, Alexander Whitley Dance Company, Sadler鈥檚 Wells, London, 27 and 28 June
IN A basement studio in south London, seven dancers are interpreting some from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. They are tackling the electromagnetic properties of the sun鈥檚 surface, and have got themselves, literally, into a knot. 鈥淪omething about your grip here is stopping her moving,鈥� frets choreographer Alexander Whitley. 鈥淐an we get his hips to go the other way?鈥�
Bit by bit, a roiling form emerges. Imagine a chain, folded in on itself, stretching and reforming. Its movements are coherent and precise, but wildly asymmetrical. This is no tidy, courtly dance. At one point the chain abruptly unwinds. The relief is palpable as the dancers exploit their few seconds of freedom. Very quickly, the chain kinks and folds in on itself again: a folding problem intensely claustrophobic to watch, never mind perform.
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Whitley formed his dance company in 2014, and 8 Minutes will be its debut on London鈥檚 Sadler鈥檚 Wells main stage at the end of June. It is named after the time it takes for light from the sun to reach Earth. 鈥淚f you imagine travelling this distance at the speed of light, and you subtract all the relativistic effects, it鈥檚 quite bizarre,鈥� muses Hugh Mortimer, Whitley鈥檚 collaborator and a researcher at Rutherford.
Mortimer designed climate change-detecting spectrometers for the Sentinel-3 satellite, and a sea-surface temperature monitor currently operating from the Queen Mary 2 liner. He hopes to build space-based instruments that analyse the atmospheres of exoplanets. But quite another fascination drew him into collaboration with Whitley鈥檚 dance company: the way the most abstruse science can be explained through ordinary experience.
He continues his thought experiment: 鈥淔or 6 minutes, you鈥檇 be sitting in darkness. By the 7th minute you would notice a point of light looming larger: that鈥檚 the Earth. You鈥檇 arrive at the moon, pass by Earth, and a few seconds later you鈥檇 pass the orbit of the moon again. And the point is, passing the moon and the Earth and the moon again a few seconds later would feel intuitively right. It would feel ordinary.鈥�
However difficult an idea, someone, somewhere must be able to grasp it, or it鈥檚 not an 鈥渋dea鈥� in any real sense. How, then, are we to grasp concepts as alien to our day-to-day experience as electromagnetism and the speed of light? It鈥檚 a question that has cropped up before in these pages, although seldom through the medium of dance. In 1988, for example, computer scientist , who explained particle spin 鈥渦sing the belt from his trousers鈥� (快猫短视频, 30 June 1988, p 75).
As for Whitley, he says: 鈥淲e grasp quite advanced concepts first and foremost through movement. That forms a semantic template for the complex thinking we develop when we acquire language. Right, left, up, down, front, back 鈥� also the idea of containment, the concept of an inside and an outside 鈥� these ideas come through our bodies.鈥�
鈥淏it by bit, a roiling form emerges. Imagine a chain, folded in on itself, stretching and reforming鈥�
This is especially true in children, he argues, because they don鈥檛 yet have fully developed rational capabilities. 鈥淚 think there鈥檚 strong potential for using movement to give them a different understanding of and engagement with scientific ideas,鈥� Whitley says.
Mortimer discovered the truth of this idea for himself quite recently: 鈥淎lexander runs a creative learning project for 9 and 10-year-olds based on our collaboration. Sitting in on some sessions, I found myself thinking about solar-dynamic processes in a new and clearer way.鈥�
Will the audience at the work鈥檚 premiere leave understanding more about the sun? From what I saw, I鈥檓 optimistic. They won鈥檛 have words, or figures, for what they鈥檒l have seen, but they will have been afforded a glimpse into the sheer dynamism and complexity of our nearest star.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淎ll in the body鈥�
