Event

Point of Departure

Choreographer Karin Stevens has combined talents with multimedia artist Craig van den Bosch to create an evening length work that combines the technology of present day particle science with 12th Century Islamic architecture. This world premiere is full of mathematically and geometrically inspired movement, visceral original audio and video segments. Point of Departure began with an observation of the juxtaposition between the muqarnas dome architecture and cosmology found in Islamic mosques and the Large Hadron particle Collider in Cern. The work has developed into an examination of matter, technology and the human pursuit to make meaning from the physical world. The Muquarnas Dome architecture pushes one visually through a three-dimensional multiplicity of shape toward the point of unity or source of existence; the other uses architecture to collide particles in order to find the most fundamental building block of life, or "God Particle" as some refer to it. Although separated by almost a millennium, culture, material and scale, both technologies seek a cosmological understanding of life. In Point of Departure, Stevens and van den Bosch use their own observations of these technologies, old and new, macro and micro, to explore, create and present a richly complex visual kinetic art that hopes to engage the viewer in a similar wonderment about existence and our relationship to physical matter.