March 2012 public engagement events

Our monthly round-up of upcoming events supported through our public engagement awards.

Let’s start with a bang, namely The Big Bang UK Young Scientists & Engineers Fair in Birmingham next week. An exciting new live show ‘Science Junkie: In The Zone’ plays on Thursday 15 and Friday 16 March at the Fair. This one-hour show uncovers the physiology and sports engineering that makes an Olympic & Paralympic athlete a champion. Funded by a Wellcome Trust People Award the show is part of our In The Zone project, a major initiative linked to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. ‘Science Junkie: In The Zone’ will also be performed at the Cambridge Science Festival at 10am on Saturday 17 March in the Babbage Lecture Theatre.

Action Dog’s touring exhibition ‘Flavour Sense-Nation’ will also be at The Big Bang Fair from 15-17 March. The exhibition explores the science behind your senses – taste, smell, touch, sight and sound – to find out how they react with each other when different flavours and textures are thrown into the mix.

Elsewhere at Big Bang Fair is ‘Trauma Surgery: The Science of the Bleeding Obvious!’, another People Award-supported exhibition. Traumatic injury is the number one cause of death worldwide for those aged 5 – 44 and kills over 18,000 people each year in the UK. This exhibit demonstrates how leading research from The Royal London Hospital’s trauma centre is working to understand haemorrhage in trauma and improving patient outcomes. Interactive models and games allow the audience to step into the world of trauma surgery and see for themselves the techniques and practices used to save a life.

If trauma surgery isn’t your thing, how about coronary angiography? Coronary angiography is an advanced procedure where a flexible wire (inserted into a groin artery under local anaesthetic) is used to image the heart’s arteries and treat any blockage. ’Your heart in their hands or your hands in their heart’ is an interactive performance, also on at Big Bang Fair, allowing the audience to experience coronary angiography from two different perspectives – as a member of the team performing it, and as a patient undergoing it. A realistic simulation presents this closed world through a performance bringing together the latest in simulation technology with the artistic eye of a theatre director.

Completing the set of People Award-funded Big Bang shows is ‘The Bionic Ear Show’, an award-winning interactive educational show about the ears. Created with the support of a People Award in 2007, the show has been touring ever since. It demonstrates how sound travels through the ear to the brain, what happens in different parts of the hearing system, and how each part of the system can fail or ‘break down’.

Meanwhile in Cambridge, the Cambridge Science Festival is on. CHaOS (Cambridge Hands On Science) (17 March 10am-5pm. Free) will take over the zoology labs of the University of Cambridge. The hands-on event is a chance for adults and children to explore and experiment. CHaOS will also be delivering talks/demos throughout the day, some with a biomedical theme including ‘What happens if you cut off a blood supply?’ at 10:45am and ‘Living Things: what’s inside a cell?’ at 3pm.

Coming up this weekend, Richard Fenwick’s film Exhaustion, which chronicles a professional athlete’s journey from rest, to exhaustion, and recovery will be premiered at the AV Festival in the North East at a screening with Q&A on Sunday 11 March.

Also on this weekend, a work-in-progress performance of Caroline Horton’s play about anorexia, Mess will be part of the Bite Size Festival at Warwick Arts Centre on Sunday 10^th March 2012.

Elsewhere, on 17 March Stilled, a photographic dance performance reflecting on the scientific process of X-ray crystallography will be on at Siobhan Davies Studios in London from 1-8pm. Featuring an improvised light and sound score, Stilled is a meditative cross-art form event exploring perception, movement and stillness. The piece was originally commissioned by Wellcome Collection and the 2012 tour is supported by a Wellcome Trust People Award. And if you’d like to hear more on the themes and origins of this work, there’ll be a discussion on Friday 30 March between the choreographer/designer David Harradine and guests from across the arts and science.

Incontinental, “an incontinental cabaret of stories, situations, song, science and a spot of ballroom dancing, exploring everyday control and what it means to lose it” by Kazuko Hohki will be on as part of the Sprint Festival at Camden People’s Theatre, London on 21–22 March.

The People Award funded short film ‘Me Or The Dog’ will be playing at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. Martin Clunes is the voice of a dog who challenges his owner with the prospect of him actually being a real ‘talking dog’, and in order to do so sets out to prove that Tom’s girlfriend is cheating on him. It’s playing before features on general release starting on 23 March.

Funded by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award, Going Dark, a one man show exploring vision (and loss of it) through the story of an astronomer is showing at the Young Vic in London until 24 March. Developed by Sound&Fury, you can read our blog post from the Directors.

Daria Martin’s films Sensorium Tests, about mirror touch synaesthesia, and Soft Materials are showing as part of her solo show currently at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes until 8 April 2012.

Analogue Theatre’s 2401 Objects, a story about memory, brain donor Henry Molaison and brain surgery for epilepsy, is touring the UK throughout March, April and May. Chrissie Giles reviewed this when it played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year.

Advanced notice

Autobiographer by Melanie Wilson is a performance about life refracted through the lens of dementia. The show is on at Toynbee Studios, London, from 17 April to 5 May 2012. In the meantime, you can read our Q&A with Melanie.

Still on

Body Pods, from Fuel Theatre, a 12-month series of podcasts by artists and scientists about different parts of the body continues. There’s one podcast each month (we featured the heart one in February), distributed through the Guardian and Time Out websites and through listening stations in various venues.

Many thanks to our Senior Public Engagement Advisor Tom Ziessen and Arts Advisor Meroë Candy for the information.