The planetarium show bears a rich history that reveals how science and theatre collaborated after the middle of the 20th century. By adding elements of spectacle and narrative (performed live or piped in over speakers), along with forms of audience interaction, planetarium shows effectively popularized astronomy, cosmology, and cosmography for generations of audiences. Particularly after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, planetarium shows in the U.S. played a significant role in advocating for space exploration and inspired young students to pursue science-based careers.

 As interdisciplinary collaborations between the sciences and the arts grew more common, they drew the attention and research of anthropologists and social scientists interested in understanding the purpose, funding, and execution of such partnerships. In theatre and performance studies, too, the public ‘performance’ of science became a source of intense interest. Out of the first generation of such studies emerged a sense that the theatrical elements of the conventional planetarium show were being placed solely in the service of the communication of science, positioned as a semi-transparent window to the existing scientific knowledge being conveyed to audiences. Within the context of theatre’s historical role as a critical apparatus for understanding and responding to culture, critiques emerged (particularly in the work of Georgina Born and Andrew Barry) regarding the service model of collaboration, and scholars and theatre practitioners began to press for theatre to assume a more nuanced role in the presentation of astronomy via the planetarium show. Several of these reappraisals took the form of actual planetarium spectacles (or the theatrical representation of them), signaling prospects for more complex forms of collaboration between theatre and science.

 My paper will address three such cases and argue that, while minimal but important progress is made in the first two examples, the final case study presents an intriguing model for future collaborations. I first analyze a play featuring a planetarium lecturer, Going Dark (21012), by Hattie Naylor and produced by Sound&Fury, a British company notable for their inventive use of sound and projection design. I then turn to Nina Wise’s fully immersive planetarium show, The Kepler Story (2013), which attempts to reframe the conventional narrative of Kepler’s contributions to Western science. Although both works creatively reconfigure the presentation of science and grant performance a more critical role, they fail to advance new forms of collaboration and retain a service model of collaboration.

 Finally, I take up The Hidden Code, a performance fronted by the DJ turntablist and composer Paul Miller, known professionally as DJ Spooky (That Subliminal Kid). The show was first performed in 2015 at the Boston Hayden Planetarium while Miller was resident artist at the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth University. Miller has served several such art-science residencies and collaborated on albums, films, and lectures at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and, most recently, at the Yale University Quantum Institute. The Hidden Code featured advanced sound and projection technology, imagery provided by the Hayden Planetarium, and performances by physicist, astronomer, and musician Stephon Alexander and cosmologist and poet Marcelo Gleiser. Notably, the spectacle utilized an aesthetics of remix to complicate the scientific content presented as well as the nature of the collaboration taking place. This, in turn, transformed how the audience responded to and participated in the presentation.

 My argument is framed within the thought of Michel Serres, who uses concepts and metaphors drawn from the sciences to interrogate and render complex the shifting relations between the sciences, the arts, and the human sciences. By deploying his concept of the “parasite” (both a social sponger but also, for Serres, a key operator in thermodynamics and information theory), I show how The Hidden Code performs astronomy, and science in general, in a more dialectical relationship with performance. The work provides a stunning example of how a service model of collaboration may be rendered sufficiently malleable to produce new interactions between science and theatre.