This sounds fun: a music theatre production illustrating Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Based on Haydn’s The Creation, Darwin’s Dream
imagines the founder of evolution meeting modern children and
challenging them to explore how his theory has advanced since his
death in 1882. Their quest takes them from the oceans where life is
believed to have begun, to Africa to meet a fossil hunter looking
for evidence of the earliest humans.
It’s also got a dance about DNA. Unfortunately, it’s in London…let’s at least have some of the music put on the web!
All the fun stuff is in London!
Richard Dawkins is giving a lecture on “The Selfish Gene; 30 Years On” in a few weeks. In London. Rats.
Science meets the arts again. How much more poetry in 4 billion years’ history than in 6000 or so. Dawkins mentioned this idea in “Unweaving the Rainbow”.
Science hardly gets a look-in, in music – even Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” suite was based on the planets’ astrological assosiciations!
Reminds me of the “Bolero” sequence in Bruno Bozetto’s animated film,Allegro non troppo. Neat little movie, though the sequence with the abandoned cat broke my heart.
What about Monty Python’s Galaxy Song (from The Meaning Of Life). Or the recent silly season news item of someone complaining the lyrics to another song weren’t accurate enough. Saint-Saens’ inclusion of Fossiles in his Le Carnaval Des Animaux was quite fun.
I rather enjoy They Might be Giants’ song “The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas”, also commonly labeled as “Why Does the Sun Shine?”
It’s also got a dance about DNA.
Please please please not the Translation Jive Sutra. Please.
Well, it is England, so I’m kind of hoping for something with jaunty fieldhands wearing bells and waving hankies.
Fieldhands dressed in 4 different colour costumes, one of each pair holding each end of the neckerchief/bond, only the two colour combinations of each, dancing in many interweaving lines & circles, eventually forming a kind of representation of the twin helices?
There are other science songs. Here’s one of my favourites: The Elements– here animated in Flash, too. And Carl Djerassi has written some plays about science – not to mention Brecht’s play about Galileo!
I’ve penned a full-length parody of The Mikado about evolutionary biology–and let me tell you: writing “I’ve Got a Little List” was very fun! *grin*
I saw Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffman’s play Oxygen when it was given its world premiere in San Diego. It was quite excellent.