Something wondrous can be found right under your shoe. 

“Trial & Theatre” is a group riding the crest of wave of contemporary puppetry.   In their new show Nano Steps – Into the Lab, the audience will be invited to have an impact on the microscopic world.  

“Nano Steps – Into the lab” invites the spectator into a basement laboratory right in the middle of a physicist’s experiments. Bare eye cannot fathom the scale of microparticles, until we open their world up with the help of microscopes and other tools. In this laboratory the microscopic particles, scientific equipment and audience all have an impact on the outcome of the experiment. Each performance is an open question. Does the microscopic world have something to say? Can a piece of sand hear us?  

“Nano Steps” is a series of performances based on an ongoing artistic research that started with a question: what could be the smallest puppet in the world? “Trial & Theatre” indulged in a meandering and unpredictable research process, during which they called world-famous professors and traveled to Cornell University, to Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and to laboratories of Aalto University. 

“Nano Steps” is a tapestry of science and object theater that introduces new techniques of microscopic puppetry, borrowed straight from ongoing research in applied physics, and asks big questions about the nature of research, knowledge production, and the things and doings involved within. The premiere of the first performance in the series, “Nano Steps – a Particle Performance” in Helsinki City Theatre, Finland, was a resounding popular and critical success. The second research outcome: “Nano Steps – Into the Lab” premiered in Alfred ve Dvoře in April 2024 before continuing its tour from the collective’s native Finland to other countries. 

Trial & Theatre is a new, process-oriented performance collective concentrating on experiments and a conceptual approach to puppetry. Nano Steps is their first foray into the world of physics and material sciences, as well as their first series of staged pieces. The objective of the group is a free and unruly process of research in which the performances of science and puppetry collide, and blur each other’s boundaries.