"N2O in Drag" Dance Performance

Dance has the power to crystallize and highlight for the viewer concepts more thoroughly understood through movement, and thus to motivate a response to environmental problems. In “N2O in Drag,” we use dance to explain why nitrous oxide (also known as laughing gas) is a powerful greenhouse gas, what techniques geochemists use to study it, and how the gas is produced in an important region of the ocean. Three faux queens represent each of the three atoms in the nitrous oxide molecule, and a fourth andro-queen, “Miss Spectrometer,” represents the mass spectrometer, an instrument used to measure the isotopic composition of each atom in the nitrous oxide molecule. This project is a collaboration between a choreographer (Colette Kelly), dancers (Cansu Culha, Rebecca Gellman, Kelsey Foster, and Kelly), a composer (Stephen Cole Dobbs) and a filmmaker (Connor O’Keefe), all graduate students at Stanford, to describe nitrous oxide cycling in the eastern tropical North Pacific Ocean. This project is part of the Art as Science Communication Initiative at Stanford (https://art-sci.weebly.com/).