Midweek - 28/10/2009

Ben Haggarty is a performance storyteller and artistic director of The Crick Crack Club, which promotes the best of British and international storytelling. He brings his new work to the Barbican Pit with Mr Sandmann: Bringer of Dreams - Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, in which he explores the ambivalent mythology of the Sandman and questions the purpose of dreams. Dr Lynn Rogers is a behavioural biologist and director of the Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Centre in Minnoesota. For over 40 years he has studied the black bears of the Northwoods of Minnesota. He has developed a radical method of habituating the bears to allow him to follow them all day just a few feet away, which has earned him the epithet 'the Jane Goodall of bears' and is featured in a new series of Natural World on BBC Two - Bearwalker of the Northwoods. Aarathi Prasad is a geneticist and is also the mother of a mixed race child. In a programme for Channel 4 she sets out to challenge the ideas of racial purity and examines provocative claims that there are in fact biological advantages to being mixed race. Is It Better To Be Mixed Race? is part of Channel 4's Race: Science's Last Taboo season. Vincent Osborne runs the Black British Classical Foundation which aims to find and promote black arts talent across the UK and the Commonwealth. He is organising the inaugural Voice of Black Opera Awards (VOBOs) to find the best black or Asian voice of classical opera. Seven finalists will compete in Birmingham in front of a distinguished panel of judges including opera stars Grace Bumbry and Maria Ewing.