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Redshift Productions History
Redshift Productions was created in 2000, when Megan K. Halpern and Max Evjen wrote and directed Elements at HERE Arts Center in New York City. Elements was a short piece that combined live music and dance in an exploration of Aristotle’s four elements: air, water, fire and earth. Elements captured the attention of Astrophysicist and Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, Dr. Neil De Grasse Tyson, who wrote of the performance in his monthly column in Natural History Magazine, as well as in his forward to Lynn Gamwell’s book, Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science and the Spiritual.
Redshift Productions’ following project, Galileo: The Emotional Life of a Spacecraft premiered on September 17, 2003, just days before the Galileo Orbiter completed its fourteen-year mission and plunged into Jupiter. Galileo captured the attention of mainstream media, with exposure on CBS Sunday Morning, and ABC News Nightline.
Redshift Productions has also created The Collaboratorium, a workshop for the development and implementation of a new structure for artist/scientist collaboration. The first Collaboratorium was held in June 2003 and brought 15 artists, scientists, and audience members together to discuss and engage in collaboration. In September 2004, the second Collaboratorium served as a tool in developing Redshift’s Happy Hour at the Event Horizon, a comedy about physics that takes place in a bar at the edge of a black hole.
Happy Hour was created by scientists and improvisational performers and was performed monthly as an improvisational workshop in 2004. In April 2005, the best improvisational scenes and games created by the scientists and performers were written and performed as a full theatrical production at the Blue Heron Studio Theatre in New York City. OffOffOnline.com said of Happy Hour “Not since the Big Bang has physics been so explosive.”