Ballet Based on Einstein's Theories Premieres | Playbill

Related Articles
Classic Arts News Ballet Based on Einstein's Theories Premieres The Rambert Dance Company will premiere Mark Baldwin's Constant Speed, a ballet based on Einstein's theories, tomorrow night at Sadler's Wells.
Performances of Constant Speed run through May 28.

Constant Speed, the first work that Baldwinhas presented as the company's artistic director, focuses on Einstein's theories of relativity and Brownian motion.

The work is performed to six pieces by Franz Lehar, the best known of which is Gold and Silver Waltz. The music was composed around 1905, when Einstein published three seminal papers.

Ray Rivers, a physics professor, advised Baldwin on technical aspects of the theories. In an interview with the weekly magazine New Scientist, Rivers said, "Of all the art forms that one can use to express the notion of here, now, and what happens then, dance is probably the best. In some sense, there are ways you can represent equations by movement because they often describe movement. The equations and ideas in Einstein's papers are very dynamical. Dance is better suited to the 1905 papers than any of the other visual arts."

Baldwin, in the same interview, said that the ballet was not aimed at teaching, like many works that conflate art and science. "Constant Speed isn't worthy," he said. "It's gorgeous, cheap, and nasty, and fabulous."

 
RELATED:

Explore Classic Arts:
Recommended Reading:
 X

Blocking belongs
on the stage,
not on websites.

Our website is made possible by
displaying online advertisements to our visitors.

Please consider supporting us by
whitelisting playbill.com with your ad blocker.
Thank you!