A play opening in Dublin next week was inspired by science, mathematics and ancient Greek philosophy, writes Dick Ahlstrom
Science helped provide the initial inspiration for an intriguing theatrical production next week that involves a time-traveller who is in love with former president Mary Robinson.
Theatre company Barabbas has written and produced the show, Luca, which runs at the Project Arts Centre from November 2nd to 19th. The company was inspired to produce the show after a workshop at the Peacock Theatre last January involving the philosophy of Plato, the "golden ratio" 1:1.618, and the rigours of modern physics, says Barabbas general manager and producer of the show, Triona Ní Dhuibhir. The workshop was titled "The Investigation of the Principles of the Golden Ratio in Theatre Design and Staging," and the 10-person workshop involved set and lighting designers, directors and two physicists among others.
The goal was to understand how theatre could be informed by the ratio, which has resonance in both science and art, she explains. The Greeks named it the golden ratio because rectangles produced using it were considered most pleasing to the eye.
Called "phi" after the Greek sculptor Phidias, many artists who followed him used the proportion. These included Leonardo Da Vinci who referred to it as the "divine proportion" given its presence in many natural phenomenons from the structure of a seashell to the dimensions of a human. Phi is also of interest to scientists, particularly mathematicians who recognise the ratio in numbers associated with a Fibonacci series.
While the golden ratio was the inspiration for the workshop the group also discussed the five regular three-dimensional solids described by Plato in his Timaeus (ca350BC), explains Ní Dhuibhir. These include the tetrahedron (four sides), cube (six sides), icosahedron (20 sides), octahedron (eight sides) and the dodecahedron (12 sides).
The first four represented the fundamental elements fire, earth, water and air but the dodecahedron was associated with "Aether", the matrix within which all others existed.
"We were intrigued with this," she says. "That is how we came across the dodecahedron for the first time". But that is also how "it became a starting point for the Luca set," she explains.
The set features something reminiscent of an opened out dodecahedron, she says. Luca and his friends inhabit the Aether as they move effortlessly through time where they are free to behave or misbehave, as they like.
The play is not based specifically on anything that came from the January workshop but Ní Dhuibhir does see strong connections between the performance, Plato and science. "There is a philosophical link to all of this," she says. The philosophy that inspired the show was from a different era but it was an era when science, art and mathematics were parts of the one learned discipline.
Prof Iggy McGovern, assistant professor in Trinity College's school of physics, also sees the art-science connection. He was one of the 10 participants in the January workshop and on November 9th will publish a collection of 60 of his poems in a volume, The King of Suburbia.
There are many parallels between art and science. "They both are creativity-based activities and they are both cerebral activities. Also, both of them rely on and change with technology," he says. "The science feeds the technology but relies heavily on it as well, and art in all its forms does too."
He agrees with the view of Ireland's greatest mathematician and scientist, William Rowan Hamilton, who developed the groundbreaking mathematical concept called Quaternions. Hamilton said his Quaternions had four parents, geometry, algebra, metaphysics and poetry. It is fitting then that Quaternions today solve problems in quantum mechanics but also help create computer game heroines such as Tomb Raider, Laura Croft.