Thursday, February 02, 2006

London Pride Morris - supporting science?

We have another media opportunity. It would involve giving up our practice on 20 Feb to be feted and filmed in a Busby Berkley manner. However, it is all in the cause of science.

A TV production company want to use us to illustrate a scientific principle, for a proposed TV show. The show isn't yet commissioned, but they're making a sample episode, in which they want us to help explain why the sky is blue.

As you all know the sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering. The other colours pass right through the atmosphere, but short wavelength light, at the blue end of the spectrum, is absorbed and re-radiated. So the sky - which only has a colour because it scatters sunlight - is blue.

That's simple enough - but to make it fun, they want to have a team of morris dancers with multi-coloured handkerchiefs. For the scattered light we'd just have blue hankies.

They want to film us from overhead in a sort of Busby Berkeley manner, and edit it into a routine in which the hankies change colour at the clash of a pair of sticks...

They don't have any budget, but their studios are just round the corner in Newman Street (near Goodge Street). They could either come to our place (is the gallery in the back room suitable for overhead filming?) or we could come and do it in their courtyard.

If the series is commissioned, they would do a more polished version of the item, and there could be money. Maybe they could have Morris every week, illustrating a different principle. Maybe they could ditch the presenter and just use us!

I think it sounds fun, and I'm happy to give it a whirl.

I also want to use corner dances to illustrate quantum mechanical interactions between leptons, and maybe cyclotron effects in some rounds figures....

The question is, would it interfere with Ezra's steady progress in learning the morris, and seduce him into the bright lights of showbiz at too early a stage?

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