Today, thorough the Winnipeg Fringe Festival’s “NextGen Fringers” program, I had the opportunity to see two shows. The first one, and the subject of this post, was 1000 pieces of π. This interpretive dance piece includes only 10 moves, corresponding to each digit from 0-9. For each digit, the corresponding move is preformed.
My first reaction upon hearing this premise was “there’s no way they can make this interesting”. However, by adding in props, and keeping a rotation of dancers entering and exiting the scene, they managed to keep the 50-minute runtime interesting. There was also someone in the rear corner writing down the digits in time with the dancers, who would occasionally have spoken word sections which broke up the dancing.
Although the performance managed to keep my attention, I definitely felt my mind wandering at points. One thing I kept coming back to was how large a number 1000 is. I think the internet, where posts can easily get tens of thousands of views, as well as studying physics, where massive numbers like 10^23 are common, have made me forget how many 1000 of something is.
This summer, I’ve been working at Maker Mind Toys, helping them sand down wooden toys for a bulk order. I was hired on to sand 1500 of these toys. I did not realize just how much work this would be. I thought “Well, it only takes me two minutes to sand down each of these, so I should be done pretty quickly”. However, when you do the math, 2 minutes times 1500 toys ends up being 50 hours worth of work. Now I understand why they needed to hire someone to do this.
This performance feels the same. Memorizing the first ten digits of pi wasn’t all that hard for me in high school, but crank it up to 1000, and the sheer size of this performance becomes impressive. One of the underappreciated skills of the performing artist is their memory. You not only need to remember a bunch of lines or dance moves, but you need to recall them fluidly in front of a crowd, where a mistake could break the flow of a scene.
As I go on to see more shows these upcoming two weeks, I’ll definitely keep in mind just how much work goes into putting on a stage play that is invisible when done right.