Hoorah! It’s nearly spring. The days are longer, there are buds on the trees, birds are singing, I’m sure there will be warm weather, sun and blue skies very soon… We should celebrate! What better way to do that than spend an evening listening to 10 amazing people entertain you with stories and songs about museums?

Museums Showoff will be at the Wilmington Arms, 69 Rosebery Ave, EC1 on Wednesday March 6th. Doors are at 7pm. Entry is free, but we will be collecting on the door for our charity of the month, Peckham Shed, which runs innovative theatre workshops in a supportive place for 5-17 year olds living in and around SE London. We strongly suggest a donation of £5.

Strutting their stuff on stage in an extravaganza of behind-the-scenes revelations, wit and wisdom are:

Steve Cross – Your compère for the evening. Steve tells jokes, eats sweets and wears silly t-shirts, sometimes simultaneously.

Gemma Holland & Meredith Wood – Join a dynamic duo from the Museum of Brands in Notting Hill for an interactive and explosive show-case of consumer history. Meet items from the collection and hear wondrous facts about the unique and vast treasures on display as well as win free tickets to the Museum. Described by visitors as a “hidden treasure” the team is here to show you that everything has a story waiting to be told.

Tim Gardom – Take to the streets! The right place for culture is outside a museum. Tim
Gardom explains, attempting the Pecha Kucha format (20 slides, 20 seconds per
slide).

Dan Schreiber – For the last 5 years I’ve been co-running a museum on radio called The Museum Of Curiosity. We have a great collection including the Big Bang when it was the size of a grapefruit, the first story ever told, and Nothing. I’ve recently noticed that other museums have some pretty good stuff too. So I’ve made a list of things I’d like to plunder from them all.

Tom Miles – I will talk about the project to digitise a representative sample of the Museum of Writing’s collection, introducing objects from the collection and discussing how social media has enabled the collection to be brought to a wider audience.

Dan Simpson – I’m going to be talking about how videogames are (and are not) represented in museums / galleries, and raising the whole ‘are videogames art?’ type questions. But, you know, in a funny way.

Anouk Gouvras – I work at the Natural History Museum, one of 300 scientists. I will talk a bit about working at the NHM, some random fun facts, how the NHM became involved in controlling a debilitating parasitic disease in sub-Saharan Africa (Schistosomiasis aka Bilharzia), the Schistosome Collection at the NHM and there may be a very geeky Schisto song at the end.

Sarah Punshon – Telling lies and resisting dinosaurs; or, what happened when a theatre director was let loose on the Natural History Museum for a year. Complete with pictures of small happy children and a game of Spot the Scientist.

Jack Ashby – Natural history museums, whilst being awesome, are deeply unrepresentative of nature – it’s often said that 95% of known animal species are smaller than your thumb, but have you noticed how most museums fill their displays with big animals? To right this wrong, the Grant Museum has built The Micrarium – a beautiful back-lit cave displaying 2323 microscope slides containing amazingly prepared miniscule animals – hoping to give some attention to the huge diversity of tiny lives.

Martin Austwick – Singer-songwriter Martin Austwick has never worked for a museum, although he has been in one, and has played at the British Library (which is like a museum for books) until everyone started shushing him and security arrived. He has songs about old things (well, Gutenberg’s printing press) and dust (well, Brownian Motion) so he imagines he’ll feel right at home at Museum Showoff.

Say BOO to the January blues. Forget that it’s cold and dull. Cheer yourself up by watching amazing acts from across the museums world reveal behind-the-scenes stories and incredible projects.

Museums Showoff 5 will be at the Wilmington Arms, EC1 at 7pm on January 17^th. Taking to the stage for this extravaganza of objects and exhibitions are:

Steve Cross – will be our compère for the night. What will he say about the Science Museum this time?

Nick Poole – Yes (Culture) Minister:  9 minutes, 10 years, 7 Secretaries of State for Culture Media and Sport. A fast-paced review of the glittering academy of unforgettable stars that have held the Government’s top culture job. What have they done with it? Why did they do it? Where are they now? What does it take to be a Minister for Culture? And which one of them once accused me of something he liked to call ‘unthink’?

Katherine Curran – “Heritage Smells or The Terrible Fate of Tropical Ken”. Delivered entirely in verse, this will be both a description of my research project and an account of the dreadful things that happened to a Ken doll who found himself in one of UCL’s laboratories.

Danny Birchall ­– Why wrap the Freud Museum in ropes made of doll’s hair? Danny will present a lightning tour of artists’ interventions in museum spaces, from notorious pisstaker Marcel Duchamp to neo-neuroticist Alice Anderson.

Alice Bell ­– Why the very idea of a science museum is just plain silly, but if we’re going to have them they should be less like Harrods and more like a junk yard.

Alison Boyle & Harry Cliff – Higgs bosons, hadrons, high-energy physics … it’s a huge and incredibly complex machine, with lots of people busy doing things that nobody else understands. But that’s enough about the Science Museum. Find out what happened when Harry met Ali and the world of museums collided with the world of CERN.

Researchers in Museums – Gemma Angel, Sarah Chaney, Suzanne Harvey, Felicity Winkley, Lisa Plotkin, Tzu-i Liao and Alicia Thornton are a UCL-based gestalt entity whose mission is to engage the public with their research and UCL’s museum collections in ways never before explored. Bringing together their expertise in diverse subject areas, the team presents “Foreign Bodies” – their very first interdisciplinary group-curated exhibition, which opens in February 2013 at UCL.

Peter Ride – #Citizencurators was a twitter project that ran during the 2012 Olympics organised by Museum of London and Univ of Westminster. It’s goal was to collect Londoners response to living in London during the games – a social history for the museum collection. But it also also asked the question how can a museum collect tweets – as database, a visual object or a string of individual lines?

Hayley Kruger – is going to talk about some of the stranger steps on the path that paved the way to modern blood donation and provides a salutary warning of why it is unwise to be related to an anatomist and predecease them…!

The Ministry of Curiosity – will be recruiting for the newly founded collective dedicated to London’s museum social scene.

Jason Webber – Come the inevitable Zombie Apocalypse, which Museum will give you the best chance of survival? Who has the collection and venue to hold off the slaving hordes of the un-dead?

Entry is free, but we will be collecting on the door for our charity of the month, which is 1A Arts Association, a community initiative helping people develop skills through arts projects. We strongly suggest a donation of £5.

Hello! Welcome to the brand new Museums Showoff blog. For the last six months we’ve been sharing space on the Science Showoff blog, but now we’ve got our own home. Look here to find out everything about our gigs – announcements of new dates, how to sign up, line ups for the next gigs, and more.

If you want to find out who’s already strutted their stuff for us, and how they did it, read the posts below, which have been reblogged from Science Showoff.

If you’re wondering what on earth Museums Showoff is all about, click on the What is Museums Showoff tab at the top.