A theater project that combines science and art will debut in Elgin on Friday, Oct. 6.
Rising Tide: The Crossroads project will show at Elgin Community College.
Robert Davies, associate professor of professional practice global change, human vibrancy and critical science communications at Utah State University, talked to WNIJ's Yvonne Boose about the project. Here's the text of the conversation.
Yvonne
How’d the concept of combining science and art and all of Rising Tide, how'd that come together?
Davies
Wow. Okay, so let me try to summarize kind of a long process. But I was, about 15 years ago, giving public presentations on climate change. And finding, here in Logan, Utah, where I live in northern Utah, and finding that the audience is, were connecting intellectually with the information — it's a pretty straightforward story, and they understood it. And I discovered, we have a resident String Quartet here at Utah State University, the Fry Street Quartet. And I happen to have really powerful intellectual experiences, I guess, in chamber music concerts. A few years prior to that I had been in England at university doing research in physics and quantum optics, which is where I'm trained. And I would be going to these chamber music concerts there and scratching around for my notebook all the time, because the music was unlocking thinking in my brain, about all the little physics puzzles I was working on in my laboratory. So fast forward a few years, I’m giving public science lectures, wanting the people to connect to it. And I thought, you know, I wonder what would happen if, if we brought an audience into a chamber music concert but didn't let them bring in all the little puzzles like I did in the — you know, they're working on your minds … for a little travel, you have coming up your jobs, and push those out. And we did that with some compelling information and some powerful imagery. And then unleash some evocative music. Even that sort of really blocky, clunky thing where you just go from science to music, without much transition, seemed to have a pretty powerful effect on the audiences. And the Quartet said, ‘you know, this seems to have real legs, we could probably do this a lot better, but we need purpose-composed music. And we need to structure the performance differently.’ So, we set about doing that. And that was about 10 years ago — 11 years ago now. And that is the performance that we now have, 'Rising Tide.'
Yvonne
Now, can you tell me about taking it out of Utah, and going to other places? Because I learned about you because you're coming to Elgin, which is in our coverage area.
Davies
Yeah, so we even at that [first concert], we thought, well, we'll probably give a few more performances of this. And that'll be it, which is usually the case with some kind of a performance you create, locally. But we — as I said, it struck a nerve — we got some good press, a little bit of publicity. And the next thing you know, we had invitations to -- the very next performance we gave after the premiere of this was a big conference of 1,500 sustainability educators in higher education.
Yvonne
Now, I also see that there is a spoken word component, can you tell me about that? The poetry side of things?
Davies
So, I hesitate to call it poetry. I wrote it. It’s intended to be poetic prose. I'm not even sure if there is such a thing. So, the idea is, the performance is in five vignettes. And each vignette comprises me giving five- or six-minutes' worth of 'sciency' information. And then five or six minutes of the quartet playing a movement of the music that was composed for this, as I said, a sort of a contemplative space to sit with what you just heard. And while I'm speaking, there is projected imagery, from some amazing visual artists, both abstract and concrete. So, photography, as well as some paintings. And the spoken bit is, in as I said, there are these five vignettes. And so, what we cover are the first three are sort of the wonder of, of the natural world that provides a space for life in this otherwise very, unhospitable universe that we live in, you know, our planet, but this thin atmosphere and this thin skin of life that we have. And so, the first one is about the role of water, and why it's so critical to the emergence of life. The second one is about the basic operating principles of successful natural systems, the biosphere. The third one is about the foundations of the biosphere, phytoplankton, and soil. And, and so the idea is, through these three, we get both the wonder and the rules of nature of living systems. And at the end of each one of those little vignettes, there's just about 30 seconds of -- so most of it is uplifting and kind of wow, this is amazing. But that last 30 seconds, and each one of those is about, you know, there turns out, there's a few problems here. We have some problems with our water, we have some problems with the living systems. And we have some problems with the foundations of that, we call foliage, the soil and the phytoplankton. So, then the fourth vignette is called 'Societas.' And that's where we learn about how the systems that we have created for our modern society, our food system, our energy system, and our economic system, are based on rules that are fundamentally antithetical to the rules by which successful natural systems thrive. And then finally, the fifth vignette is me talking, we're talking, about how we might reimagine all of this. And so that's what the words are about. As you can imagine, I'm trying to pack all of that into just -- in each case, sort of between five and 10 minutes of talking five to seven minutes of talking.
Yvonne
Now, is there anything else you would like to share with me today?
Davies
Well, we're super, super happy to be coming to Elgin, and to the community college. We have not performed there before. We've done three performances in Indiana, we've done one performance in Illinois, it was in Decatur at Milliken College — Milliken University. And I will say that the audiences who've come universally tell us they have a very powerful impact. It's a difficult kind of performance to advertise. It's like, what is this thing exactly? It's not like anything. I think presenters have a real hard time with that. I can simply tell your audience, your listening audience that we've never ever had anyone come up to us afterwards and say, 'what a waste of time.' We get scores and scores of comments from people both after the performance -- there will be a talkback with the artists after the performance -- and through emails that we get later, from people telling us how much they're affected by the work of these artists, the composer, the musicians, the visual artists, who have put this together, and who all jumped at the chance to do it, who wanted to make their artistic voices relevant on these topics.
Yvonne
Alright, well, you have a good day, sir.
Davies
Thank you so much, Yvonne.
