How can engineers and dancers use nets to explore structural designs and collective motion? At Princeton, artists and researchers confront this question head-on, exploring the complexities of giant nets and seeking to understand how they respond to human movement and dynamic loads.
Spearheaded by Rebecca Lazier, professor and associate director of the Program in Dance at the Lewis Center for the Arts; Sigrid Adriaenssens, a professor of civil and environmental engineering; and visual artist Janet Echelman, the project traces its origins to a serendipitous meeting at a 2018 symposium.
“We saw the potential of the artistic expression — the living, human system of the net,” Lazier explained. “The net was an extension of the body, and plucking a single line can make the whole system move. It also has this layer of how we think about the world we’re in, the earth we’re on.”
This shared vision led to subsequent collaborations with architects, engineers, and dancers, exploring dance within net structures through residencies and co-teaching at the University of Washington and the Atelier Program at Princeton. Adriaenssens leads efforts to use machine learning to develop mathematical models that capture nets’ nuanced behavior. The collaborators test the models in performance spaces. Thus, the stage becomes an alternative laboratory for engineers to observe how different net configurations impact their mechanics under various loads and configurations.
“We’re interested in studying the behaviors we ob[1]serve in the nets because very little is known about how they behave. Nets are complex systems that warrant deeper exploration,” Adriaenssens said.
An ongoing multidisciplinary performance from this collaboration, “Noli Timere” is a soaring aerial dance. Eight performers, suspended up to 25 feet in the air, move within Echelman’s monumental net sculpture, where every movement reverberates through the intricate web.
“Noli Timere,” Latin for “be not afraid,” renders interconnectedness visible and demonstrates the delicate balance of our ecosystem as small actions have ripple effects across the world. “Noli Timere” has a residency this year at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology and premiered at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre Center in February.
Mark DeChiazza is a documentary filmmaker who was the Edward T. Cone Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of Music in 2022. He is the producer and documentarian for Princeton’s CreativeX partnership between engineering and the arts.
