Introduction to the Project

Seven Enigmas is a multimedia performance work, conceived as a collaboration between the dancer / choreographer Peter Sparling and the visual artist Jim Cogswell. It was staged by Dance Gallery/Peter Sparling & Co. for a sold out house at the Power Center for the Performing Arts in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during the 1997 Ann Arbor Summer Festival. It was restaged at the Power Center on September 13, 1997, with special funding from the University of Michigan Office of the President and the School of Art & Design.

The Enigmas Project, as this unprecedented collaboration came to be known, created an opportunity for artists and scientists at the University of Michigan to bring their skills together in ways that continue to influence subsequent research and creative endeavors. This site offers a behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of Seven Enigmas. By comparing the same set at various stages of realization--from early drawings, to blueprints, and finally photographs of the performance itself--viewers can experience the gradual refinement of visual ideas. The work on view ranges in technical sophistication from stills of video animated computer graphics and digital images downloaded from the Hubble Space Telescope to drawings by Cogswell's preschool children which inspired elements of the set design. Cogswell's original drawings are full of marginal notations, creating a diary of the artist's thought process. An accompanying text provides a full history of the project, and gives more detailed, technical information explaining the contributions of the two U-M scientists who worked with the design team on the project.

Seven Engimas represents different ways of approaching the enigmatic, interacting with it, and being affected by it. Instead of answering questions, these seven pieces describe some of the many possible responses in the face of incomprehensible mysteries and unreachable knowledge. The pieces form a cycle -- although not a story -- in which the first piece portrays an awakening to mystery and the last depicts the simultaneous dread of and yearning for the future. In between, we witness a delight in the unpredictable, the applications of measures and balances, the limitations and confinements of knowledge, a sense of harmony possible even in puzzlement, and an egoism that defies the enigmatic through the projection of the human image onto it. Seven Enigmas builds by metaphor, which is itself a mapping of one experience onto another to create meaning.

In these pieces, ordinary shapes -- a hemisphere, a venetian blind, a draped piece of cloth -- become unfamiliar and strange to our eyes. The sculptural environments "dimensionize" the shapes of the dances, by translating those shapes into other media and lending them a further set of associations. For example, in the opening dance, the cupped, curved movements of the dance are echoed in the dome of the tent. Likewise, in the fourth solo, the dancer's movements are confined to a narrow corridor, a thing broken line that reappears in the projected film images as well as in the horizontal path of a comet that moves behind her. In this way, the Enigmas arise from familiar movements and shapes that are layered on top of one another in new ways. Meanings are suggested by relationships established within the context of the performance itself.

In Seven Enigmas, the mechanics of the production are exposed, allowing us to see the objects and people that create it as if we are looking into a toolbox or broom-closet. To this end, the set designer opened up the backstage area as a place to store objects that are not in use, and we can see the design crew as the shift objects between and during the dances. Similarly, this section of the web site explains how the dancing grids work, how the Hubble images were created , and how the Enigmas project came into existence. The mysteries are not within the production, but within our own minds.