The Poetics of Physics in Dance

As a dance artist who for the past five years has collaborated with a particle physicist, I see several problems in examples of dance-science exchanges that circulate in professional concert dance. The first problem is the excessively literal translation of scientific ideas, which can leave the artistic composition flat and unimagined. In an exchange we shared at Yale last fall (2015), William Kentridge noted the creative wall that literalism can quickly hit, explaining, "You're stuck running around and around your studio in circles to simulate a collider." The second danger exists when an artist is unable to bend her choreographic style to absorb the encounter with science. In this case, the spectacle of the performance overwhelms the scientific point of departure, as Kryptonite overwhelmed Superman. The only remnant of scientific reference lives in the publicity material; the dance looks like any other work by that artist. A third danger lies in representing the scientific object as a cliché: to signify the quantum world, for instance, a production turns to darkness, flashing lights, vaguely extraterrestrial-looking unitards, and trembling. This list is not comprehensive—there are other pitfalls I could mention. It is rather a starting point from which to articulate what a more successful poetics of physics in dance might look like in the twenty-first century.

One major obstacle in identifying the characteristics of a successful dance-science poetics is that different parties wish for different outcomes. On the one hand, scientists often want art to communicate effectively and accurately to a broad audience science's far-reaching questions and human impact. Engaging the public in science is key. On the other hand, dance artists desire points of departure, stimulating discussion, foreign ideas—anything to inspire new work. The publicity, grants, touring gigs, and new audiences that may follow can benefit an artist as well, especially in the scarcely resourced field of dance. Critics in turn simply wish to see good art, whatever that means.

Aside from these pragmatic concerns, however, a more compelling question is to ask how and to what depth knowledge in one form ends up in another. To what degree of complexity is the scientific idea expressed in the new medium? To what degree has the science infiltrated and altered the artist's practice? How deeply has the dance altered and reimagined the science, showing the viewer something anew? I am less concerned with the ultimate recognizability of the science in the dance than with the potential for good art that exists in this mutual transformation of knowledge. But what does this transformation entail? And what is "good" in the best art that results? I'll first tackle the question of the transformation of knowledge.

A quick Google search turns up numerous mentions of dance-science collaboration that describe the transformational process as "science translated into contemporary dance." The Oxford English Dictionary defines translation as "the expression or rendering of something in another medium or form." Translation suggests both distance and discreteness. By definition, the word refers to a passage: something moving from here to there, from English to French, from the realm of science to the realm of art. This distance between the two terms implies separate mediums, and thus discrete boundaries: here is not there, English is not French, science is not art.

There are a number of problems with using the idea of translation as a conceit to describe dances that engage with science. Translation carves out a chasm between the disciplines, over which the artist must leap. But as historians of science have been noting for some time, the practices of science and art have more in common than many have assumed, and using the framework of translation doesn't allow for their overlap. Translation also tends to suggest a one-way road—you start here and end up there—without recognizing the back and forth that can occur, or that both disciplines can change. What about the science that translates a dance? Lastly, the concept of translation sets up the expectation that after watching the dance, something about the original scientific point of departure will be...