Radiolab's "In the Dark" show explores evolution of the eye
By Daniel Peel
May 13, 2012 5:40 p.m.
More than 3,000 irises dilated as the concert hall’s lights flipped off. The time had arrived to speculate about the orchestral webs of cells in the eye and the days before vision existed.
“In the Dark,” a multimedia show produced by WNYCs Radiolab, visited UCLA’s Royce Hall last week to explore the aspects of light and darkness through various means. The show combines scientific curiosities, such as theories on the evolution of the eye, with humor, music, stories, athletic-dance and other media, to create an immersive experience.
Jad Abumrad, an award-winning radio producer, and Robert Krulwich, an acclaimed science reporter, teamed up with comedian Demetri Martin, the athletic-dance troupe Pilobolus and musician Thao Nguyen to captivate, entertain and educate audience members.
Martin acted as the emcee, transitioning the show from Pilobolus’s athletic-dance demonstrations to discussions between Radiolab, Abumarad and Krulwich while Nguyen created sound effects to accompany the hosts’ discussions and the stories that followed.
First-year microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics student Sami Yerunkar said he was excited for the show after seeing the guest list, but did not expect Radiolab to tie the different performers together as well as it did.
As Abumarad and Krulwich interviewed a man who had lost his sight from a drum of battery acid, Nguyen’s live sound effects contributed dimension and an emotional atmosphere. Pilobolus combined its contortionist shadow-puppet show with the hosts’ discussion, opening doors for the audience to imagine a pre-vision world, blindness and spacewalks.
At one point, Nguyen placed her guitar horizontally on a stand and began playing it like a keyboard, with slides, hammer-ons and arpeggios. The Pilobolus dancers linked their bodies together to create a structure and elevated Nguyen and her guitar off the stage and into the air.
Alumna Claire Kennedy said the show made her question what visuality is, and engaged her cognitive mind, as well as her imagination.
“Radiolab is essentially an aural experience,” Kennedy said. “It makes topics of science accessible and emotional. The visual element “¦ manifested some of the phenomena.”
Dave Wolf, a NASA astronaut, told his story about an airlock malfunction during a space walk on the Mirror shuttle. After more than 11 hours of attempting to restore the airlock, his resources ran out and he began to experience carbon dioxide poisoning. Traveling in orbit at 5 miles per second, he and two other Russian astronauts created a new airlock out of a separate section of the shuttle and survived.
Alumnus Eason Wang said he liked learning about the evolution of the eye from the visual effects and living prop demonstrations, which simplified complex subjects to make them clear and understandable.
“Adding the dancers humanizes the experience “¦ (giving) us a link to such a non-emotional subject,” Wang said. “They don’t dull (the concepts), they amplify them. Radiolab makes knowledge digestible.”
