What's Jugular?
Jugular: Joining the Head and the Heart is an award-winning production company with a vision to showcase and develop rich interactions between cutting-edge science and newly-commissioned arts. We create cross-disciplinary salons, immersive and entertaining performances, interactive installations, creative and educational workshops and alongside, offer cross-disciplinary consultation on events and marketing campaigns. Jugular values science, art, philosophy and entertainment, as equally valid and fundamental parts of culture, each most fruitfully pursued in dialogue with the others. The underlying fundamental in all our work, is to facilitate the absorption of academic research in an authentic and embodied fashion through the medium of culture, so anyone can relate in their everyday lives. We continually engage and entertain through our online publication and art/science archive video channel.
The inspiration and concept is described in a Tedx talk on Multidisciplinary Creativity by Artistic Director/Founder neuroscientist, actor and musician Dr Shama Rahman.
We have had 5 festival commissions (British Science Festival, Secret Garden Party, Wilderness, Green Man, Crawley STEMFest), 4 sold-out London shows including a feature in British Science Week and been awarded an ‘Institute of Physics Public Engagement Award'. Performance genres span theatre (scripted, devised and physical), storytelling, spoken word, music, dance and circus (contortion, aerial, juggling).
We have worked with over 40 artists and academics from UCL, Imperial, Oxbridge, Sussex and Cardiff. With this network, we develop and deliver unique workshops to schools, universities and the general public teaching science through embodied kinaesthetic learning, using theatre-based improvisation and storytelling techniques.
The frontiers of technology and design have been an inherent inspiration to Jugular's creative process and we have featured tech startups in performances, created innovative interactive experiences and delivered workshops in the science of creativity using theatre, within design agencies, events at London Design Festival, British Science Festival, Digital Shoreditch and Wellcome Trust funded project 'Hack the Senses' on redesigning perception with sensory science.
We create unique bespoke events for you and your company with a cross-disciplinary ethos at the heart of the vision. We bring together cutting-edge innovation and research to entertainment. Companies we have worked with include Google and Gensler, and EU-funded initiative NERRI.
Our current productions include the Rhythms of Life series, and monthly informal debate Dialogue.
Prevous productions include the Experiment series.
People
Dr Shama Rahman
Founder & Artistic Director
Professional actor, musician and neuroscientist with a multi-disciplinary PhD in the "Neuroscience and Complex systems of Creativity".
Dr Shama Rahman founded The Gung Ho Down an umbrella creative production company in 2008, under which she subsequently founded Jugular: Joining the Head and the Heart focussing on cross-disciplinary creative production.