Interview with choreographer Liz Lerman & physicist Bill Dorland: Rearranging the Way We Think About Things
Choreographer Liz Lerman and physicist Bill Dorland sat down together in the Dance Exchange studio in July for a wide-ranging conversation about our season opener, The Matter of Origins (Sept. 10 & 12) — where the project has taken them, what new ideas it has revealed and how it has affected their thinking about their own fields.
Dr. Dorland, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, will also participate in a Creative Dialogue on November 1 about physics, perception and “the poetry of the mind.”
Has working on The Matter of Origins revealed new ideas to you? What have you learned, what have you gained?
Liz Lerman: I was introduced to CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and I understand that at least part of what they’re trying to do at CERN is to figure out what might have happened at the Big Bang and that’s interesting to me as a question about origins and beginnings and where do we come from and even why that’s such an interesting question to people.
So I go to CERN but of course when I really want to find out what’s happening, I’m brought to some of these very philosophical questions. I didn’t expect that when I started.
Bill Dorland: There’s a flip side to that too. If you’re a scientist and you work in your lab, or in my case in my office — I’m a theorist — there’s a tendency to be isolated from the world.
It’s very important to participate in life to keep the ideas flowing. Otherwise very clever people will often run out of ideas.
So being a part of this project for the last couple of years has been very exciting.
LL: I always feel when I talk to you, Bill, like I get a brainwashing — I mean in the best sense, like your brain is laundered — because you have these very pithy ways of saying something that is true in your world that I had never thought about in my world quite like that.
It’s very important to participate in life to keep the ideas flowing. Otherwise very clever people will often run out of ideas.
I think that’s maybe one of the ways that physicists are at their best, is that they rearrange the way we think about things.
BD: There was an article in the New York Times, Tuesday in the Science Times, and they quoted some physicists, including a fellow from the University of Maryland that I know, and it said that gravity is all an illusion.
I thought, “Come on! The table’s heavy, I fall when I trip — ” but there’s a theory floating around that says in some abstract fashion that gravity is different than all the other forces.
It is an emergent rather than a fundamental force — an illusion.
LL: Even just those words — illusion, emergent and fundamental — that’s sort of three ideas that you guys think about or use and we do too but the idea of illusion in relationship to performance is just really interesting.
How do you describe concepts that are indefinable, in either choreography or in physics?
LL: Language is an interesting problem for both of our fields because in neither field does language do justice to what we’re really doing and yet language is the mediating force for the public.
Even the fact that we’re having this discussion now and it’s language that people are hearing as we try to describe it — you in your world and me in my world.
Language is an interesting problem for both of our fields because in neither field does language do justice to what we’re really doing…
Language never quite does it.
BD: We were talking about language, and in physics, we often resort to equations; so we can write an equation which has an enormous amount of content.
It describes very quantitatively what’s going to happen next but when you try to put words to that equation, you’re often stuck because it insists that there was nothing before something.
How do you do that? The equation says it, but you have to interpret the equation.
Do you think the Manhattan Project changed the way physicists view their work?
BD: In the Manhattan Project scientists, you had a group of people who were chosen by circumstances to grapple with this important question.
There were very complicated political things going on: World War II was getting closer and they felt obligated to act and to do what needed to be done because somebody else might do it first.
Even if not everybody appreciated it at the moment, the world hung in the balance.
So they worked together, they built a bomb and then from that moment — within a year or two — there were huge questions reverberating through the field:
- What have we done?
- Where does this go?
- How do we think of ourselves?
- What responsibility do we have toward humanity, toward the future, toward the earth?
Our curiosity had led us to be far more responsible for these things than we thought we were.
And so physicists in a certain sense were the first community of people on earth who had to doubt that following your nose, being curious and thinking about the world could lead to such a moment.
LL: I’m reading Richard Feynman, who was young when he was at Los Alamos, and he talks about being taught by von Neumann, the mathematician, to be irresponsible.
You had a bunch of people who didn’t ask to be in charge of the world’s future. … They were just physicists, a small group of people; they didn’t ask for that responsibility but they got it [and] acted on it…
And [Feynman] actually says, “One of the things I learned from being at Los Alamos is that I’m going to be irresponsible from now on.”
BD: How could you work on that project and carry the responsibility of what was going to be done? I think you had to shed some skin along the way.
LL: Part of the beauty of CERN to me, on one level, at least as it was introduced to me, is: We are interested in these questions and not necessarily the application of the questions. And I wondered if that wasn’t an outcome of the Manhattan Project, which was so entirely about applications.
BD: Sort of a blowback.
LL: If one of the rebounding effects was, “Don’t use us again to make something so horrific.”
BD: That’s exactly the kind of dynamic I’m talking about.
You had a bunch of people who didn’t ask to be in charge of the world’s future. By the time we got to the Manhattan Project they knew what they were going to do, but just 10 years before that…
They were just physicists, a small group of people; they didn’t ask for that responsibility but they got it, acted on it, and then, yes, as a community they have now struggled.
There have been reverberations of, “We want to work out of pure curiosity again. We want to go back to the Garden of Eden.”
For more information, please visit Liz Lerman Dance Exchange’s homepage, the official CERN website and join us for Liz Lerman Dance Exchange’s The Matter of Origins on September 10 & 12, 2010.
This excerpted transcript of the full video interview has been edited for length and clarity.