RuminOmics inspires the arts!

Our climate is changing and solutions to keep it healthy is not something only scientists and large companies are working on, it is something that interests children as well. And what better way to raise the issue than through a family art performance?

RuminOmics was one of the inspirational sources for Moxie Brawl, an all-female dance theatre company, to bring science and dance together. The result is ‘Windibops’, a fun and inclusive dance theatre piece for children and their families about flatulence (yes, you read that correctly) and its possible impact on global warming. In the lab of Professor Windibops, moving lab tables, fart jars, cows and test tubes all create a colourful interactive experience, including live experiments (silly and serious), illustration of digestion and if you are desperate there is a fartline for all your farting troubles. During the R&D for the show, Moxie Brawl collaborated with our RuminOmics project coordinator Professor John Wallace, a ‘real’ Professor Windibops to create content for the performance.

In 2014, the company did R&D performances and spent a week in a school in Aberdeen working with school children, talking to them about digestion, bugs in their stomach that create gas, cows and methane and of course: farts.

‘Windibops’ premiered in May 2015 at artsdepot (https://www.artsdepot.co.uk/) in London and had a number of performances during the year with audiences ranging from 30 to 200 people, all families and young people. The show will go on tour in 2016.

Interested? Check out the promo video at http://bit.ly/1Kq44NL!