THEATER
Child's Play
Las Meninas at the Community College of Baltimore, Essex campus, March 19–23
Look Up: The Story of the Fall of Icarus at Maryland Institute College of Art BBox, March 6–8

The subjective nature of historical record is called into question in the Community College of Baltimore County's student production of Las Meninas, a lesser-known play by Lynn Nottage (whose Fabulation closes March 8 at Center Stage). It's the story of the alleged affair between the Spanish-born wife of Louis XIV and an African servant called Nabo, who was a dwarf.

"The play is about being an outsider," says director Precious Stone, assistant professor of performing arts at CCBC Essex. "And it also explores the question of historical accuracy." The story is told from the point of view of the daughter of the adulterous couple, who is preparing to take her vows at a convent. She is mentioned in diaries of people who lived at the time, Stone says, but there is no official historical record of the girl's existence. Stone says the play asks the question, "How do you erase a human existence?"


One of the first scenes in Look Up: The Story of The Fall of Icarus is meant to remind viewers of Pieter Brueghel's 1558 painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, in which a farmer ploughs his field as the youth in melting wax wings plunges, unnoticed, into the sea. The piece, performed by local aerial performance troupe Daydreams and Nightmares Aerial Theatre with Maryland Institute College of Art students and staff members, imagines what happened to Icarus after the splashdown.

The action takes place mostly "underwater," where Icarus encounters such mythical figures as Poseidon, Neptune, and Undine. The nine performers don't speak, but use aerial cloth and straps, harnesses and circus adagio—aka, each other's bodies for balancing tricks—to tell the post-hubris tale, accompanied by a soundtrack of high-energy music and otherworldly ocean sounds. "It's a childlike, innocent story, but it describes something universal," says Kel Millionie, the company's artistic director and lead acrobat. "Everyone has been plunged into an unseen or unknown experience."

—Martha Thomas


For tickets to Las Meninas, call 443-840-2787.

Tickets to Look Up are available at the door before performances. Go to www.daydreamsandnightmares.com for more information.





DANCE
Inner Visions
Full Circle Dance Company performs The Unconscious: Dreams and Fears at the Baltimore Museum of Art, March 20–21

The Unconscious. | photo by Erica Feriozzi


Back in 2000, teachers at the Morton Street Dance Center, a dancing school in Hampden's Meadow Mill complex, pitched the idea of forming a professional ensemble to studio owner and artistic director Donna Jacobs, who choreographed the original piece "Spirits Fallen" for the troupe. The piece garnered accolades on stages from Broadway to Artscape, and Full Circle Dance Company was born.

Since then, this team of fourteen dancers—a multiethnic mix of dedicated pros and semi-pros, many of whom juggle demanding professional lives with their commitment to the company—has tackled such heavyweight social issues as race, religion, and motherhood. For this year's theme-driven concert, Full Circle focuses its choreography inward. The Unconscious: Dreams and Fears uses dance as a medium for exploring and exposing our mysterious inner lives. Preparing for the annual performance has proven emotionally taxing, Jacobs says. "It's rare for us to make it through a planning session without some inspired tears."

A compilation of eight new and repertory works, The Unconscious is the product of the company's yearlong meditation on the mind. The ensemble recruited Ohio-based choreographer Travis Gatling for selected pieces, but for the most part choreographed its own work, finding inspiration in the most mundane of places. In dancer/choreographer/psychiatry resident Misty Borst's "Daydreams," for example, co-workers in a run-of-the-mill office environment navigate a stage of chairs, coexisting but never understanding each other; the dancers vacillate between militaristic marching and outbursts of fluid, passionate pirouette sequences. The Unconscious marries high art and the everyday; indeed, for Full Circle, dance is only as meaningful as it is accessible. "Dance can be stuffy, and we want to be the opposite of that," says Borst. "By virtue of being human, we're all automatically included in this concert: We all have dreams, we all have fears."

—Anne-Marie Robinson


Tickets are available at the door and by calling 410-235-9003.





BOOK
Sorry, Wrong Number
Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio (Simon & Schuster, 2009)


In 1971, while on the moon, Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott conducted a 343-year-old thought experiment: He simultaneously dropped a hammer and a feather. Proving the predictions of scientific wunderkind Galileo Galilei, the light object and the heavy object hit the lunar surface at the exact same moment. (Here on Earth, the hammer will hit the ground first because the feather encounters atmospheric resistance.)

Dig, if you will, how amazingly prescient Galileo proved to be, especially after Sir Isaac Newton mathematically refined Galileo's theory into what is now called the inverse law of gravity. Between the two, they formulated a prediction of how quickly things fall. Not just in Italy. Or Cleveland. But everywhere, even the moon. Galileo and Newton, using the language of mathematics, explained exactly how our universe teeters on the balanced forces of gravity, and their work has held true to levels of precision far beyond what they could fathom.

Mario Livio is a man who invests a similar trust in the numbers. By day, the Romanian-born astrophysicist works for the Space Tele-scope Science Institute (STScI), snuggled along the curvy San Martin Drive behind the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus. One of Livio's ongoing tasks at STScI is to try to mathematically characterize dark energy, the still-unexplained force that seems to be causing the universe to expand. He also heads up the institute's office of public outreach, which provides educational material to schools, planetariums, and the press about findings from the Hubble Space Telescope, which STScI oversees. (See Urbanite, March 2006.)

Drawing on this dual skill-set of understanding bits of the vast unknown and relating it back to the rest of us, Livio also writes general-readership books on astronomy and mathematics. Like all scientists worth their salt, he has a taste for a good mystery: Previous books have delved into such conundrums as why the mathematical constant phi—known as the "golden ratio"—defines the aesthetically pleasing. Now, for his fourth book, Is God a Mathematician?, Livio picks the biggest brainteaser yet: Did humans invent numbers, or just discover them? And why, if numbers are man's invention, do they work so darn well at characterizing, well, pretty much everything in the natural world?

"When you work in something like astrophysics, like I do, you encounter almost daily this phenomenon of explaining the universe through mathematics," Livio says. "Mathematics has this incredible power of not only describing what we see, but can make predictions of what we should see—and those predictions are often found to be correct."

Other great minds have trod this path, as Livio notes; Albert Einstein once mused, "How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality?"

Is God a Mathematician? is more philosophy than mathematics. The math-wary can relax: No flummoxing number puzzles here, although Livio does offer a few light numerical examples. (Here's one: The number of days in an Earth year, 365, is the sum of the squares of 10, 11, and 12. What's up with that?) Much of the book recounts the discovery of major mathematical milestones, such as the birth of calculus. But in his research, Livio kept an eye out for how groundbreaking mathematicians talked about their work—the asides revealing what they thought the nature of mathematics to be.

By Livio's accounting, Galileo was the first to see that mathematics could be applied everywhere. "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe," the great astronomer was quoted as saying. Earlier, many thought that each science had its own discipline, with mathematics being a separate entity entirely from, say, astronomy. But no sooner did the post-Renaissance scientific collective agree on the universal goodness of numbers did they break into two seemingly irreconcilable factions about the origins of said tool—those who thought that mathematics represented some higher order of thinking we were lucky enough to glimpse, and those who thought our mathematics was our own devising and that other utterly different but equally valid maths could also be created.

Livio recounts the best arguments from thinkers from both camps but ultimately shies away from coming down on either side. "What I did was a very thorough review," he says. He offers what he calls a "partial answer"—math is a combination of invention and discovery—but it feels like a bit of a compromise. Nor does he confront the idea that mathematics could constitute proof of omniscient guidance. Rather, he admits, he sets the stage for readers to ponder such issues themselves.

This is a great time to get pondering: Themes in Is God a Mathematician? also resonate in many of the recent press retrospectives on Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday was celebrated in February. Just as Galileo had no idea that his laws of gravity would hold up at the micron level, or on other planets, Darwin could not have anticipated that evolution would operate on the level of genes. And much like, as Livio reports, people wonder if alternative maths could exist, biologists debate whether life on this planet could have evolved differently given a slightly different set of initial constraints.

Such parallels might give even a die-hard agnostic the uneasy feeling that some larger force is at work, one that humankind can barely glimpse. And what Livio's book does best is impart this sense of awe. As he says, "The questions are more important than the answers."

—Joab Jackson




BOOK
Feet First
Standing for Socks by Elissa Brent Weissman (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2009)


In local author Elissa Brent Weissman's breezy debut novel for young readers, Standing for Socks, Fara Ross accidentally wears a mismatched pair of socks to school, causing a surprising flurry of attention. "Everybody thought socks should match," the fifth-grader realizes. "But clearly they didn't have to. It was a free country, with freedom of expression." So Fara, "the greenest girl on the planet," who brims with ideas for the world's betterment, attempts to turn her socky popularity to political advantage and win the election for president of the student council. After all, she notes in her journal, "It seems like a lot of people who make a difference … start by deviating from the norm."

Unfortunately, there are dangers to being known for something rather than being known for doing something. Before you can say "hand-knitted argyle," she becomes "Fara Ross, Sock Girl." Events take a brutal turn when she receives socks as elementary school graduation and birthday gifts, although she'd been hankering after a bike. Rather than rally the environmentally progressive, Fara and her BFF Jody Gower simply empower the sock-challenged. (Let me pause here to unburden and share: At school I wore regulation ribbed knee-length white socks, which after many washes lost their elastic oomph, requiring them to be secured by rubber bands. By day's end my chunky Scottish pins bore a ring of rosy welts, like the tread marks from a mini Sherman tank, planting dormant seeds of bad circulation and varicose veins now ravaging my middle years. My name is Susan, and I am a sockaholic.)

Weissman's prose trots along at a snappy clip, enlivened with a tasty smattering of more difficult vocabulary. A few boys hover in the plot periphery, hinting of future sweaty palms, but thankfully that's where they stay. Fara, whose heroes are Rosa Parks, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and her uncle, Alan, who sets up an orphanage in Bosnia, has a family that make me feel like an ingrate. They recycle, give gifts to Goodwill on their birthdays, serve home-cooked food at shelters at Christmas and Thanksgiving. I don't know what kind of car they drive, but I'd bet my truck it's a hybrid. Nevertheless, I like them. The Rosses are decent, not self-satisfied, but I fear such undiluted political correctness may now be the family prototype expected in young adult fiction. Fara often questions why other folks don't take more responsibility, and by the book's end she is no nearer to answering this question, a missed opportunity for Weissman to pay more than lip service to the environmental movement.

Fara's nemesis is Melodee Simon, a gum-snapping prepubescent gossip girl whose power-hungry über-mom runs the PTA and has Ms., not Mrs., prefixing her name. Melodee perpetuates the reverse-snobbery stereotype that all rich kids are self-absorbed and that affluence is inherently bad (though tweenies toting designer bags do make me want to barf). Also, Weissman may have unwittingly implied that women who choose not to advertise their marital status are somehow sinister, or that Ms. Simon may be (shocker!) a single parent, not a nice, normal Mrs. Mom—a message a tad regressive to send to young girls. When did we become so afraid of having complex characters in young adult literature? Why not blend a little bad into our heroes, spice our villains with some humanity?

Nevertheless, it's a joy to eavesdrop on Fara and her buddies; Weissman has a real knack for how kids banter and interact. Poor Phillip is confused over what exactly is a "homeroom" (Good question. Are there "away rooms"?), and brainstorming campaign slogans results in the winning "Vote for Fara and School won't Sock!" Small moments of adolescence are charmingly crystallized—searching for the cool spot on the pillow, or how little it took for life to be deemed perfect: "her favorite T-shirt was freshly washed and it was macaroni day at lunch and she knew her science teacher was going to be absent." Bliss.

Standing for Socks also manages to be a timely satire on the evils of political lobbying, of influencing public opinion by manipulating celebrity and the media while ignoring policy and deeds. "I am extremely disappointed that neither candidate played by the rules," a teacher says. "That's politics, but we won't stand for it here." Fara's fear of losing popularity causes her to jeopardize her friendship with Jody, and she learns that standing by and doing nothing can be as dishonest as deliberately doing wrong.

Kudos to Weissman, who has a second book due out this summer, snapping at the knitted heels of a debut that entertains, teaches, and totally does not sock.

—Susan McCallum-Smith





AWARDS
People's Choice
The Baker Artist Awards
 www.bakerartistawards.org


On March 25, the winners of the Baker Artist Awards are to be announced. The Baker Awards comprise two kinds of grants given to individual Baltimore artists: The Baltimore's Choice Award—five $1,000 awards to the artists who receive the most votes from viewers of an online gallery of their work—and the Mary Sawyers Baker Prize—up to three $25,000 prizes awarded by a jury. The winners will be announced on MPT ArtWorks at 7:30 p.m. on local channels 22 and 26.

The Baker Awards are a bit unorthodox: Unlike other grant applications that require applicants to choose one category, artists could upload a portfolio of a variety of media—film, painting, sculpture, animation, written and spoken words, music, design, and crafts—to www.bakerartistawards.org. The portfolios form an online gallery that can "present to the world what a great community of artists Baltimore has," says Nancy Haragan, executive director of the GBCA, the administrator of the awards. Up since October, the site has been well trafficked: Visitors came from more than seventy countries and territories and all fifty states. More than six hundred local artists posted portfolios to the site, and more than nine thousand registered to vote.

The site has created a sense of community; local artists have posted comments about each other's work and sent out e-mails to rally their friends to vote for them. (Viewers who registered received one vote, and the more they browsed, the more votes they could use, up to ten. They could change their votes until the February 1 deadline.)

The Baker Awards are also unusual for their openness. Normally, decisions about grants are made behind closed doors; here, the general public chose some of the winners. And although artists cannot see how many votes they received, the Mary Sawyers Baker Prize jury will know who has won the Baltimore's Choice Award when they select the winners. The whole thing may feel too populist to some, but Haragan isn't worried. "I don't care if it's a popularity contest," she says. "We have a lot of nonprofit arts spaces but not a lot of commercial galleries for people to exhibit work and be found by people. Maybe over time, this will help with artists who want to sell their work."

—Marianne K. Amoss