Pulse - other projects

Athletes of the Heart
London Yerma's Eggs	www.athletesoftheheart.org

This performance project was conceived, devised and directed by Anna Furse, with a multicultural cast of six, explored infertility and Assisted Reproduction Technologies (ART). The production blended physical theatre and cutting edge video projection both documentary and bio-medical. The title of the piece comes from the Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca’s play 'Yerma' (meaning ‘barren’) about a desperately childless peasant girl in 1920’s pro-natalist Spain. Furse states: “I didn’t want to write a play, impose my authority on a single-track narrative, as this would imply working on but one of so many possible medical infertility factors. I wanted to get under the skin of the subject via the body in performance - expressionistically, viscerally, and reflect complexity and contradiction via a layering of elements. The fragments of Lorca’s play we used have nonetheless become a sine qua non, as his words have such resonance to the theme today. With ART the human heart collaborates with highly invasive medical technology. We are impelled to reconsider our ethical assumptions. We subject our bodies to a necessary splitting – the separation of eggs from ovaries, sperm from testes, reproduction from sexual intercourse – as our sex cells become involved in a spectacular process of fusion and, if successful, growth outside us. In vitro fertiliation (IVF) procedures offer us exceptional insight into our own reproductive processes. Who else gets to see their 48-hour-old pre-embryos before feeling them being inserted into the womb? Rapidly evolving advances in these technologies impact on all areas of our relationships with our bodies, with each other, with life itself. The bioethical debates they provoke are complex and challenging, forcing us to confront the logical outcome of all medical intervention in the human condition.” Project Patrons were Marina Warner and Benjamin Zephaniah. The production played at Riverside Studios in London and the Explore @ Bristol science centre, May–June 2003. It was funded by an Impact Award from the Wellcome Trust. Ancillary activities included bioethical debates and workshops in schools and colleges as well as the publication of an Education Pack.

Events diary

		Theatre Royal Plymouth
		www.theatreroyal.com	Plymouth Imagining the Future

		Script Development Programme In February 2003, four playwrights were brought together with a number of scientists, clinicians, actors and directors to explore potential biomedical subjects for plays. Over a week of activities - which included science lectures and presentations, visits to laboratories and theatres as well as practical drama workshops - four short pieces were written, and then shared with and discussed by, a small invited audience. From these pieces three plays have been commissioned by the Theatre Royal Plymouth’s Education Department. The subject matter of these three scripts includes the social responsibility of scientists and artists, genetic immunity to HIV/Aids, the Swedish eugenics programme and therapeutic cloning. One script has already had an extremely well received public reading in Plymouth (Nov 2003) and two will receive public readings in London in March 2004. It is intended to fully produce all three plays in 2004-2005 as part of Theatre Royal Plymouth’s ‘Theatre of Science’. Schools Science/Drama Festival In March 2004 a Science/Drama workshop was held to introduce Plymouth Secondary Schools to the idea of researching, devising and performing their own short plays based on biomedical science issues. This was a development of the Wellcome Trust’s flagship project for the Year of Science, Science Centrestage, and the Hurst School and Tinderbox Consultants’ Newbury Science/Drama Festival (also supported by the Wellcome Trust). Between March and July, with input from local scientists and support from the Theatre Royal Plymouth’s Education Department, four schools developed their own work on HIV/Aids in Africa, GM crops in the developing world, genetic resistance to cancer in South America, and ADHD and Ritalin. The shows were presented for two nights at the Theatre Royal’s Drum Theatre in July 2003. A presentation of the processes involved will be made at the BA’s Festival of Science 2004 and it is intended to further develop this area of work with a nationally promulgated Education Pack and a second Plymouth Science/Drama Festival as part of Theatre Royal Plymouth’s ‘Theatre of Science’. "highly accomplished… a thought provoking evening"– Plymouth Evening Herald on the Imagining the Future schools' performances

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© Wellcome Trust 2003