Molecules, Markets, and Movement

What do the movement of molecules in liquids, stock market fluctuations, and successive waves of female dancers walking, in patterned randomness, across a stage floor (carrying Starbucks coffee containers, no less) have to do with each other?

To answer that question you need to haul ass to the Firehall Arts Centre this evening for the last remaining performance of Brownian Motion, a collaborative choreographic rumination on the economy by Mark Haim, Rob Kitsos, and Shae Zukiwsky for SFU's Off Centre Dancers.

In particle physics, "Brownian Motion" (a theory akin to Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle," but in this case named after a Scottish botanist), might be represented something like this:

And in economics, like this:

However, as Haim, Kitsos, and Zukiwsky, together with their very talented young dancers (including a student of mine from last term, Tessa Forrester), brilliantly demonstrate, the impact of what, after Lucretius, we would do well to call the "invisible blows" of physics and economics is always registered most viscerally on the human body.

This is a show that is sensorially and intellectually ravishing--as all great art should be. I was glad to be among last night's audience of Canucks refuseniks.

P.