Superwomen of Science @ Fossil Festival, Lyme Regis 2017

Festival programme image

 Superwomen of Science
Minerva Scientifica

Winner of a Three Weeks Editors Award – Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2016

Singing with Fossils!

Our expedition to the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival made us many new friends. These included 100 children from Symondsbury Primary School Dorset, St. John’s Primary School Weymouth,  Mountjoy School Dorset and Musbury Primary School, Devon, and the 20 adults who accompanied them. They arrived in groups on Friday 28th April at The Marine Theatre, Lyme Regis,  and were introduced to the female earth scientists depicted in the “Raising Horizons” exhibition which was displayed in the auditorium.  We all got to know the women very well – and the children created some very special work which you can hear them sing here: –

TrowelBlazers  – A New Song
On April 29th 2017 at 1.30pm “Superwomen of Science – Minerva Scientifica” was performed at Lyme Regis Fossil Festival in the Marine Theatre by electric voice theatre surrounded by the TrowelBlazers exhibition “Raising Horizons”.WP - TB 4Frances M Lynch created a new vocal work for the occasion, celebrating the scientists depicted in the exhibition and inspired by the Festival theme – Time and Tide and Tectonics.

“TrowelBlazers – Time and Tide and Tectonics wait for no woman”

 

Raising Horizons
Time and Tide and Tectonics wait for no woman
TrowelBlazers finding footprints of the past
Archaeology, geology, palaeontology that’s us
Mary Anning had a dog, holds a hammer in her hand
found a lot of dinosaur poo, flying dragons corprolytes
“In every outthrust headland, In every curving beach,
In every grain of sand, there is the story of the Earth”
(Rachel Carson)
The Earth, what is it? How was it formed?
People, who are we? What have we made?
Creatures of the world, where do they come from?
Minerva Scientifica – Raising Horizons

The work is for a live solo voice with a chorus of recorded voices generously donated by  the children of  Symondsbury , St. John’s Weymouth and Musbury Primary Schools, and Mountjoy Special and Community School and by Pippa J Redfern, Danielle Barry, Kathryn Holland, Miranda Melville, Colette Milward, Eloise Ward, Fiona McAlister
all other voices are Frances M Lynch