7/6/2026
Quantum Illuminations is a stage production in four parts, each with its own artistic nod to quantum concepts through music, acting and multimedia. In this reflection piece of part article, part poetry and part prose, poet Chloé Firetto-Toomey guides the reader through the performance as experienced through her eyes.
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A Quantum Performance Production at The Den Theatre, Chicago.
April 20th 2026. Hosted by The Grainger College of Engineering and partnering units,
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Reflections by Chloé Firetto-Toomey:
poet, mother, citizen of two countries, stargazer in the window seat
(and author assistant to inaugural poet Richard Blanco).
Editor's Note: Quantum Illuminations is a stage production in four parts, each with its own artistic nod to quantum concepts through music, acting and multimedia. In this reflection piece of part article, part poetry and part prose, poet Chloé Firetto-Toomey guides the reader through the performance as experienced through her eyes.
We are made of starstuff…”
— Carl Sagan
“We are each luminous beings, radiating like stars, together, ever-shifting constellation patterns.”
— Smitha Vishveshwara
Here is a journey into the primordial that leads us toward the knowing that we are of the universe—constellations in our bones; expressions of the cosmos learning to recognize themselves. This production is such an acknowledgment: an endeavor of love charted by the light of many university departments, guided by Smitha Vishveshwara, Gina Lorenz and Rebecca Wiltfong, and staged by Sophia Urbana and Jake Metz, in chorus with students, physicists, artists, and engineers—encapsulating both the collaborative nature of universal forces and elements, and the mysterious ways this production also came into being.
Quantum Illuminations is a multimedia stage production; a candle held in two cupped hands. The audience is “poised on the threshold between Being and Non-Being.” This pioneering work presents the quantum world as the poetry of the universe, blending drama, dance, and music with quantum voices as multimedia images unfold across five screens.
Perhaps intention is the only required absolute for charting a map through our unknowing; the universe provides all other details.
I still do not understand all of the physics. But I understand the feeling of reaching toward it; the trembling recognition that comes when language brushes against something ancient and interior: the transition from the possible to the actual takes place during the act of observation.
My words are tealights guiding us through this journey of a stage production unraveling the birth of the universe and the ways we house quantum particles—the secret ministries of the stars compose us.
Sitting to write this, I feel all possible beginnings resolve and fizzle into singular thoughts in succession. The act of observing changes the thing observed. Inside The Den Theatre, we are reduced, briefly, to oneness: observer and observed conjoined within a single column of light.
Co-scripted by Smitha Vishveshwara and inaugural poet Richard Blanco, and performed by Armand Beaudoin, Lauren Laws, Aarya Mehta, Soma Sarathy, Sophia Urban, Rebecca Wiltfong, and Jagadeesh Yesetore.
Here the dialogue begins with elements personified: The Universal Spirit, The Wave, The Particle, Gravity, Nuclear Power, The Absolute, and The Relative—speak to us in the language of our first family, tell origin stories as we find ourselves beyond the time and space that separates us.
The opening introduces concepts that dissolve the line between audience and cosmos. The Universal Spirit calls to everything at once—planetary rock, nebular billow, starfire, and the human bodies gathered in the theatre—insisting that matter and energy belong to the same radiant source.
We are not outside the universe looking in, but within it already, watching and listening as it recognizes itself through us.
Reality is staged as a series of luminous pairings; the dialogue between the universal spirit and the dual, and dueling, forces that court the spirit. Duality becomes the form of tension.
Wave arrives as pulse, breath, unseen sustenance—the invisible beloved moving through every synapse, every laugh, every heartbeat. Particle answers with touch and the palpable fact of embodiment. One is current; one is form. One is the shimmer we feel but cannot hold; the other is the hand that holds and is held. Yet the Universal Spirit gathers both into one larger truth: tangibility and mystery are not enemies, but alternate faces of the same unfolding whole.
Then Gravity and Nuclear Power enter as if to argue over creation itself. Gravity is the binder, the gatherer, the force that gives shape and draws matter into orbit. Nuclear Power is the furnace within matter, the intimate fire by which new elements are born and light enters the world. One binds; one ignites. Together, they become the star.
Then the philosophical register deepens. The Absolute insists reality exists whether or not we witness it. The Relative answers that meaning flowers in encounter, that existence glows most fully in relation, that even the cosmos seems longing to be seen. Again, the Universal Spirit refuses a simple victory. Instead, all binaries begin to soften—Being and Non-Being, body and ether, self and other—until each leans toward its opposite in shared radiance.
Here, physics returns to wonder. I find myself wanting to gather this section; to make a poem of it. Here is a cento, a constellation of borrowed lines:
| Wave: |
“...a lover you have never known physically, but the one you have always felt.” |
| Particle: | “I am your hand and the hands you hold.” |
| The Universal Spirit: | “You, in constant metamorphosis.” |
| Gravity: | “the force that binds, that gives you shape and commands galaxies into being.” |
| Nuclear Power: | “...the love that births new elements, that casts you in luminous effulgence.” |
| The Absolute: |
“I am everything in you and you are everything I am.” |
| The Relative: | “I’m a soulless vacuum without the air of your souls.” |
| The Universal Spirit: | “The You and the I dissolve, and become One in our shared radiance.” |
Here, the languages of poetry and physics reach for ways to trace the unknown. Matter and metaphor touch. Science becomes prayer in recognition of mystery.
Inaugural Poet and Engineer Richard Blanco reads “Love Poem According to Quantum Theory” and "Love and the Genius of Stars.”
“love is our wisest formula, most elegant calculation,
our most noble science...”
Listening to Richard read, haloed in spotlight, I feel love exists at the highest frequencies, akin to light—the fastest force in the universe: ever traveling, ever arriving, even when we turn from it. Love and light become synonymous.
The poems deepen the performance’s inquiry; a marriage of scientific and lyric astonishment—neighboring rooms in the same house—two stanzas of the same universal poem we write together.
Richard, shortly after reading his inaugural poem, “One Today,” about our shared human experience, at President Obama’s second inauguration, visited the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC’s) Arts and Science college, as well as that of Engineering, and formed enduring bonds.
Ten years later, Richard provided a blurb for Smitha’s book Two Revolutions: Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Physics – A Dialogue Between Father and Daughter, co-authored with her late father, C.V. Vishveshwara. As Richard’s assistant, I am privy to email exchanges, and I join the conversation and begin to percolate ideas with Smitha, share memories, set manifestations. Emails grew to scrolling threads that overload messaging systems; new threads became missives and the art of letter writing becomes its own act of love.
In 2025, I traveled with Richard to Champaign-Urbana to see the stage production, Quantum Voyages, co-scripted by Smitha and Latrelle Bright. Here was our first in-person embrace, and here we are now: Richard reading his poems, Yours Truly accounting: collaborations becoming lamplights in the postholes of ancient constellations, mapping the outlines of the unknown in crepuscular light.
The poetry of the page and the poetry of the universe feel one and the same, written by a universal spirit before language ever named it.
“Love, our greatest genius…”
Richard reads his poems in a waltz with the poetics of physics, and the lights widen…
Scripted by Gina Lorenz; performed by Armand Beaudoin, Mari Cieszynski, Amy Hassinger, Paul Kwiat, Lauren Laws, Jake Metz, and Sarah Scott. Visuals by Ellie Curshellas, Aarya Mehta, and Jake Metz.
Each section unfolds like a glistening nesting doll, unveiling layer within layer—the point of both inception and closing. I, too, become nested within this liminal space, listening to narrator Aarya Mehta, who starred in Quantum Voyages—a union of theatre and physics expressed through music, movement, and dance.
As Aarya guides us inward, he introduces Quantum Voices, a brilliantly scripted companion piece by Gina Lorenz. Inspired by the recently departed Latrelle Bright’s interdisciplinary approach to creating new work, Gina intertwines her vision of immersing an explorer of the knowledge and wisdom of the universe with key quantum themes, collaborating with the incredible musical and creative technological offerings that Amy, Armand and Jake synthesized. Particularly resonant is the archival footage of quantum pioneers: Einstein, Madame Wu, John Bell, and the live words of Paul Kwiat.
I feel Bright’s presence here still, as though her light remains in circulation, observing the opening tableau and becoming one with the scene as the spotlight widens.
Here the narrative is driven by a questioning student, and here is the tableau:
A young woman reads beneath the projection of an open textbook spread across the screen above the stage. The bass player waits. The vocalist is seated upon a drum. Text formulates, floats, dances across the projection.
Cue bass and soft vocals.
The student slips into a dream as the dancer rises holding an orb against elongated notes.
“Together all things come to light
The hidden past, the darkest night
Heaven, Earth and in between.
They all combine and fuse to one
Like melting droplets of the sun.”
Knowledge becomes theatrical.
The student questions:
“what is……outside time and space?”
Cue music: beats and dance, fingers drumming rhythmic taps—perhaps this too is the undulating energy of the universe funneled through fingers and palms.
The vocalist is our guide as the universal spirit conjures Albert Einstein onto the projected screen.
Science is for everyone.
Light is our guide. Matter and energy are equivalent. Entanglement is not only theory but ache.
Here we witness how quantum particles remain connected in unusual ways, existing in two states at once—the mysterious tethering of particles across distance. This is where the production’s emotional and conceptual intelligence converge: quantum mechanics is presented as a language for relation, uncertainty, and invisible holding.
And here I must interject: I stretch my arms toward the sphere of knowing and feel how my grandmother, lying in a hospital bed in England, remains connected to me here in Florida as I write this reflection. Here I feel, however briefly, that we are all split particles of one indivisible light.
We are infinitely and perpetually entangled—perhaps not reaching toward one another, but already holding, glinting.
The composition on entanglement based on John Bell's theory gives this paradox body and sound; is sung to drum taps and bass:
“Doctor Bell say we connected,
He call me on the phone.
Doctor Bell say united,
He call me on the phone.
But if we were together,
How come I feel all alone?”
Here is severance and unity encapsulated: the ineffable connection of quantum particles across distance, the instantaneous mirroring of one another through observation.
I admit: I will need to re-read, re-watch, re-enter the projections, the dance, the narration, to understand what I already feel—the connection between myself and my estranged father; my ailing grandmother across the ocean. The feeling that we are bound by love despite the illusions of time and distance that separate us. Again, the notion that observer and observed become one.
“…complete randomness and correlation
at the essence of Entanglement…
the most ubiquitous fact of our existence.”
Awake: we are all students of the universe, journeying inward and outward simultaneously through quantum philosophies.
Perhaps within the infinitesimal space inside the atom is where love harbors?
Scripted by Smitha Vishveshwara, music performed by the Jupiter String Quartet; musical selections across centuries and geographical space, including the premiere of “Whirling into Resonance” by Stephen Taylor; narrated by Matthias Perdekamp, Philip Philips, Smitha Vishveshwara; visuals by the original 2019 team, Ellie Churshellas, Aarya Mehta, Jason Miles, and Soma Sarathy.
Part performance piece, part cosmological meditation, Quantum Rhapsodies merges the Jupiter String Quartet, narration, physics, and projected imagery into an exploration of matter, consciousness, and the sublime. Scripted by Smitha Vishveshwara in collaboration with the Jupiter String Quartet, the work spans centuries of musical repertoire while incorporating the premiere of Stephen Taylor’s Whirling into Resonance.
Here the quantum becomes orchestral. The strings embody the science; bowed notes lengthen into waveforms. Plucked strings suggest particles, collisions, oscillations, and interference. The abstract becomes sensorial as immersive visuals unfold across the backdrop screens.
First created in 2019 for its premiere at the Beckman Institute at UIUC, the visuals for Quantum Rhapsodies emerged through a collaborative effort among Beckman visual artists, filmmaker Nic Morse, and students from the class: “Where the Arts Meets Physics.” The current iteration expands that vision with significant contributions from a newly assembled youth team, continuing the work’s spirit of creative and intergenerational exchange.
Narration by nuclear physicist Matthias Grosse Perdekamp, opera singer-physicist Philip Phillips and Smitha Vishveshwara guides us through this luminous convergence of music and matter where the quartet becomes an interpretive body through which quantum phenomena are physically felt.
Quantum Rhapsodies transforms physics into lyric and metaphor. Music, entangled with narration and sound itself becomes matter in motion.
As I sit before the stage in a cushioned chair, all things seem to split, merge, weave; nothing complete but continuous, everything relative and absolute, caught within radiating spectrums of light. Perhaps light is consciousness disembodied?
“You may have basked in warm sunlight by turquoise waters,” the narration begins, before asking the primordial question: “How did light come to be?”
Photons, electrons, and atomic orbitals are rendered as sensorial experiences—luminous, fluid, intimate—we are holding this space together within the deep dome of the theatre, itself gestational.
“Each of us is a glowing being”
the narration declares, reframing blackbody radiation as both scientific principle and existential metaphor.
Projected imagery of galaxies, auroras, planetary atmospheres, plants unfurling, and microscopic structures fold into the quartet’s choreography of sound. Violins swell and fracture into staccato pulses as narration describes light behaving simultaneously as wave and particle:
“Propagating, pixelating, pelting other particles.”
Crescendos mirror interference patterns. Layered harmonics resemble ripples crossing water. The production continuously collapses distinctions between music and mathematics, body and cosmos.
Most compelling is the way the work treats quantum mechanics as a language of uncertainty and becoming, as poetry does. Electrons exist “here and there at once”; matter glides, undulates, dissolves, reforms. The audience is held within the perceptual state where boundaries between observer and observed dissolve, forging new understandings of all that binds us.
Even the metaphors themselves remain fluid, reverberating through the strings while projected images continuously morph: stars resemble neural pathways; a baby elephant appears illuminated as a black body of light, the veins in its ears branching like the Bodhi Tree or the bronchial tree of the lungs; orbital forms echo flowers. Everywhere, patterns repeat themselves. We are participants in this same underlying choreography.
Quantum Rhapsodies achieves what few interdisciplinary works attempt successfully: quantum theory as origin story, as living cosmology, as intimate inheritance—the ancient rendered continuous.
I once asked Smitha about reincarnation, hoping perhaps for a spiritual answer. She replied through physics: throughout time, we have all taken other forms within the cosmos. In this moment, the spiritual and the quantum converge—wave and particle, self and whole, temporary form and eternal energy. Are we the cosmos becoming conscious of itself?
“An electron, a wave, being here and there at once…superposition…”
Now you are with me as I write this on a returning flight. We are entwined, watching this stage production together on YouTube above the clouds, and I am living moments twice: listening again to Philip Phillips’ baritone as I recall this morning combing my grandmother’s hair, matted from three weeks against the hospital pillow.
If thought is a tunnel to memory and possibility—the way we superposition ourselves here and there at once—is this how we hold something sacred? If I envision her hospital room as a dome of amber light, might that too become a form of manifestation or prayer?
Indeed, this production is a sustained act of wonder: a simultaneously inward and cosmic journey, though perhaps the two are synonymous. Here, the philosophies of physics and theology entwine.
As the quartet gathers and releases, I feel the message resonate: each cell in our bodies a note in the orchestra, all of us part of the “bigger symphony.”
“Perhaps we stand in awe
at the cosmos within us
and without.”
We come to a close by honoring the recently departed radiances of the UIUC community: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Anthony Leggett; theatre maker and collaborator of Quantum Voyages, Latrelle Bright; and string theorist Rob Leigh.
Here is the encore: “a coalescing of celestial dust,” a distribution of red and white long-stem roses as Rashid Bashir, UIUC's Dean of the Grainger College of Engineering—who refers to the convergence of these many quantum endeavors as a “quantum bouquet”—thanks the illuminators for their collaborative efforts to capture the imagination of the quantum realm.
The final offering arrives akin to a sermon—or perhaps a call to prayer—in which all return to the stage to give voice to the universal spirit and its sacred principle of love. Here the circle closes with a passage projected like a hymn, inviting all voices to meet and rise:
“I, the Love that sustains all Existence,
Invite you to remain submerged in the
mystery. Where reality remains elusive.
To continue the journey that embraces the
unknown, towards where we stand poised
on the threshold between Being and Non-Being,
where the palpable and ethereal ebb, flow
and merge in constant metamorphosis,
where darkness and light sparkles as dust at dawn.
A journey where the You and the I have dissolved,
and continue as one in our shared radiance."
This hymn renews a sacred space; a way of knowing; I feel we all leave with awareness (which itself is sacred) of the small furnaces of light we carry in heartbeats, in breath, in the blinks of our eyes; aware that this infinite light is what guides us through the evenings of our lives.
More information about the event can be found at https://cascade.illinois.edu/events/quantum-illuminations.
Smitha Vishveshwara is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor in the Department of Physics. She is also affiliated with The Anthony J. Leggett Institute for Condensed Matter Theory, the Materials Research Laboratory, the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center, and the NSF OLCI Hybrid Quantum Architectures and Networks. Vishveshwara is a co-director of Collective for Art-Science, Creativity and Discovery, etc.
Virginia Lorenz is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor in the Department of Physics and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory, the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center, and the NSF QLCI Hybrid Quantum Architectures and Networks.
Paul Kwiat is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor in the Department of Physics. He is also affiliated with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Materials Research Laboratory, the Holonyak Micro & Nanotechnology Lab, the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center, and the NSF OLCI Hybrid Quantum Architectures and Networks. He holds the John Bardeen Chair in Physics and Electrical Engineering appointment.
Philip Phillips is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor in the Department of Physics and the Department of Chemistry. He is affiliated with the Illinois Center for Advanced Studies of the Universe, The Anthony J. Leggett Institute for Condensed Matter Theory, and the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center. Phillips is a Bliss Faculty Scholar.
Matthias Grosse Perdekamp is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor in the Department of Physics and the Department of Nuclear, Plasma & Radiological Engineering. He is affiliated with The Program in Arms Control & Domestic International Security and the Illinois Center for Advanced Studies of the Universe.
Armand Beaudoin, Jr. is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor emeritus in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering. He is also a College of Engineering Willett Faculty Scholar.
Amy Hassinger is a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign assistant professor in the Department of English within the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
Stephen Taylor is an University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor of composition-theory in the School of Music within the College of Fine and Applied Arts. He is also the co-director of the Illinois Modern Ensemble.