History reignited

The Nature Museum

FACT and fiction clash dizzyingly in The Nature Museum, a one-hour performance lecture that takes you on a whirlwind journey of the natural history of Singapore. Created by the Institute of Critical Zoologists (ICZ), an organisation dedicated to ecological causes, the lecture covers a lot of ground - from how Mount Krakatoa's eruption in 1883 coloured the Singapore sky, to the number of insects living in an ordinary Singapore home today (apparently more than 100). Throughout the lecture, the ICZ members - artist Robert Zhao Renhui and playwright Joel Tan - dispense facts and factoids that range from the fascinating to the bizarre. They show you a rare specimen of a white cockroach which they say thrived during the land reclamation efforts of the 1970s, and then a large fulgurite in the shape of a penis from the same era.

They introduce you to an old pigeon trap called The Magic Prince that was operated with a series of magical Malay chants. Then they show you its frightening contemporary: a large, heavy, infra-red remote-controlled contraption capable of catching at least 10 pigeons - and possibly maiming a small child too. They explain their "chicken rice archaeology", their study of the bone structure of Singapore chickens through the reconstruction of found bones on various plates of chicken rice across the island. And if you've been suppressing your sniggers this far, the "chicken rice archaeology" would surely crack you up.