my battery is pure love

I subscribe to Dance Magazine, the hard copy that comes in the mail. It is often a slim volume with beginnings of ideas that they delve into more deeply on their website, and many of the articles are aimed at students or young professional artists. Still I love it, because I learn a bit about commercial dance, and Broadway shows, health insurance and wage issues in the United States and, each month, what drives a particular creator or dancer. Adeene Denton's short but compelling profile in a recent article about science and dance hovered off the page for me. A planetary geologist who is also a choreographer? I contacted her immediately to be part of my Art + Science interviews. We spoke via Zoom in March 2020, during the early days of lockdown/social distancing/pandemic and it was an excellent way to launch into a startling and galvanizing stage for North America and far beyond. Conversations like these -- though not broaching head-on the concerns of pandemics and the amazing...

In January, Kristen Facciol was in Toronto for the WISE (Women in Science and Engineering) Conference and I was supposed to interview her then. However the conference coincided with the opening of my recent production "8 minutes 17 seconds" and I found myself too overwhelmed to make it happen. Luckily, Kristen was willing to talk to me later this winter via email and I am so grateful for her beautiful answers to my simple questions. Kristen is an Operations Engineer at the Canadian Space Agency, part of the Mission Control Group. She has trained at NASA, and trains astronauts herself, remotely operates robotics in space. Kristen was part of a history-making team, training the two astronauts  for the first all-female space walk in 2019. This interview is short and sweet, but so worth the read. Kristen Facciol photo courtesy of NASA LR: What drew you to engineering? and to your particular area within engineering? KF: It was my high school algebra teac...