MIXING large, unusual words with captivating science experiments is what Kerang audiences got to do at the Alphabet of Awesome Science show last Wednesday.
The Alphabet of Awesome Science saw Professor Lexi Con, played by Abby Hampton, outline her curious collection of obscure, rare and often archaic words – one for each letter of the alphabet. Professor Noel Edge, played by David Lampard, then uses the meaning of those words as a starting point for some quirky and spectacular science experiments.
The catch is, however, the show does not run in order of the letters of the alphabet.
“Before the show starts, the professors go out and they basically go up get the audience to select numbers off a bench, and underneath those numbers are letters. That then dictates the pathway for the show, so we as performers really have no idea what is coming next,” Mr Lampard said.
“So we have got 26 skits that can happen in any order.”
Mr Lampard, who is also the creative director of the show, said the purpose behind the performance was to try and get children more science literate through the entertaining medium of theatre.
“My background is as an opera director and musical theatre director as well as a scientist, so this kind of fuses my two careers,” he told the Gannawarra Times.
“I have a passion for science, and obviously I have created a lot of theatre in the past. So for me, pulling those two things together is really really important.
“We know as theatre creators how much theatre can inspire and move people and create an emotional response. So that is what we are trying to do with this is a huge amount of educational content within there, but at the end of the day it is still a theatre experience.
“It’s two characters, its situationally conceptual, but we also hopefully prompt that science conversation and make kids a little less scared of science as a concept and more keen to engage with it in the future.”
The idea of the concept of the show came about after Mr Lampard noticed an unusual phenomenon occurring at a lot of his earlier performances.
“I have done heaps of just standard science shows in the past, and this one fell out of an idea, whenever I threw a big word into the audience, I could hear kids repeating that word and wanting to chew over it,” Mr Lampard said.
“So my instinct was to go, what about a whole show with big words that kids don’t know and use that maybe as a starting point.”
Mr Lampard said the Kerang audience was very receptive, and he had a blast performing to them.
“The show, while it is about the two characters, it is also a lot about the audience, and the Kerang audience was fantastic,” he said.
