Star Messengers
Work
Star Messengers is about two scientists -Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler - who changed our view of the universe.
While some aspects of Galileo's life and discoveries are well-known, hardly anything is popularly known of his scientific contemporaries. Johannes Kepler's realization that the planets moved, not in perfect circles, but in elliptical paths was a leap of mind as extraordinary as that made by Galileo in his proofs that the earth moved around the sun. Kepler's discoveries were made despite poverty, the Thirty Years War, the loss of his wife and child to an epidemic, and the need to defend his mother in court from the charges of witchcraft. A third prominent contemporary was Kepler's mentor, Tycho Brahe, the greatest naked-eye observer of the heavens. Brahe was a flamboyant, worldly, nobleman who wore a silver nose to replace his own that he lost in a duel. In Star Messengers, these extraordinary, colorful figures are joined by three Commedia characters - Simplicio, Sagredo and Salviati - created by Galileo himself, in order to explain and popularize his theories. The show is a carnival of genres - Opera, Commedia Dell'Arte, Strindbergian Dream Play, and Contemporary Dance/Theatre - in order to produce a theatrical language that conveys the wonder of Galileo's and Kepler's discoveries.
press release
While some aspects of Galileo's life and discoveries are well-known, hardly anything is popularly known of his scientific contemporaries. Johannes Kepler's realization that the planets moved, not in perfect circles, but in elliptical paths was a leap of mind as extraordinary as that made by Galileo in his proofs that the earth moved around the sun. Kepler's discoveries were made despite poverty, the Thirty Years War, the loss of his wife and child to an epidemic, and the need to defend his mother in court from the charges of witchcraft. A third prominent contemporary was Kepler's mentor, Tycho Brahe, the greatest naked-eye observer of the heavens. Brahe was a flamboyant, worldly, nobleman who wore a silver nose to replace his own that he lost in a duel. In Star Messengers, these extraordinary, colorful figures are joined by three Commedia characters - Simplicio, Sagredo and Salviati - created by Galileo himself, in order to explain and popularize his theories. The show is a carnival of genres - Opera, Commedia Dell'Arte, Strindbergian Dream Play, and Contemporary Dance/Theatre - in order to produce a theatrical language that conveys the wonder of Galileo's and Kepler's discoveries.
press release
circa 2001
English
WORK.2001.0034
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