(Photo: The Bang Group)
I admire an idea that can travel — one that moves from its native domain into a completely different context and arrives carrying new meaning. Darwin’s theory of evolution does this. So does quantum theory, still unsettling our assumptions about what reality is made of.
Recently I encountered two more ideas with that kind of range, and I’ve found them surprisingly useful for thinking about what’s happening in the arts right now.
The first is from genetics. Moonlighting describes how a single protein can perform more than one job. Instead of the traditional “one gene, one protein, one function” rule, these multitaskers hold a day job and a night job simultaneously — and the jobs are often completely different.
The second is mycological. Merlin Sheldrake‘s Entangled Life has brought wide attention to how resources move through fungal networks. When a node is depleted and unable to access what it needs from its immediate environment, the network steps in. Resources flow from abundance toward deficiency with a precision no individual organism could coordinate on its own.
Both ideas came to mind as I watched The Bang Group‘s DanceNOW/Boston at the Dance Complex in Cambridge. The performance space is small and cabaret-style. There are no elaborate sets, no costumes to speak of, no technical apparatus. Just bodies and innovative choreography. (One example: Milk, by Kristin Wagner, a solo danced to voice recordings of women describing their experiences with lactation.) The entire program was unmediated and unadorned, and it pierced me deeply.
That near-absence of production apparatus is not a limitation. It is the condition that makes the work fully alive. With nothing else to carry the weight, the dancing has to do everything at once: aesthetic force, emotional truth, communal presence, timely resonance. This is moonlighting in a cultural sense — multiple urgent functions performed simultaneously, none of them decorative.
The contrast with Black Swan, currently at the American Repertory Theater, could not be sharper. This much-anticipated new musical arrives with a talented creative team and layers of visual spectacle. And yet something kept not happening. The Boston Globe’s Don Aucoin put it in succinct terms: the production is “deliberately excessive, often irritating,” its aesthetic somewhere between a Ken Russell film and an MTV music video. The story underneath feels feeble — not necessarily because it is, but because it has been wrapped in so many interpretive layers it can no longer do its own work. The production consumes the oxygen the story needs. You end up watching the production watch the story. So much invested, but what mattered most kept receding.
Eureka Day, Jonathan Spector‘s play now at the Huntington, sits between these two experiences in production scale. But it belongs in a different category entirely when it comes to urgency. The play dives directly into the elemental struggle of this cultural moment: consensus, truth, community. What ideas win, and why? The production is mid-level and confident, and it earns every dollar spent because what it’s carrying is strong enough to cut through. The writing is precise and aimed. The production serves the message without obscuring it.
This is where the fungal network becomes more than a metaphor.
Natural networks do not move resources toward the nodes that are already loudest or most visible. They move toward deficiency, toward need. They do so without any individual organism directing the flow. That is simply how they work.
Our cultural funding apparatus tends to do the opposite. It rewards scale, production ambition, institutional prestige. Resources compound where abundance already exists. The result is that the work most likely to pierce you—work that puts nothing between you and it—is precisely the work least likely to be resourced.
What DanceNOW/Boston demonstrates is that necessity is not the enemy of multifunctionality. It may be its primary condition. When you cannot hide behind apparatus, you have to be genuinely present in every dimension at once. The work that emerges from that condition is structurally different from work given every resource and asked mainly to impress.
What Eureka Day demonstrates is that production investment is not inherently the problem. It is misalignment between the weight of the apparatus and the strength of the essential idea beneath it. A well-resourced production can still pierce you if what it carries is urgent, honest, and precisely aimed.
At this particular moment, we need art that can do many things at once. We need work that metabolizes grief, confusion, and fracture and still finds its form. We need the cultural equivalent of the moonlighting protein: not specialized for spectacle, but structurally capable of serving multiple urgent functions simultaneously. And we need a funding ecosystem that behaves more like a fungal network: recognizing deficiency and moving toward it rather than compounding abundance where it is least needed.
The DanceNOW dancers performed in an intimate space with almost nothing. What they made with almost nothing went straight through everyone who was there. This is not an argument against resources. It is an argument for understanding what resources are actually for — and a reminder that the work most capable of piercing us should not be, by default, the work we starve.