the world we all live in today, about how our individual lives are all interlinked and can make a difference if we choose to make them do so.