Darwins Worms

a theatre piece by Bent Architect

Saturday, 3 November 2007

It is now a week since the end of our initial R&D process, and it's been a most exhausting and exhilerating period of work. First up I want to thank everyone involved, the actors, designers evetyone who chipped in from all the various bodies from the Natural History Museum to Henry McGhie at Manchester History Museum, it was all utterly invaluable.

We have come out of the process with a clear idea of the piece of theattre we wish to create, both in terms of content and style, and some very powerful ideas about what we want to say with it. The open workshoip performance we staged on the final afternoon of the R&D project was extremely useful, in terms of just seeing how a small audience responded to some of the ideas we playe dout before them, and also in terms of the feedback session directly afterwards. It soon became clear that having Darwin himself as a character in our piece was possibly not working for us, and we have moved outr thinking on 'where the Darwin is in it all' to his ideas, his legacy, his love of scientific enquiry, rather than him as a character.

We also realize now that we need a much bigger 'vehicle' for our piece to take, that the audience will need to be clear about what the content is and feel comfortable with the science, ie "the Darwin of it all" as someone said in the discussion last week, and that we cannot allow metaphors to simply sit unaided in the piece.

We have some very exciting ideas, and we feel we now have a very strong angle on how to present them in a way that is highly theatrical and powerfully dramatic.
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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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The writer writes:

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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Friday, 31 August 2007

The People:

Mick Martin
Jude Wright
Barney George
Will Docherty
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Tuesday, 28 August 2007

Our theatre piece


Week one at contact theatre.

Our reseach and development week here at Contact Theatre in sunny Manchester has proved incredibly fruitful.

From small beginnings, focussing on the humble earthworm, to scientific chats with Chris at the Interdisciplinary Biocentre at Manchester University, we've lurched between greenhouses and train crashes, LCD screens to tracing paper, and everything inbetween, in an attempt to seek out a visual asthetic for our production.
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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.