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Steel Spring 2005 Score available from ‘Science on Stage’A full length dance-musical built around the chemistry of steel production. Steel is a love story which takes place in mountains of Kazakhstan (a good place to find iron ore) It tells of iron's search for a mate. He nearly makes a bad choice of partner, having a short lived dalliance with smelly old sulphur which leaves her heartbroken, but from which he is saved in the nick of time by the arrival of the beautiful & irresistible oxygen. They hitch up and live happily ever after until the Soviet Union collapses and¼. Just as our loving iron and oxygen atoms seem to have got their act together everything suddenly goes horribly wrong. You would think that being buried deep under the hills of Kazakhstan would more or less guarantee that the activities of mankind would have no effect whatsoever on your lifestyle. Not so, if you and your partner happen to make up iron ore and the world up above just happens to want iron ore. They're going to come looking for you¼strip miners = full monty. The fortunes of our young lovers take a dive as the local miners dig them out & treat them just as if they were inanimate lumps of iron ore. In Act 2 they come face to face with the dark priest of the blast furnace, Father Tuyère (with his sidekick Slagrat). In the pursuit of purity for iron, this wicked priest sets about wresting oxygen from him. Failing to separate the lovers with his torments of fire, he conjures up the terrible carbon crows, the monoxide monsters, whose lust for oxygen is powerful enough to tear her from the arms of iron and bear her away on the winds of the world. This leaves the iron atoms alone, now they are steel and are put to work in the service of mankind. In Act 3 oxygen is released from her unholy bondage by the green leaves of the forest and the carbon crow is taken into the tree to become part of its fabric, after a bit of well-earned payback. Oxygen returns to look for her iron atom, and finds him on the battlefield. Joy of discovery sinks through melancholy to bathos as the iron atom develops into a bit of a whinger, and oxygen has to set him right. They come together in the chapel of rust and sink into happy and eternal obscurity as a tiny flake of rust in the. |
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