From the very beginning, we have discussed that Nano Steps is a performance featuring the world’s smallest puppets as the performers. As planned, the leading roles are played by tiny particles that become visible under the microscope lens: colloids, silica, microscopic grains of sand and other guys. One could imagine that the microscopic puppets, and thus the entire performance, could fit into a microscopic space. However, the opposite is true.  Our puppets, which are approximately the size of a human cell, require relatively large equipment. Microscopes, microphones, cameras, a huge pile of wires, signal generators, power supplies, amplifiers, actuators, pipettes, specimen glasses and other instruments.All this just so we could even meet these performing artists of ours.

Devices are partners of human thinking. On the terms of their own materiality, they let us into a world that would otherwise be invisible to the human eye. Through the microscope, we gain access to the world around us, where anything can happen. As an environment functioning far from human’s everyday experience in terms of its scale and legality, it is unknown and unpredictable to us.

For the performance we made numerous expeditions to the world’s science universities and noticed that it is precisely reality that is an interesting performance. Especially microscopic reality. In this performance, we want to give the stage to the microparticles themselves: the material with which we share the world. That’s exactly why we don’t want to just act that we are doing science on stage. On the stage, we really do what people do in applied physics laboratories. And that’s fine, the scientists’ laboratory itself is already quite a puppet theater. As in a physics laboratory, the tension between animate and inanimate is at the heart of puppetry.

Our culture is characterized by a human belief in continuous development. We humans are in a hurry to run towards revolutionary discoveries, with as big leaps as possible. Researchers must constantly publish new research results, always receive new scholarships and funding. However, the work of a scientist and researcher in itself is in deep conflict with the ever-accelerating pace of the world. At the core of research is often waiting, wading through huge – and often boring – data masses without a guarantee that the work of years, decades or a lifetime would necessarily produce any world-changing fruit. However, it is precisely basic research that is worth doing: if not the current researcher, then the next one, or the one who will follow them far in the future, can take their own small step and find a new insight of the topic.

Our working group Trial & Theatre thinks, that just like science, art is cumulative. At its center is not a single person, but a continuum and a chain. Hopefully, our show will be placed in that continuum and generate a flow of thinking in the viewers and slowly maturing new outlets.

The ones that dug out from the corners of the microscope into the light of the premiere
Aati, Iiris ja Valtteri
Trial & Theatre