When movement is a form of science

Albert EINSTEIN has long been considered one of the artiest of physics innovators. His love of the violin, for instance, is well known, and his admirers talk about the elegant beauty of such formulas as E=mc2.

But a ballet in the works at the Rambert Dance Company, Britain’s oldest dance troupe, still sounds unlikely. “Constant Speed,” which the company plans to premiere in London in May, addresses both the special theory of relativity and Brownian movement, the latter a principle so obscure that many educated people have never heard of it.

Still, Mark Baldwin, the work’s choreographer and the group’s artistic director, says Einstein makes a good fit with dancing.

“All dance, all ballet, is about time, space and light,” Baldwin said from London. “When you go to the theater, you’re plunged into the darkness, and you’re actually watching light bounce off bodies.”

Baldwin has consulted with physics professors, and he, like Britain’s Institute of Physics, which commissioned the piece to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s breakthrough year, is hoping the dance will provoke interest in science. But it’s not meant to be joyless. “I’ve tried to keep it very, very simple,” he said.

“There’s very little partnering in it, so the dances are like individual molecules, and as a choreographer I’ve had to come up with a very fast, inventive way of moving -- the randomness of the natural sciences.”

Baldwin also listened to music from 1905, the year of Einstein’s greatest discoveries, and he wound up choosing “the lush, gorgeous tonal music” of Franz Lehar.

“I should have probably gone with Schoenberg, who was working in exactly the same time as Einstein,” he said. “But I really wanted this to be a friendly project. I didn’t want an empty theater.”