In creating a work of art that seeks to tell "The Story of Everything," where does one even remotely begin? For international Poet Laureate Kealoha, it was a logical process. He, of course, had to start at the beginning.
"What are the building blocks for life? First you need to have particles, right? So, I had to tell the story of how we got particles. Then what happens after particles? The particles start to come together to form the periodic table -- I need to tell the story of the periodic table," the artist shares.
FAQ
‘The Story of Everything’
WHEN — 7 p.m. Nov. 1
WHERE — Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville
COST — $10
INFO — 443-5600, waltonartscenter.org, kealohapoetry.com
From there, the tale weaves through the formation of the solar system and the creation of life, to human beings and the different regions and people of the world -- all through metaphor and music and dance.
"I'm a big fan of myths and creation stories and legends," Kealoha says. "The myths from various cultures around the world, what they've done is they've taken the body of knowledge that those peoples had and summarized that knowledge through story. But we've learned so much over the past hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And I just wanted to capture that new knowledge, the knowledge that we have now through science, I wanted to capture that through myth and legend."
Perhaps unexpectedly, science and art go hand-in-hand for Kealoha, who got his start in the professional world studying nuclear fusion at MIT. But when he attended a poetry slam on a whim, the art form "blew my mind open." Kealoha began writing when he returned home and couldn't stop. He had been "bitten by the bug," and eventually decided the world of poetry was where he was living his truth, and it was time to pursue that truth full time. He left his job in corporate America and devoted his energy to writing, listening, exploring and telling stories.
"One thing that kept coming to my mind is that one day a child of mine would ask me where we come from. And for me, the thing that I subscribed to the most is science. So I started to write the answer to that question through a scientific lens," Kealoha remembers. "And as I was writing, all these scientific principles, they eventually got faces, and those faces had intentions and desires. And there was war and there was conflict and there was resolution; there was love, there was dancing, there was celebration -- there was all these different things that make a good story. And then all of a sudden I was down this path [where I realized], 'Oh my gosh, this is something that I care about. This is something that I can put my energy into.' Because it's telling the story of science in a way that science has never been told before."
And thus, "The Story of Everything" was born. The slam poem is a family-friendly multimedia performance that Kealoha says people have described to him as "doing for science what 'Hamilton' is doing for American history." And when he brings the performance to the Walton Arts Center on Nov. 1, Fayetteville will be the farthest from his home in Hawaii Kealoha has traveled with his scientific epic.
"I hope the audience enjoys the whimsical nature of it, but also, it's all backed by hard science. It's telling you science, but through a fun, poetic, musical dancing lens."
NAN What's Up on 10/28/2018