Photograph David Hawe

FROM LEFT: Erin Shields, AIMÉE DAWN ROBINSON, JACOB ZIMMER, Frank Cox-O’Connell

“I think science can be really alienating for everyone,” admits Jacob Zimmer, experimental theatre artist. “Especially for artists trying to figure out the scientific method — it’s like, I know how these concepts work, but I could never build you a computer.”

Beginning in Halifax in 2001, and blossoming with a conceptual take on Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Zimmer’s theatre company Small Wooden Shoe developed the first instalment of Dedicated To The Revolutions for the 2006 Rhubarb Festival. A “casually formalistic” performance series that wrestles with breakthroughs in scientific history, Dedicated uses agit-props like tinker toys and tin-can phones. Actors explain how the internet is a network of tubes, and even tackle E=MC² — though they’re no Einsteins.

Says Zimmer: “We want to show that there doesn’t need to be this [hierarchy] of specialized knowledge. We’re trying to go about this process of understanding — but we’re also putting on a show. It’s fun and we use humour, but it’s also about issues of progress and that’s very political, I think.”

The eponymous and most ambitious instalment of the six-part series, running at Buddies in Bad Times March 31 to April 12, aims to redefine the seven scientific revolutions (Gutenbergian, Copernican, Newtonian, Industrial, Darwinian, Nuclear, Information) based on a list cribbed from Zimmer’s Grade 8 science class. Six of Toronto’s most exciting theatre artists mix live demonstration, ukulele singalongs and a Staples catalogue worth of whiteboards. They’ve learned their protons from their neutrons in an extensive rehearsal process: of all of them, only actor Frank Cox-O’Connell could be considered a scientific authority. He remembers Darwin’s finches from OAC biology.

When I go to observe a rehearsal at the Theatre Centre, the stage is littered with tin cans, beach balls, marbles and magic markers — it’s half lab practicum, half Beakman’s World. Collaborators Evan Webber and Chad Dembski are poised at the whiteboard, drawing the universe.

“This is all the knowledge we have,” illustrates Webber, shading in a Richard Scarry–like bacterium alongside sketches of sugar molecules, rodents and miniature galaxies. The pictures are a matter of scale — an earlier rehearsal made apparent that “humans are always comparing everything to themselves.”

While it might sound trite to a nuclear physicist — a bunch of actors find science tough to understand! — the oblique poetry of the scientific method suits the contemplative work of Dedicated’s frequent collaborators. After all, it was physicist Ernest Rutherford who described the nucleus of an atom as “a flea in a cathedral.”

Today’s list of rehearsal questions furthers the existential melancholia: “How do we prevent loss?” “What conditions would create stillness?” and “How do we understand change?” are not only jumping-off points for particle theorem, but the stuff of Mamet, Brecht and Sophocles.  

The actors appear to have been cast for their ability to seek out answers: Webber races a dot matrix printer to determine who can replicate a Bible passage fastest (NTS grad or machine?); Aimée Dawn Robinson ponders John Cage’s soundless chamber; and Zimmer vamps on particle acceleration through a free-verse rap entitled “It’s Hard To Stop.”

“Nothing wants to change,” the cast sings, spinning on miniature wooden planks and channelling the inherent drama of a failed experiment. “But it does and that’s what’s strange. It’s even worse for bigger things; nothing ever wants to change.”

“We’re working through these issues together,” says Zimmer. He notes that in rehearsal for their 2007 Fringe show at MaRS, Dembski defined progress as the drive towards “doing whatever you wanted as quickly as possible.”

“That has very real consequences for society, the economy and for how we understand ourselves,” says Zimmer. “It makes you wonder, is this really a good model for revolution?

“Ultimately we mean this — we mean everything we say onstage,” he says of Dedicated’s sardonic bent. “It’s just that sometimes, we mean other things, too.”