Het Raadsel van Alles Wat Leeft (9+)

a performance about the evolution based on Jan Paul Schutten’s book of the same name.

‘How long have people roamed the earth and haven’t bacteria been here much longer? What is life exactly, how did it originate, how do living things procreate and why does everything that lives die in the end? Does Jos Grootjes from Driel look like a shark? Or does he resemble the bacteria in his socks? Why is it sometimes shrewd to die? How do you make a dog that weighs seventy kilos? Why do all babies look alike? What is the secret of the ground beetle Brachinus crepitans? Why do women want to bear the child of a murdering idiot? How do you make a fly with extra wings? These are just some of the major questions that will be tackled  in The Riddle of Everything that Lives.

In a ‘Wunderkammer’ full of rarities, stuffed animals  and embryos in formalin, a Paramecium meets a deer with an enormous pair of antlers. We’ll explain how DNA and RNA work using letter pasta and perform an experiment on a natural sponge that shows how it continually recovers from various attempts to destroy it.
Difficult questions about evolution are approached didactically and despite (and perhaps due to) the general chaos, you learn an awful lot. All that knowledge triggers even more questions. It promises to be an ode to scientific research.