What: Bodies . . . The Exhibition.
Where: Corner of Euclid Avenue and East Fourth Street, downtown Cleveland.
When: Today through Oct. 31.
Hours: Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Tickets: Prices range from $14 to $22, with many discounts available. For details or to buy tickets online, see www.bodiescleveland.com. Tickets also available at box office, 340 Euclid Ave.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Naked bodies and revealing poses are the main attractions of a show opening today in the heart of downtown Cleveland's entertainment district.
High visibility is what presenters of "Bodies . . . The Exhibition" want. But instead of a risque show, the point of the display is family-friendly education featuring plasticized and dissected human bodies.
"We find one of the best places to be is exactly [where] we are, on Euclid Avenue," said Dr. Roy Glover, the exhibit's medical director and spokesman, who grew up on the West Side.
"Anybody that's interested in science will come here, and the people that wouldn't grace the door of a science center will walk past this place and say, 'Maybe we ought to go in and take a look,' " Glover said.
Open seven days a week through October, "Bodies" features nine galleries of displays covering 14,000 square feet of street-level space once occupied by clothing stores.
Similar to the larger "Body Worlds 2," a competing show mounted five years ago at the Great Lakes Science Center, it allows visitors to walk among bodies, body parts and organs that have been permanently preserved through plastination -- a silicone polymer process that makes it possible for bodies to be displayed in lifelike action poses or cut into thin slices.
Visitors entering the first gallery from Euclid Avenue are greeted by the show's most conventional display, a full skeleton hanging on a rack.
Farther inside, they'll find meticulously dissected cadavers partly or fully stripped of skin to reveal the organs and connections inside. One, which looks like a body made of red moss, has been stripped of everything but its circulatory system. Another was reduced solely to the wiring of its nervous system through more than a year of painstaking dissection.
"Bodies" has 12 full-body corpses and more than 250 additional specimens. Among them are five human embryos and seven fetuses, and a side-by-side display of healthy and smoke-blackened lungs.
"There isn't a health-related issue your kids won't bring up when they're here," said Glover, a former professor of anatomy and cell biology at the University of Michigan. "You come here and the kid sees this black lung. That's the open door to start talking about issues related to smoking and respiratory health. The same holds for dietary health, exercise, alcohol-related behavior and other issues. They're easily understood and discussed here."
Glover recommends that parents talk with children in advance "about what they're going to see and why it's important, then make the decision if they should go. We've had younger children come to the exhibit, and older children left at home. When we work with schools, we usually start in fourth grade."
The Cleveland exhibition is one of 12 cadaver shows presented around the country and abroad by Premier Exhibitions Inc., a publicly traded, Atlanta-based company known for its exclusive displays of artifacts from the Titanic.
The bodies come from China and are leased from the plastination laboratories at China's Dalian Medical University.
"The bodies are all of unclaimed individuals who died of natural causes and whose bodies then went to medical schools," Glover said. "We have exercised every bit of care and caution to work with just the right partner so that we can honestly answer all the questions about body provenance.
"We work exclusively with the Chinese because we find they are the best dissecters in the world," he said. "The preservation part is really not that difficult. I could teach you that in a day. I couldn't teach you how to do this level of dissection in a lifetime."