Origins

Museums are normally quiet, peaceful places, but last night at the University of Cambridge Museum of Zoology, a team of hip-hop and contemporary dancers injected some life into the still artifacts in a show called “Darwin’s Notebook.”

Among fossils and long-dead animal skeletons, Cambridge dance group SIN Cru popped, locked, and flipped its way through the museum and through Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution. Young dancers represented various animals, and in between performances, a beetle—more accurately, a dancer dressed as one—occasionally scurried past your feet, an element inspired by stories about Darwin’s beetle collection, says Ben Taylor (a.k.a. Ben-Jammin'), who's a dancer and one of SIN Cru's choreographers.

Audience members were free to wander around the museum, while dancing and singing acts were dotted around the exhibitions. “It’s very different from sitting in the theater watching,” says Taylor. “You’re in amongst the performance and watching the creatures moving around the skeletons.” Taylor says that in researching the show, the dance crew were taken on a guided tour of the museum by Darwin biographer James Moore, “so we could get a feel for the whole Darwin story.” 

Outside the museum, contemporary dancers wove a complex piece under a gigantic finback whale skeleton, based on Darwin’s book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Outstretched arms and jerking movements showed three women searching for their identity while demonstrating their personalities and behavior. At the same time, young graffiti artists worked on large canvases to celebrate the evolutionary hero. 

Perhaps most impressive was a routine demonstrating the theory Darwin espouses in The Descent of Man. Performed in front of an encasement of human and ape skeletons, each dancer represented a different stage of evolution, from apelike creatures to modern people. The piece was choreographed by a 15-year-old student named Alex Marsh (a.k.a. Marshki), one of the group’s Junior Sinstars, who was the inspiration for the whole event. Earlier this year, the routine got through to the finals of the Young Creatives competition run by Youth Dance England.

—Claire Thomas

Image Credit: Ben Swift/Nonsinthetik