NATIONAL Science Week is almost upon us, but although it’s celebrating the International Year of Light, it looks set to be overshadowed when Canberra science-theatre company, Boho Interactive, stages its “Best Festival Ever: how to manage a disaster,” billed as “a three-day camping festival”.

In case you suspect they’re making it up as they go along, nothing could be further from the truth, with director and science theatre whizkid, David Finnigan, having already staged the event at the London Science Museum last year. This will be its Australian premiere.

“Best Festival Ever” was developed in 2011-13 through residencies at the University College London Environment Institute, the Battersea Arts Centre and Arts House Melbourne and is seen by the creators as “a fun theatre disguise for looking at the science of complex systems”.

In recent years Canberra audiences have been willing guinea pigs as Finnigan and his co-conspirators have played with game theory, investigated the potential of smart phones in performance, subjected us to character-building psychological experiments and allowed us to make up the endings, giving new meaning to the word “play”.

Part theatre show, part performance lecture, part board game, the hyperbolically-named festival aims to introduce us to concepts drawn from “systems science”, asking how we can best understand and manage the complex systems we live in.

Finnigan and Boho’s David Shaw, joined by Nathan Harrison, Nikki Kennedy and Rachel Roberts from Sydney collective Applespiel, intend putting up to 30 audience members into Street 2 and letting them have charge of programming and managing a hypothetical music festival.

Challenges will include curbing rowdy campsite parties, assembling the perfect line-up of bands, dealing with artistes’ tantrums and preventing fights in the moshpit. Many local festival organisers will say this sounds uncannily like real-life, but Boho is proposing the exercise as a look at the possibilities.

They’ll also be giving the audience the chance to discuss the experience with real scientists, Will Steffen, from the Climate Council; Bob Costanza, from ANU; Brian Walker, Nicky Grigg and John Finnigan, from CSIRO and Eleanor Malbon, from RegNet – the cast of boffins will vary each night.

“Best Festival Ever: how to manage a disaster”, Street 2, August 12-22, bookings to thestreet.org.au or 6247 1223.