STAGE expands theater and science exploration

At STAGE, the art and science laboratory embedded within the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME), 2021 was the year of improvisation. The pandemic’s resurgence and the move back to hybrid operations meant that the traditionally theater-based laboratory had to translate its ongoing projects to more COVID-friendly formats.

“Our work can thrive in many mediums,” said Nancy Kawalek, director of STAGE, professor and distinguished fellow in the arts, science and technology. “We always wanted to incorporate new technologies and work with new forms from the very beginning of STAGE. This year gave us an excellent opportunity to take that leap.”

To ensure that transition went smoothly, the team adopted a highly flexible outlook, ready to roll with whatever punches came their way. What resulted was a series of unexpected boons, as Sunanda Prabhu-Gaunkar, STAGE’s director of science, explained.

“Our projects have a substantial development period,” Prabhu-Gaunkar said. “We were worried that working wholly online would make that process take even longer, but it turned out to be truly advantageous. The breaks between video sessions gave us more breathing room and gave our ideas more time to percolate. Shorter work sessions also meant more students could join us. In many ways, that was emblematic of our year overall.”

Curiosity: The Making of a Scientist

STAGE’s flagship documentary series Curiosity: The Making of a Scientist thrived during the past year.

The series’ first episode, “Superposition,” won best short film at the Sigma Xi 2021 STEM Art and Film Festival, won best short documentary at the 2022 Katra Film Festival, and was an official selection of the 2021 Chicago Indie Film Awards and the 2022 SeriesFest. The film was also featured at the 2021 first annual Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) symposium, held at the University of Chicago.

Curiosity: The Making of a Scientist is a documentary series that follows researchers as they navigate the ups and downs of real science, illuminating its inherent drama. “Superposition” tracks Nate, a PhD student, as he struggles to complete his capstone project: a new device that could be a building block for quantum computers. If he’s successful, the project could catapult his academic and professional career, but with only a year left and little success, he’s running out of time.

Work on Curiosity continued through 2021 with its newest episode, “Serendipity,” finishing production in the middle of the year and post-production expected to wrap by summer 2022. The film features UChicago professor of biochemistry and molecular biology Erin Adams as she balances life at the lab and at home. She tackles the difficulties in making protein crystals for immunology research while also raising an energetic five-year-old son as a single parent.

Entanglement

One of STAGE’s ongoing theater projects, Entanglement, evolved by necessity over the past year and a half, and in doing so, spawned an entirely new project. Unsure whether they’d be able to hold a traditional stage play, the team explored formats that could be deployed both online and in-person, which led to the creation of the Quantum Casino.

Meant to serve as an overture to the Entanglement theater production, the Quantum Casino is a suite of digital and analog card games that are designed to convey the core principles of quantum mechanics in a way that’s engaging and easy to comprehend. In its early stages, the development of Entanglement and the Quantum Casino moved hand-in-hand, leading to conference presentations and public playtests. Lab group member Sanskriti Chitransh presented a talk, “Using Theatre to Communicate Quantum Physics to a Non-scientific Audience.” For this, Chitransh received “Best Interdisciplinary Presentation” at the Sigma Xi 2021 Annual Meeting and Student Research Conference STEM Art and Film Festival.

In the current realization of the Quantum Casino, there are three digital games and three card games that use a custom deck of cards, with all six demonstrating elements of quantum mechanics. The casino also includes the Quantum Photo Booth, a two-person interactive experience put on in collaboration with IBM that attempts to make quantum key distribution understandable by the general public.

“The Quantum Casino’s central design philosophy is to make quantum science accessible to everyone,” said Kawalek. “Instead of approaching people with an explicit intent to teach, the games evoke curiosity and spark moments of playfulness, inspiring players to use concepts in quantum physics to build strategies and win.”

The newest iteration of the Quantum Casino debuted at this year’s American Physical Society meeting in March, which happened to take place in Chicago.

STAGE’s Quantum Games are funded, in part, by a 3-year $270,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, “Enabling Quantum Leap,” with additional support for the APS event by the Chicago Quantum Exchange and IBM Quantum.

The River Project

The transition to hybrid work also brought unexpected opportunities for The River Project, STAGE’s theater production inspired by Prof. Supratik Guha’s research on water quality in India. The River Project centers on Indian communities that depend on the country’s increasingly polluted rivers for their livelihood, documenting their daily struggles amid the volatile landscape.

STAGE intended to be in India for workshops—supported, in part, by a Global Faculty Award from UChicago’s Center in Delhi—with members of the Ambedkar University Delhi's Centre for Community Knowledge, a local collaborator on the project. But with international travel off the table as a result of the pandemic, STAGE turned to Zoom.

While the pivot to online work created some physical barriers, it gave the team more planning time than they could otherwise afford. To date, they have logged over 20 improvisation and workshop sessions over Zoom with their international partners, finalizing many of the stories and characters that will be included in The River Project’s final production.

As an offshoot of The River Project, STAGE collaborator Ellen Askey, BA ’20, has created the short documentary film, Downstream, highlighting the impact of farming practices on the water ecosystem in the Midwestern US. Earlier this year, the film was screened virtually by the UChicago Center in Delhi to an audience of 200 people, which was followed by a discussion and Q&A with Prof. Guha, filmmaker Dinesh S. Yadav, and executive director of the Foundation for Ecological Security Sanjay Joshie.

STAGE in 2022

Looking to the future, STAGE aims to scale up. The lab is in early talks to establish a center that’s dedicated to the intersection of art and science: the STAGE Center. As part of that effort, STAGE has launched multiple studies looking at existing programs that straddle the arts, science and technology. STAGE also plans to expand its current projects and explore new mediums for its work.  

“Our goal is to make the PME a significant source of theatre, film, and related artistic endeavors that deal with science and technology,” said Kawalek. “We want to create scalable, tangible works that can be distributed and experienced globally. Our goal is to get the public truly excited about science and dispel whatever mistrust has grown in recent years. We want our audiences to forge authentic, emotional connections with science.”