Dancers rehearse at Point 5 on the LHC for the contemporary dance piece QUANTUM, beneath a lighting installation by Julius von Bismarck and a poster of the CMS detector (Image: Michael Hoch/CERN)
Collide @ CERN and Swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin are working in collaboration with the CMS experiment at CERN, which is hosting the world première of their new performance piece, QUANTUM, in September. This is Jobin's latest choreographic creation that came directly out of his Collide @ CERN residency last year and will be danced directly above one of the spots on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) where the Higgs boson was first detected by both ATLAS and CMS.
"During my residency at CERN I was trying to find movement generators based on quantum physics," says Jobin. "It was a challenge – the movement of particles can be so abstract; it's about possibilities. Eventually I found rules for the movement of human bodies inspired by quantum physics."
This contemporary dance piece is the result of a creative collision between the two first laureates of the Collide @ CERN artistic residencies: Jobin and German visual artist Julius von Bismarck, who created the lighting installation used in the dance piece during his Collide @ CERN residency. The installation, featuring hanging lamps cycling in and out of various resonant modes of a set of pendulums, was first shown at the Ars Electronica Festival in 2011.
The music score, using real data from the LHC, was created by American composer Carla Scaletti, and the costume design was by Belgian fashion designer Jean-Paul Lespagnard.
This first Collide @ CERN collaboration, QUANTUM, has been awarded the prestigious Hermès Foundation New Settings Award. This means that the piece, after its premiere at CERN, will go on tour to Paris at Thèatre de la Cité Internationale on 4, 5, 7 and 8 November followed by performances in New York in 2014.
To see QUANTUM for free during the CERN Open Days on 28-29 September at 11am and 3pm, go to CMS on the CERN Cessy Site in France and queue for entry at least an hour before. We look forward to seeing you there.