Dancing Chickens and Battling Ladybirds: Oxford’s First Science Slam

A scientist on a stage.  A few props and a PowerPoint.  Ten minutes to talk.  The clock starts…NOW!

This is the setting for a Science Slam – a competition among scientists to communicate their work as clearly and engagingly as possible.  The trick is not just to translate complex ideas and academic jargon into a story comprehensible to a lay audience, but also to entertain, intrigue, and delight them.  Slamming is about learning, but it’s about fun too, about making science scintillate, sparkle, surprise, and inspire.

Science Slams began in Germany, spread across Europe, and recently hopped the channel into the UK.  Oxford’s first Slam took place last week in the Old Fire Station’s black box theatre.  The atmosphere was part game show, part public lecture.  The event’s organizer – a joke-cracking German neurobiologist who is himself an experienced slammer – bounded onto the stage, accompanied by dramatic music and lighting effects, as if he was about to host an episode of Jeopardy.  Six contestants – all biologists of one variety or another, all pursuing PhDs or postdocs at Oxford – waited nervously in the wings.  One by one, they took the stage and, for ten minutes, pitched their research to the audience.  Their goal was to make us understand their work and its importance – and, at the same time, to keep us all entertained, laughing at geeky jokes or gripping the edge of our seats as the drama of an experiment unfolded before our eyes.

The range of approaches the contestants took to communicating their work was as impressive as the variety of the work itself.  James Cooke shared his passion for unraveling the mysteries of the cerebral cortex through colorful diagrams and awe-inspiring factoids (did you know that the human brain can do with a light bulb’s-worth of power what a supercomputer needs an entire power station’s output to compute?).  Peter Oliver, also a neuroscientist, taught us about the science of sleep using a sharpie-decorated pumpkin to model the brain and a flashing bike light to model the body clock.  Holly Kirk illustrated her work on foraging behaviour in shorebirds by recruiting two friends to act out an experiment in which the students’ search for beer cans on the stage stood in for the birds’ quest for fish in the ocean.  And paleobiologist David Legg strove to convince the audience that arthropods are cool by showing off his fossil tattoo and regaling us with tales of the frustrations of fieldwork.

Although appreciative of all of the slammers’ presentations, the audience narrowed the competition down to two front-runners: Cedric Tan and Sally Le Page.  Tan, a zoologist and dancer who has made several award-winning dance videos about his PhD research, presented a skit entitled “Chicken Sex: Variety Is the Spice of Life.”  Accompanied by a four-piece band, Tan and his ensemble danced, sang, and recited their way through an experiment on whether bringing along a male relative as a wingman is a successful courting strategy for chickens.  The skit opened with a bearded scientist explaining the experiment in rhyming verse.  Enter the experimental subjects: two brother chickens, rapping about the night of love awaiting them, and a hen, appropriately adorned with a white feather boa.  The brothers’ courtship of the hen is interrupted by the arrival of a foreigner (Tan, playing the role of a Chinese cock that the scientists introduced to their flock of British chickens).  The foreign male woos the hen with dance moves rather than vocal skills, and, as it turns out, she prefers quickstepping to rapping.  The audience was delighted by the skit – although the Q&A afterwards was necessary to clarify just what the experiment was all about.

It was Le Page who took home the prize in the end, however.  Her presentation, “You Can Run But You Can’t Hide: A Story About Ladybirds,” was as entertaining as Tan’s but managed to pack in a good deal more scientific detail, thus achieving the dual goals of a Science Slam – to both educate and entertain.  Le Page is an accomplished science communicator, maintaining a website that includes a blog, photos, and videos, all aimed at communicating her enthusiasm for science and for the natural world.  That experience showed in the Slam: Le Page performed a funny, exciting, and informative presentation with a soundtrack perfectly timed to the slides and to her narration.  She took an experiment that would strike most as tedious and dull – an attempt to model competition between native and invasive species of ladybirds in a lab petri dish – and wove a dramatic story of a Hunger Games-style fight for survival in an arena (the petri dish) where competitors (the native ladybird, the invasive ladybird, and aphids) battle for their lives while being avidly watched by an omnipresent audience (the scientists).  Le Page certainly had me on the edge of my seat, and she managed to educate me about the relative merits of different ladybird survival strategies – fight versus flight, run versus hide – so engagingly that I barely noticed just how much I was learning.

This is just the beginning for science slamming in the UK; the next Oxford Slam is scheduled for early 2014.  The first Slam was a spectacular showcase of just how varied and creative slams can be.  With these performances as inspiration, the next round promises to be even better.  Want to try your hand at slamming?  Then keep an eye out for a call for slammers – and remember that “science” here is broadly defined; researchers from any field are welcome.  So whether you’re a biologist, historian, mathematician, or musician, start pondering how you could entertain an audience with the story of your research – in words, in pictures, in music, or even in dance.