Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Star Messangers, Paul Zimet, Ellen Maddow

Kahn Institute Projects

Star Messengers is a musical theater work about two scientists, Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, who changed our view of the universe. Writer Paul Zimet and composer Ellen Maddow have created a carnival of genres—opera, Com- media dell’Arte, Strindbergian Dream Play, and contemporary dance/theater—to produce a theatrical language that conveys the wonder of Galileo’s and Kepler’s discoveries.

While some aspects of Galileo’s life and discoveries are well known, hardly anything is popularly known of his scientific contemporaries. Johannes Kepler’s realization that the planets moved not in perfect circles, but in elliptical paths, was a leap of mind as extraordinary as …