15 July, 19.00–21.00

19.00 Dirty stories from the Crick Crack Club

20.00 Drinks reception and a chance to see the Dirt exhibition

21.00 Wellcome Collection closes

An infant proudly shows its parent its latest potty production; the whole of life on Earth depends on a few inches of grubby soil… It seems that from the earliest times, humanity has recognised that creation starts with muck – and so the earliest myths record that new worlds can be formed from the filth under a fingernail and that living beings were first moulded from mud. Two of the Crick Crack Club’s liveliest storytellers, Ben Haggarty and Sarah Rundle, will present an evening of dirty stories from around the world, including North American, Norse and Hindu mythology.

The Crick Crack Club is a peripatetic venue that creates events to showcase and develop performance storytelling. As well as working with dozens of regional arts centres and festivals, it programmed regular events at the South Bank Centre from 1989 to 2000 and at the Barbican Pit Theatre from 2002 to 2010. The Crick Crack Club currently programmes monthly events at the Soho Theatre, an annual three-week family season at the Unicorn Children’s Theatre, and programmes events in a national circuit of regional theatres and arts centres.

Ben Haggarty is a performance storyteller with a repertoire of over 350 traditional narratives ranging from three-minute fables to three-hour epics. He founded the Crick Crack Club in 1987. Since 2001, Ben has been the official storyteller with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble in the USA. In 2007, he was appointed Honorary Professor of Storytelling at the Arts University of Berlin (UDK). Ben’s graphic novel, MeZolith, was published by Random House in 2010. This exploration of the archaeology of the imagination was selected as the Times’s Graphic Novel of the Year 2010.

Sarah Rundle got locked in a laboratory but tunnelled her way to freedom. She ran away to drama school, and is now a professional actor and storyteller. Over the last seven years she has performed in theatres, cafes, museums, yurts and a Saxon longhouse.