It is the year 2022 at Sapienza University, Rome, and the Virgo Research Center near Pisa. The camera explores the spaces of the institutions where gravitational waves were first successfully detected in September 2015. Rooms, staircases, and doors. Piles of paper, blackboards and whiteboards. Everything is empty. Then, limbs come into view, moving and undulating like waves. There are no talks with scientists, staff, or press officers. No interviews about who made what discovery, when it took place, which company manufactured what instrument, or what the discovery means for humanity.
Watching this film by Meritxell Campos Olivé requires a willingness to engage. Surfing Einstein is astrophysics and contemporary dance performance. These are not just completely different disciplines and methods for exploring and describing the world. They also have different audiences that would otherwise rarely, if ever, meet. Olivé has created something extraordinarily poetic. A reverent film about onde gravitazionali—as gravitational waves are beautifully referred to in Italian. Because when words are spoken in this documentary performance, they are in Italian, and only as part of the voice over. In several acts accompanied by otherworldly sounds and adorned with thought poems, Meritxell Campos Olivé explains the human side to cutting-edge research: la frus trazione, la pazienza …
People, not many of them, dance through the rooms of the university and the laboratory—right where the discoveries were made, and the ones dancing are the ones who made them: the performers are members of faculty. They are not trained dancers, but physicists, engineers, and designers. Watching the researchers interpret their rational work through dance is both sublime and relatable.
Yes, the viewer must be willing to engage, as the movements are unusual—ascending and descending the stairs, circular actions at the blackboard, doors opening and closing, clicking and clacking at the computer, twisting joints. It is extraordinary and so compelling that you find yourself wondering if something as abstract as gravitational waves could ever have been represented in any other way. Surfing Einstein conveys to us the beauty of research, the beauty of physics, the beauty of movement!
