Martin Figura's DOCTOR ZEEMAN'S CATASTROPHE MACHINE Shortlisted for Saboteur Award

Martin Figura has been shortlisted for Best Spoken Word Show in the Saboteur Awards 2018. https://sabotagereviews.com/2018/04/09/saboteur-awards-2018-shortlist/

Martin is performing Doctor Zeeman's Catastrophe Machine next at the Norfolk & Norwich Festival on 23 May. His performances at StAnza festival in Scotland received rave reviews:

"Just home from an exhausting, inspiring 48 hours at StAnza. The best thing I saw (and I saw some excellent performances and heard some great poets) was Martin Figura's show Dr Zeeman's Catastrophe Machine. And it was the talk of everyone else who saw it. Congratulations Martin - everyone who wasn't there is now kicking themselves! No kidding." - Clare Whittaker

"You've missed it at StAnza this year, poetry fans, but if you have the chance to catch Martin Figura's show 'Dr Zeeman's Catastrophe Machine' you should take it - funny, sad and life-affirming, with fab visuals...and even references Wreckless Eric, New Wave fans. Peerless." - Andy Jackson

Award winning poet Martin Figura follows his previous auto-biographical, Ted Hughes Award nominated show Whistle with a look at love and life through a mathematical lens. Whilst Whistle explored his childhood and his mother's murder at the hands of his father, Doctor Zeeman's Catastrophe Machine looks at the life he made after. In this new standalone show, Martin tells the story of his adulthood, using sound, images, poetry and a mathematical machine to journey through marriage guidance, a father/son road trip and his Down's Syndrome daughter's leaving home for college. Poetic storytelling with searing honesty, wit and fun.

Is there a mathematical equation for love and the behaviour of a beating heart? What can be retrieved from life's catastrophes and wounds? When our windshield is blurred with rain and we're wearing our reading glasses, can we learn to look in the rear-view mirror and smile?

Martin Figura is a poet, a portrait and social documentary photographer, a qualified accountant and retired army major. Whistle (2010) examined Figura's unusual childhood and won the Sabotage Best Spoken Word Show and was nominated for the Ted Hughes Award. Other collected works include The Little Book of Harm, Ahem and Boring the Arse Off Young People. He has been a member of the poetry ensemble The Joy of Six since 2000, and has performed extensively with them in the UK and at various venues in New York, as well as producing booklets and a CD. He is chair and compere of Café Writers; a Norwich-based live literature organisation. His photography has been widely published and exhibited, including at the National Portrait Gallery. He is married to fellow poet, Helen Ivory.

Catastrophe Theory was discovered by René Thom in the 1960's and became very popular due to the innovations of Christopher Zeeman in the 1970s. A mathematical catastrophe being a point in a model of an input-output system, where a vanishingly small change in the input can produce a large change in the output. The catastrophe machine is a device invented by the mathematician Christopher Zeeman, consisting of a wheel which is tethered by an elastic to a fixed point in its plane. The control input to the system is another elastic attached to the same point as the first and roughly of the same length. The other end of the elastic can be moved about an area diametrically opposite to the fixed point. A video of a catastrophe machine at work is visible here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx0Y4hkiQZg

Tilt curates and produces spoken word events, tours and commissions with the aim to champion the spoken word artform in all its forms. They have built up a strong track record for creating convivial and mood-changing experiences for audiences who want to see high-quality events, mashups of music, performance and culture including Hull Liming as part of the BBC's Contains Strong Language Festival as part of Hull 2017, Jamdown Meets Liming at the V&A, and touring events to Bestival, Bluecoat and the V&A, and are currently touring with the award-winning journalist and Guardian Editor-at-Large, Gary Younge for his latest book, Another Day In The Death of America.

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