Move like a proton

I’d love to clue you in on the weird and wonderful dance production coming to the Wharton Center Sunday, but it won’t be easy. As Frank Zappa should have said, writing about dancing is like dancing about isotopes.

 “Of Equal Place: Isotopes in Motion” is a pulsating mélange of dance, music, visuals and text designed to unlock the arcane processes happening at MSU’s Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, right next door to the Wharton Center.

The unique production is spearheaded by an award-winning national dance company, Dance Exchange, in close collaboration with local partners, including Lansing’s Happendance company and dancers from Everett High School and Dwight Rich School for the Arts.

Missy Lilje, artistic director of Happendance, said she was “blown away” by Dance Exchange’s “creativity and inclusivity” when the troupe came to the University of Michigan for a residency in the 1990s, when Lilje was studying there, and again in summer 1998 when she took a six-week course with the troupe. 

“It changed everything about how I looked at dance,” Lilje said. “When I became leader of Happendance, the way we made dance accessible to people was 100 percent influenced by them.”

A nonprofit based in Takoma Park, Maryland, Dance Exchange is dedicated to expanding the world of dance — “who gets to dance, where dance happens and what dance is about.” Among the troupe’s collaborators are NASA, the National Park Service and the Kennedy Center.

Lilje long dreamed of working with Dance Exchange on a local project. In 2017, visionary Dance Exchange founder and choreographer Liz Lerman created “The Matter of Origins,” a touring, multi-media explosion of movement and color that got the attention of the physics community, including researchers at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

Lerman left no neutron unturned in her oft-stated mission, fueled by a MacArthur Genius grant, to merge dance and science. She even served the “Matter of Origins” audience the same chocolate cake Los Alamos teahouse owner Edith Warner served the Manhattan Project research team.

Several researchers at FRIB, including MSU astrophysicist Artemis Spyrou, hatched a plan to harness Dance Exchange’s creative energy and outreach expertise to educate and excite MSU and Lansing about FRIB’s cutting-edge research.

In 2017, Lilje got a call from MSU, asking if Happendance was interested in working with Dance Exchange and FRIB. “I thought, ‘Are you kidding? It’s a dream come true,’” she said.

In the summer of 2018, Lilje and Everett High School dance coordinator Clara Martinez went to Washington, D.C., to huddle with the Dance Exchange staff to brainstorm ideas.

“The whole 14-hour trip, it was Physics 101,” Lilje said. “We read these papers from FRIB researchers explaining the life cycle of stars and how the FRIB is going to study these particles and tried to imagine how we could turn this into stories we could tell with dance.”

The concepts and moves were worked out in a series of Zoom meetings with MSU, Happendance, Martinez and her students and Dance Exchange dancers. The creative team checked everything with Zach Constan, FRIB’s outreach director, to ensure the science was accurate.

“The movement is generated from an understanding of physics,” Martinez said. “What is a proton and what is a neutron, and how do I represent that through movement of my body? How do you show a physics concept like inertia through artistic expression? How do you make an isotope into a dance movement?”

Later that summer, artists from Dance Exchange came to Everett to work with students.  With a well-established dance program, soon to enter its 50th year, and a New Tech High program of innovative project-based learning, Everett was an ideal local partner with Dance Exchange.

In March 2019, the students excitedly toured Wharton Center’s stage and dressing rooms, only to have the project canceled during the pandemic.

Although many of the students from that group have graduated, four are still at Everett and will dance in Sunday’s performance.

Eight dancers from Everett will perform Sunday.

Some of the dance sections are set pieces the students need to learn; other portions leave room for collaboration and input from students.

Co-creator Keith Thompson of Dance Exchange said the production offers “many ways in.”

“There’s a lot of mystery in the dance, things left open to your imagination,” Thompson said. “And there are things that hit the nail on the head — here’s what happens in a nucleus, here’s what’s inside an atom.”

Two weeks ago, Thompson worked out some of the material with local dancers via Zoom rehearsals. Last week and this week, Dance Exchange dancers worked in person with local partners in a series of intense rehearsals.

“A lot of the movement comes from their thinking, their bodies, their ideas,” Thompson said. “There’s always room for people to say, ‘What if we tried this?’ The partnership creates something far more than we could imagine the piece could be.”

The experience left Lilje with an unexpected benefit.

“I was learning, as a 40-something who thought she was bad at science — I understood these concepts for the first time because of dance,” Lilje said.

While talking with FRIB researchers, Thompson was fascinated by the creative back-and-forth between the theorists who propose ideas and the experimenters who prove or disprove them.

“Choreographers have a lot of theory about what they want to do, but you need bodies to create it so you can see it, and they must obey physical laws,” he said. “There are limitations to everybody, and it’s the same thing with atoms and isotopes.”

Martinez recommends that audiences keep an open mind, and Lilje agreed it’s a “pretty abstract” presentation.

The dancers, for their part, won’t be able to add “Proton A” to a resume of their roles, along with Giselle or the Sleeping Beauty. 

“It might not be literal, but if people come in a spirit of curiosity to learn more about dance, and more about science, they’ll be in for a real treat,” Martinez said.

The specifics might be fuzzy, but for Thompson, the experience was a reminder that all of the elements were forged in the furnace of stars, like our Sun, or in cosmic cataclysms such as supernovae or stellar collisions.

“Everything we see in the sky, everything in nature, even our bodies, our bones — it just blows my mind,” he said. “It’s an honor to even try to put something together to try to share this lesson with others.”