Loon dance

Lisa Phinney's choreography is inspired by her scientific work (Nick Pearce photo)

She can close her eyes and she’s there: emerging from her tent in the early morning, she pauses by the shore of the mist-shrouded lake and listens enthralled at the tremulous calls of the loons.

It was a strange sight: loons are very territorial and only one pair will nest on a small lake. But on this morning, Lisa Phinney could count several.

“I could see through the mist that there were at least nine of them,” says Ms. Phinney, who at the time was doing research in Kejimukujik National Park as a summer student with Environment Canada. “It was like they were having a meeting.”

As an atmospheric scientist, Ms. Phinney was part of a research team investigating how the mercury found in loons’ bodies flows through the ecosystem; does it deposit from the atmosphere and move through the soils and lakes and into the animals, or does it originate within the bedrock and soils? But as a choreographer, she finds loons fascinating for different reasons: the way they glide along the surface of the water; the way they dive like torpedoes in search of food; the way they carry their babies on their backs.

Her encounter with loons that morning is the inspiration behind her latest dance work, debuting in the fall through Live Art Dance Productions. Like scientific research, it’s a multidisciplinary enterprise, involving dancers, music composer Sageev Oore and set design by Peter Dykhuis, director of the Dalhousie Art Gallery.

The work, as yet unnamed, brings together her two worlds: her love of science and of dance.

“Practically speaking, it’s a little bit tricky serving two gods, if you will,” explains Ms. Phinney, who divides her time between her job as an air quality researcher at Environment Canada and her work as an independent choreographer. “But in a way, they don’t seem that different to me; they are both expressions of fundamental truth but explained in vastly different ways.”

Throughout her life, she’s struggled to find the balance between science and dance. After doing her first degree at Dalhousie, majoring in physics and oceanography, she moved to Toronto to pursue a career in dance. But life as a freelance artist in the big city was not her dream, and after a few years she returned to Halifax as a founding member of Mocean Dance.

At about the same time, she went back to Dalhousie to work on a master’s degree in atmospheric science. In the same way her past field research as a summer student is now feeding her choreography, her work on her master’s thesis—investigating the link between phytoplankton, tiny algae which live in the world’s oceans, and their affect on global climate—led to a dance expression of scientific processes called Point/Counterpoint (homeostatis). The dance debuted at Neptune’s Studio Theatre in 2004 and aired on Bravo and CBC-TV.

“I know it sounds a little strange, but I can see these cycles of nature expressed in a creative way,” says Ms. Phinney. “I just see such similarities in the artistic creation and scientific inquiry—you’re coming up with ideas, finding the relationships, drawing conclusions. It’s all very rich for me.”