Quantum science and the arts—a beautiful entanglement

Daniel Inafuku
for Illinois Physics Condensate

The first seeds of the art-science collaboration now known as CASCaDe were planted in 2016, when Illinois Physics Professor Smitha Vishveshwara first met Illinois Theatre Professor Latrelle Bright.

Vishveshwara’s science spans the quantum to the cosmic. She studies everything from exotic quantum systems—ultracold Bose-Einstein condensates, superfluids, and superconductors—to black holes and even protein networks. Yet she’s always had a deep affinity for the arts and envisioned a space where she could blend these two interests into one.

“Art has always been a part of my life,” reflects Vishveshwara. “My grandfather was a playwright, and my father, a black-hole physicist and planetarium director, scripted shows with musicians and visual artists. So I grew up in that environment.”

Bright, a prolific director, uses theatre and storytelling to build community in a unique approach she calls “theatre-making.” She traces her journey in science back to her interests in nature and in humans’ relationship to the environment.

“Making new things with a group of people really feels like the way I want the world to work,” shares Bright. “I use these devised performance pieces to continue learning. After undergrad, when I found myself in charge of my continued education, I was eventually drawn to nature and the environment. This turned into a fascination with water over time—water in our region, our state, our country, and the world.”

Vishveshwara and Bright’s first meeting sparked a creative flame. The two together devised the performance piece Quantum Voyages, bringing it to the stage in 2018 at a conference honoring Illinois Physics’ resident Nobel laureate Tony Leggett. Additional performances followed at the Beckman Institute in 2018, at the 2019 APS March Meeting in Boston, and over Zoom in 2020 when the pandemic first struck.

Their work soon brought them into the orbit of Illinois Music Professor Stephen Taylor, a composer who collaborates with scientists to interpret genetic, protein, and astronomical data through sound.

“I’d been writing pieces inspired by science and science fiction for a long time—I even wrote an entire opera,” says Taylor. “After that, I thought about having the music actually do the thing that it’s about, and not just in a metaphorical sense. We call this ‘data-driven’ music, or sonification.

“I got into art-science through biology, inspired by the idea of DNA as a recipe for life,” Taylor continues. “I’ve also always been interested in outer space. Thinking about the tininess of the atom, the vastness of the universe, and how these aren’t yet reconciled gives you fertile ground to explore. We don’t know, for example, what the relationship is between quantum physics and general relativity.”

The trio have enjoyed a productive collaboration. And audiences have responded enthusiastically. Quantum Voyages debuted to an audience of approximately 400 at the I-Hotel. Later, the multimedia performance piece Quantum Rhapsodies played to a standing-room-only audience of over 100, the virtual art-science festival The Illuminated Universe drew almost 100 attendees each day across its 3-day run, the multimedia performance piece Joy of Regathering filled KCPA’s nearly 650-seat Colwell Playhouse to capacity, and the physics-plus-circus collaboration Cosmic Tumbles, Quantum Leaps premiered to an audience 2,000 strong at the 2023 APS March Meeting’s Kavli Symposium.

Energized by these successes, Vishveshwara, Bright, and Taylor formalized their collaboration, bringing their prior stand-alone projects under one cohesive identity: CASCaDe. CASCaDe now unites over 100 U. of I. faculty, staff, students, and community members across multiple campus departments in celebration of quantum science, the cosmos, and the role of science in deciphering nature’s mysteries.

Bright comments, “The motivation behind CASCaDe was the realization that our pieces didn’t have a permanent home. CASCaDe is now the umbrella under which these pieces exist. It’s beneficial to fund an initiative rather than individual works.”

For CASCaDe’s launch in April 2024, the trio staged Quantum Voyages’s opening scene, entitled “Light; What does it mean to see?” at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.

Vishveshwara notes, “So many sagas begin with the emergence of light. It seemed apt to bring CASCaDe into the world through the opening scene of Quantum Voyages, which celebrates light.”

Quantum Voyages follows explorers Terra and Akash as they venture into a quantum world. Echoing the journey of Dante in The Divine Comedy, the explorers, led by the Virgilian figure Sapienza, dance with light, swim in a sea of electrons, and even play a quantum version of the board game Clue. Along the way, they encounter so-called Quantum Sages, real-life physicists who act as guides during the voyagers’ trek.

Illinois Physics Professor Gina Lorenz, an optical physicist, has been part of Quantum Voyages since its first production in 2018. She portrays the Quantum Sage of Light, who teaches Terra and Akash about photons—quantum particles of light—speaking in iambic pentameter.

“The radiation quanta that you see … from depths of purest nothing come to be,” incants Lorenz as she describes the birth of photons from immaterial nothingness. “They travel fast, make distance short. As Hermes, they—pure information—fly.”

Lorenz penned the monologue herself.

Pictured above: Illinois Music Professor Stephen Taylor and Illinois Physics Professor Gina Lorenz rehearse for the April 2024 production of Quantum Voyages. Lorenz plays the Quantum Sage of Light. Photo by Nic Morse, Illinois Grainger Engineering

For this most recent iteration of Quantum Voyages, Taylor composed new, original music. Vishveshwara and Bright credit Taylor for giving the piece new depth.

Says Vishveshwara, “The music Steve wrote added a completely new dimension. A renewed dialogue took place between theatre, physics, and music.”

Vishveshwara, Bright, and Taylor are ready to kick art-science activity into high gear in the coming months. The trio have been workshopping Quantum Voyages with Le PeTiT CiRqUe, a children’s circus, and its director Nathalie Yves Gaulthier ahead of the APS Global Physics Summit in March 2025. There will be a new full-scale production of Quantum Voyages at Krannert’s newly renovated Colwell Playhouse, planned for April 2025.

By making esoteric science more accessible and engaging to the public, CASCaDE organizers are working to broaden conceptions of who gets to engage in science.

“Let’s dispel the stereotype about who a scientist is and what a scientist looks like,” Bright asserts.

And that’s built into the creative process.

Asks Bright, “How do we tell the story of different scientific concepts so that they’re not scary but accessible? One thing that’s evident from everything we’ve done is how fun and creative physicists are.

“This CASCaDe community is growing and getting bigger and bigger,” Bright continues. “It’s a place where I can share the fullness of myself—my academic brain, my creative heart, the boots on the ground making things happen. That’s what brings me to CASCaDe.”

Vishveshwara agrees. “There’s this common ground that we and our extended community have built together. We deeply resonate with each other. This is my happy space.”