Shaping Dance with Physics
Dance is the art of human movement. It combines motion and spin, energy and balance, synchronization and cadence. Many of these concepts are familiar to physicists—even those who might panic at the mere thought of being on a dance floor. Sofia Papa can give a lesson or two on the connections between physics and dance. A physics graduate student and professional dancer, Papa won the top prize this month in the annual Dance Your PhD contest, run by the journal Science. In the winning video, she and six other dancers mimic the internal workings of a piezoelectric, a type of material that turns atomic movement into electricity.
Papa has always loved dancing. “It was my first way to express myself,” she says. For several years now, she has complemented her physics education with dance training. While the dancing has served as a break from the rigors of studying, she has also used it as a way to work through difficult physical concepts. “I’ve always needed something creative to help understand complex ideas,” she says.
Her research focuses on piezoelectric materials, whose complex structures engender an electric voltage when mechanically stressed. They are found in acoustic sensors, cigarette lighters, actuators, and many other devices. Papa works in a group at the Biorobotic Institute of the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Italy that studies piezoelectrics for applications in wearable electronic devices. For her thesis, she has been investigating a piezoelectric called chitosan, which is derived from crab and shrimp shells. Whereas most piezoelectrics are fully crystalline, chitosan is a polymeric semicrystalline material with amorphous regions that disrupt the atomic ordering thought crucial to piezoelectricity. “It has not been clear why chitosan is piezoelectric,” she says.
Working on chitosan’s atomic structure got Papa thinking about how she could create something artistic about this strange material. That’s when she heard about the Dance Your PhD contest. Started in 2008, this competition offers science students a chance to express a concept related to their research through choreographed pieces at least 90 seconds long. This year, 20 videos were submitted to the contest.
For her “Piezodance,” Papa started by making drawings of the concepts that she wanted to convey through dance, such as the level of order in a crystal and the different shapes (or polymorphs) that materials can transition between. Papa is a member of a professional dance company called Company.mov, so she shared these preliminary ideas with others in the group. “I just explained the basic behavior, like how atoms arrange and charges move. But then we developed the choreography all together.”
The result of their effort is a contemporary dance piece set to rhythmic electronic music, composed by Pietro Gozzoli, a chemist and musician. The routine starts with six dancers in red and blue outfits, representing oppositely charged atoms within a crystalline structure. Performing rigid movements, the dancers are initially spaced equally apart, but they soon shift position according to color, mimicking the charge separation in a piezoelectric responding to a mechanical stress.
Later, dancers in white outfits join the ensemble, moving in a more fluid, free-form way. They represent the amorphous regions that disturb the crystalline order in chitosan. The “crystal” dancers respond to this disturbance by changing their movements. “The choreography is pretty much the same, but the quality of the movement is completely different,” Papa explains. “It’s less rigid, more dirty.”
One of the main messages that Papa wanted to get across is the importance of shape. The shape of a material can influence its properties, just as the shape of a hand gesture can alter the visual impact of a dance move. “There is something between shape and dance that is super connected,” she says.
The choreography clearly brought the research to the forefront, says Carl Flink, one of the contest judges and a professor of dance at the University of Minnesota. “The simple design and exquisite dancing added rich nuance to the performance that was deeply satisfying,” he says.
The company filmed the performance at the Rebocco Amphitheater in La Spezia, Italy. The artistic director, Giacomo Francesconi, used a drone to capture parts of the dance from above so that the performer’s shadows would be visible “dancing” across the ground. The shadow effect impressed Renée Jaworski, another judge and an artistic director of the dance company Pilobolus. “It was engaging all throughout,” Jaworski said in the winner announcement. Four other dance performances won prizes in specific categories: biology, chemistry, social sciences, and artificial intelligence.
Papa sees winning the top prize as a starting point and plans to create other choreographed pieces related to physics. The creative process has given Papa a fresh perspective on her physics work. “Sometimes the other dancers use words that I would never think of in a scientific context. But they make sense, so I’ve used this feedback to rethink the problems that I’m working on.”
–Michael Schirber
Michael Schirber is a Corresponding Editor for Physics Magazine based in Lyon, France.