Saturday night I attended “TICKTOCK” a work-in-progress showing of Syren Modern Dance and The Ohio State University’s Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics (CCAPP) Visiting Fellow, Dr. Paul Sutter.  The collaboration was sponsored by The STEAM Factory which is an Ohio State space fostering research relationships in a STEAM (Science, Technology, Education, Art and Math) custom. I was super excited to see the space and get to know what actually happens there. This is the first time there was an event of this kind open to the public (so I still don’t know what actually happens there) and it was engaging and the audience’s reaction was palpable.

The performance was inside a demonstration illustrating how Syren generally works choreographically, how the company sought out Dr. Sutter for his expertise in physics and how their collaboration unfolded. That’s a lot of hows…

Syren Modern Dance’s Jessica Nolan, Darcie Perkins and Rivkins Christopher

Sutter is an avid speaker and has the radio show, Space Radio.*  WCBE 90.5 hosted the event as a fundraiser. The first segment of the work they showed featured his speaking and walking around the performance area Morgan Freeman style in the “Through the Wormhole series” as the dancers narrated his words, “The faster you move in space, the slower you move in time.” Sutter varied this sentence repeatedly and the dancers organized in different ways demonstrating/acting out through movement what he was saying. He also told stories and the dancers gathered around his storytelling self before blasting off as characters traveling through space, illustrating different continuums, alluding to time-travel and multidimensional worlds. At one point the dancers even lift him up in a half-sitting position and float him across the space. All to illustrate different moments of time. If you haven’t surmised, the piece Syren and Dr. Sutter are creating together is about time.

Syren warming up. Dancers Darcie Perkins, Jessica Nolan, Rivkins Christopher, Lynn Peterson and Victoria Ellis with Choreographer Kate St. Amand

They showed multiple sections. One section was created from physics action words that Kate St. Amand, co-director of Syren and choreographer for TICKTOCK, asked Sutter to come up with, such as rotation (which as discussed is about traveling less through time and more through space). Let’s just remember my affinity toward aboutness for a second. And we’re back.

The audience was given multiple opportunities to ask questions. At one point the dancers improvised the answers that Sutter was giving about questions such as, “Is there such a thing as a parallel universe? and “Is the discovery of time travel considered inevitable?” The dancers mirrored each other through space as Sutter described perpendicular multiple dimensions as a possibility more than parallel universes. This reminded me of Marvel’s The Flash.  Sutter responded to the latter question explaining that time travel at this moment is considered impossible, but no one actually knows why. The ten year old next to me even asked a few completely succinct and thoughtful questions throughout the evening about the speed of light. The audience was energized and felt engaged and heard, you could feel it.

*He also hosted a segment this week with the Syren Modern Dance’s co-directors Kate St. Amand and Lynn Peterson.