How graduate student Frederick Moss choreographs a life in science and art

 

By Caitlin McDermott-Murphy

 

Asked to explain decay, some scientists might talk about mold and cheese. Or sugar and teeth. Or bacteria and enzymes. Soon, Frederick Moss might just dance.

A chemistry Ph.D. student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Moss is also a professional dancer, gliding between the seemingly incongruous worlds of science and art. Neither is just a hobby. So when one tries — and fails — to appropriate the other, he cringes.

“You don't have either side taking the other seriously,” Moss said. “When the two come together, you are often met with underdeveloped inspiration and left with immemorable comedic bits.”

They might not be the most obvious coupling, but art and science make a productive pair. Recent neurological research suggests that incorporating singing or drawing or dancing into studying can help students remember slippery subjects better. Educators even have a term for the happy marriage: STEAM, where that “A” stuck inside STEM stands for Art.

As an undergraduate student at Morehouse College, Moss racked up enough credits to complete two majors — biology and musical performance in classical cello — by the end of junior year. Instead of graduating early, he continued to explore, polishing off minors in Spanish and dance.

After graduation, Moss moved to Massachusetts to join Suzanne Walker and Daniel Kahne’s lab at Harvard as a post-baccalaureate. On a whim, he took more dance classes with Modern Connections Collective at the Dance Complex in Cambridge, exploring modern, jazz, and ballet.

Not long after, Boston’s Urbanity Dance offered him a position in their professional dance company, and he accepted. Every weekday morning starting in December 2017, Moss was in the studio from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., first rehearsing with the company and then teaching lessons to kids. From 3 p.m. on into the night, he worked on his research projects in the lab and taught chemistry to undergraduates. “It was like trying to clone myself and do the same thing in two different places,” he said.

Far less experienced than the other dancers in the company, Moss often had to learn technique on the fly. Sometimes literally: In a contemporary piece choreographed by Chun-Jou (“Dream”) Tsai, dancers propelled over the shoulders of a standing partner, like acrobatic leapfrog. Back to back, one partner stood firm while the other held a handstand before launching up and over their partner’s shoulders and to a standing position on the floor. When the leap wasn’t timed just right, both partners crashed to the floor with dangerous force. But Moss wasn’t fazed: “When those hiccups were happening,” he said, “it wasn't this freak out moment.” Like when an experiment didn’t go as planned, he just tweaked his calculations and started again.

 

Frederick Moss (right) performs a duet with Boston-based freelance performer Caitlin Canty at the Museum of Fine Arts' annual Hanukkah celebration. Moss is currently working with other Harvard performing artists on "responsible partnering," which explores how to ensure safer practices. Photos by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

 

Growing up playing music — and helping out in his grandmother’s bakery — Moss learned to see errors as “hiccups,” little, inconsequential blips. That mentality helps him in the lab, too. One day, he spilled a day’s work into a drawer. Instead of agonizing over the potential lost work, he mopped up his experiment, extracted what he could, and kept moving. As a graduate student in Andrew Myers’ lab, Moss researches how to manipulate molecules in the antibiotic tetracycline to create new treatments to combat cancer and mitochondrial-related disease. “From the beginning,” Moss said, “Andy has been one of my biggest supporters, both scientifically and artistically.”

Still, going back and forth between his two lives has been challenging. “How you engage with those communities is so different,” Moss said. In the lab, instructions are well-documented and precise. In the dance studio, plain instruction is not always enough. (“There’s no, I raised my femur by 15 degrees”). Instead, when learning a new move like the kip-up — a Slinky-like leap from supine to standing by pushing off the hands — Moss shopped around for different explanations, cobbling together one that worked for him.

He uses the same eclectic approach when teaching. With his dance and chemistry students, Moss explains concepts with both visual and technical explanations. For example, in the introductory undergraduate chemistry course where he works as a teaching fellow, he shoots his hand forward to demonstrate how hard nucleophiles — a type of chemical species — move like lasers. Then he imitates cascading water to show how soft nucleophiles flow like waterfalls. “It seemed a lot to me like choreography,” he said. “Sure, it's a movement of electrons or atoms, but it’s still movement on this smaller-than-the-eye level.”

 

Moss and Canty, smiling and sweaty after their performance at the MFA. Photos by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

 

In August 2019, Moss left Urbanity Dance to spend more time in the lab. But, he didn’t leave dance behind. This past fall, he was selected for a two-year fellowship at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where he leads post-show talks and facilitates seminars with choreographers. He freelances, too. Recently, he danced through the bright balloon structures in Nick Cave’s Boston sculpture installation (with Peter DiMuro’s Public Displays of Motion) and filmed movement research—experiments with the body’s mechanical limits—in the Old North Church (with cinematographer Sue Murad and the Reciprocity Collective).

In December, Moss performed a duet with Caitlin Canty called “The Flared Place,” choreographed by Jenna Pollack. The dance, presented to an audience at the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Festival of Lights,” illustrated the tension and balance of light and dark in Jewish history.

Moss is also working with a group of five other Harvard graduate students, both dancers and musicians, to explore the concept of “responsible partnering.” “How much pressure you’re putting on another person and how much you’re receiving,” he explained. As one of the dancers, Moss will wear a sound suit embedded with tiny sensors that bleat louder under heavier force.

Eventually, Moss wants to build his own “responsible partnership” between his two loves, replacing kitschy attempts to fuse science and art with choreography loyal to technical concepts.

“If the art is just something pretty to look at,” Moss said, “then it’s not really of any value.”