An audience of scientists

We're just back from Warwick Arts Centre, where we performed Stilled as part of the 2012 Spring meeting of the British Crystallographic Association - a rare audience mostly made up of scientists, including a 2011 Nobel laureate for chemistry.  We really noticed the depth of engagement which the scientists at Warwick brought as audience members - thoroughly reading the programme while watching the show, really studying the photographs, and unashamedly waiting until the end to be able to ask us technical and conceptual questions.  They were incredibly inquisitive and seemed genuinely interested in trying to fathom this strange art event, something that had developed in a field totally unlike their own.And in that curiosity there was a perfect mirror of the inquisitiveness that we, as artists, had brought to the science in the first place, when we were trying to fathom how to make a contemporary performance about X-ray crystallography.  It reminded me that scientists and artists are ploughing adjacent furrows in fields that are closer together than we often know - all of us trying to make sense of the unfathomable beauty and mystery of the world.