MOM doesn’t know everything

Published 6:00 pm Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Art merges with quantum physics as students ponder ‘the

meaning of meaning.’

MOM says it’s good to brush one’s teeth – but first, one must locate both teeth and toothbrush in the space-time continuum.

“MOM: The Meaning of Meaning,” merges fine art and physics in an original theater production by West Sound Academy art teacher Greg MacDonald.

The play presents a pastiche of song, dance, monologue, chorus, slapstick – and even scenes from Shakespeare’s “King Lear” – in a lively exploration of notions of meaning inspired by quantum mechanics.

“When I read about quantum mechanics, it reminds me about things I wonder about when I’m making my own art,” said MacDonald, who paints large-scale abstractions in acrylic.

“Scientists have traditionally tried to find answers, but quantum scientists simply can’t know things, because the world of the very small is ultimately unknowable.”

The notion of mixing art and an abstruse science – one that posits, among other things, that tiny sub-atomic particles may exist in two locations simultaneously – is a particularly appropriate subject for art and artists, MacDonald believes, because artists are able to tolerate uncertainty about the meaning of things.

In fact, the mysterious qualities of the quantum world, the sub-atomic particles explored by early 20th century physicists like Niels Bohr and Werner Karl Heisenberg, have filtered into our worldview through art, MacDonald says.

He points to early Modernists like Pablo Picasso, who sought to show different views of one object simultaneously, and Marcel Duchamp, who depicted, on a single fixed plane, a subject moving through time in his famed “Nude Descending a Staircase.”

MacDonald says merging art and science subjects works well with the West Sound Academy approach to learning. The Suquamish private school, which caters to a largely island-based student body, seeks to integrate studies.

Basing theater on that notion has proved popular; a science and art-based show by MacDonalds last year, “Thing with No Name,” sold out.

This year, nearly 80 WSA students take the stage to make the point.

Bearing such monikers as Village Idioms, played by Luc Rosenthal, Jake Yearous and Margaret Carder; Cell Sisters Alexis Hawkins and Abbey Peterson; Alf and Bet – a take-off on the Hebrew for “a” and “b” – played by Alex van Gelder and Kate Briggs: and the inimitable MOM, Kyra West, students grades 6-12 undertake the complex subject matter with enough enthusiasm to make their own particles dance.

In one rap-like exchange, a group of students challenges another, chanting, “There is No Thing/That does not dissolve/To movement/As Movement/There is No Thing.”

The rejoinder: “Make any thing/Act in beauty/Take the thing/Forsake the act /The thing’s the thing” is repeated until the two lines merge.

For MacDonald, the play is a way to raise questions of meaning that students can relate to, if not understand in entirety.

“The whole thing is interesting to me and fascinating,” MacDonald said. “I write this story so kids can learn about it. They may not grasp it all now, but they will have the memory there, and a few years down the road they may say, ‘now I get it.’”

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Ask your mother

West Sound Academy presents the original production “MOM: Meaning Of Meaning” by WSA teacher Greg MacDonald at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 25-26 at the Bainbridge High School LGI Room. Directed by co-writer Michael Payne Dance, with choreography by Dance Director Susan Thompson and music direction by Sarah Dorian Lawrence and Paul Kikuchi, the play showcases 6-12-grade WSA students.

Admission is $12 for adults, $8 for seniors, students. Call (360) 598-5954 for reservations. For more information, see www.westsoundacademy.org.