WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL
Theater at Cedar Lake
547 West 27th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through June 6, $30, 4:00 & 7:30
212-352-3101
www.armitagegonedance.org
www.worldsciencefestival.com
New York-based choreographer Karole Armitage believes in five primary principles when it comes to dance: “Seek beauty. Show mutability. Move like a blaze of consciousness. Perfection is the devil. Express the eroticisim of gravity.” She brings all that and more to “Three Theories,” running through June 6 at Cedar Lake. Part of the World Science Festival, the evening-length piece is divided into sections that depict the Theory of Relativity, Quantum Theory, and String Theory. The eleven-person Armitage Gone! Dance company display their impressive muscularity and explosive vibrancy throughout the performance, which begins with a prelude in which men in black briefs and women in black bikinis reenact the Big Bang around Megumi Eda, one of several stand-out dancers (along with the lithe and agile Kristina Bether-Blunt and the creative Leonides D. Arpon). Heavily influenced by Brian Greene’s book THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE, Armitage has her dancers weave and gesture to suggest an abstract visual language of physics, evoking curved time and space, especially during the Quantum section, when Clifton Taylor’s lighting switches on and off, making it seem like the dancers are particles appearing and disappearing to Rhys Chatham’s pounding score. (Chatham also did the music for “Bang,” with Sangeeta Shankar and Ramkumar Misra handling “Relativity” and John Luther Adams’s “Dark Waves” anchoring “String.”) Masayo Yamaguchi and Marlon Taylor-Wiles turn up the heat in one sexy duet, while Emily Wagner and William Isaac show off their ballet skills in another lively pairing.
Michio Kaku and Karole Armitage discuss the phsyics of dance at the World Science Festival on June 4 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The show might not help you understand the work of Dr. Stephen Hawking or even Albert Einstein, but it continually thrills and delights. However, the Saturday evening perfomance will be followed by a discussion with Armitage and physicist Lawrence Krauss that should prove educational; the June 4 show included a talk with Armitage and Michio Kaku that was both funny and fascinating.
In case you’re worried about the next generation of Americans, WHIZ KIDS shows that there are plenty of intelligent, ambitious teenagers around the country looking to better themselves and, more importantly, the planet. Working with Tina DiFeliciantonio (LIVING WITH AIDS) and Jane C. Wagner, Tom Shepard (SCOUT’S HONOR) spent a year following three high school students as they prepared for the annual Intel Science Talent Search: Long Island botanist Ana Cisneros, West Virginia environmental scientist Kelydra Welcker, and Staten Island paleontologist Harmain Khan. Through school and regional competitions up through the grand finale in Washington, DC, Shepard, himself a 1987 finalist, gets the protagonists to share their hopes and dreams, their fears and failures. As much as each teenager wants to win the prestigious talent search, which was famously previously sponsored by Westinghouse, they also need to win, as the $100,000 prize would help them afford to go to an Ivy League institution. Welcker’s story is particularly fascinating and frustrating, as an important regional science fair, partly sponsored by DuPont, is curiously canceled immediately after news of her project, which involves a new way of cleaning water possibly contaminated by a DuPont Teflon factory, becomes public. One of the most exciting parts of the documentary, which has nothing to do with Kelydra, Ana, and Harmain, depicts the wild and woolly final minutes leading up to the Intel application deadline, when procrastinating students must get their papers in no later than 11:59, no exceptions of any kind allowed. Treading carefully to avoid becoming yet another reality-show movie, WHIZ KIDS winds up being a rather smart, enlightening film that opens, appropriately enough, while the 
