NANO STEPS - INTO THE LAB

WARNING: The performance features some flickering lights and high-pitches of sound.

Encounter in the spotlight of a microscope.Trial & Theatre stretches the scale of performing arts and does the smallest puppetry in the world.

Nano Steps - Into the lab invites the spectator into a basement laboratory right in the middle of a physicist’s experiments. The research is unpredictable and has its own time and agency. Bare eye cannot fathom the scale of microparticles, until we open their world up with the help of
microscopes and other tools. In this laboratory the microscopic particles, scientific equipment and audience all have an impact on the outcome of the experiment. Each performance is an open question. Does the microscopic world have something to say? Can a piece of sand hear us?

Trial & Theatre is a new, process-oriented performance collective concentrating on experiments and a conceptual approach to puppetry. Nano Steps is their first foray into the world of physics and material sciences, as well as their first series of staged pieces. The objective of the group is a free and unruly process of research in which the performances of science and puppetry collide, and blur each other’s boundaries.

Nano Steps is a series of performances based on an ongoing artistic research that started with a question: what could be the smallest puppet in the world? Trial & Theatre indulged in a meandering and unpredictable research process, during which they called world-famous professors and traveled to Cornell University, to Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and to laboratories of Aalto University. Nano Steps is a tapestry of science and object theater that introduces new techniques of microscopic puppetry, borrowed straight from ongoing research in applied physics, and asks big questions about the nature of research, knowledge production, and the things and doings involved within. The premiere of the first performance in the series, Nano Steps - a Particle Performance in Helsinki City Theatre, Finland, was a resounding popular and critical success. The second research outcome: Nano Steps - Into the Lab premieres in Alfred ve Dvoře in April 2024 before continuing its tour to the collective's native Finland.

Director: Aati Hanikka
Dramaturge: Iiris Syrjä
Sound-designer/musician: Valtteri Alanen
Performer: En Ping Yu
Lighting designer: Jere Suontausta
Collaborators: Aura of Puppets, Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague), Cornell University (Ithaca, New York), Aalto-yliopisto (Helsinki), Alfred ve Dvoře and Studio Alta