Mystery 109 The Higgs Particle

On 4 July 2012, scientists at CERN confirmed the discovery of a new particle with a mass of 126.5 GeV with a 5-sigma deviation, which denotes a confidence level of 99.99995%. Indeed, they said that this finding is verifiable and reproducible at any time. According to their estimation, the particle was a boson, the heaviest one ever discovered.

Mystery 109 THE HIGGS PARTICLE, in continuation of The God Particle (2014), is inspired by this very discovery. Seven performers − dancers and acrobats − use image and sound in a three-dimensional stage to narrate the age-old tale of the creation of the universe as we know it. An extraordinary spectacle exploring all the strange terms of Physics: Big Bang, the Standard Model, strings, supersymmetry, bosons and fermions, antimatter, the unification of forces, matter and dark energy, and black holes.
Developing a dialectical relationship with this multitude of concepts and rationales, Mystery 109 THE HIGGS PARTICLE becomes an informal lecture on increasing entropy by Hainis Dimitris Apostolakis, who has worked at CERN as a researcher and fellow of the University of Crete in this exact field, searching for the Higgs boson. At the same time, the performance is an ode to our extravagant and diverse universe, but mostly to the tireless bravery of humankind in its endeavour to understand with all its resources who we are, how our world was made and what will become of us. A performance filled with brilliant injections of humour, dealing with all those terrible − both huge and minuscule − events that leave us humans in the midst of an unimaginable scale, trying to bring order to the universe by making particles collide at the speed of light.

Elefsina, an international social circus, acrobatics and contemporary dance hub

Mystery 109 THE HIGGS PARTICLE marks the culmination of a series of actions by 2023 Eleusis that establish Elefsina as an international social circus, acrobatics and contemporary dance hub. The first cycle of the legacy project has already featured the following events: Mystery 57 CLIMBING OVER ELEFSINA / REVISITING THE LANDSCAPES OF ELEFSINA, an action conceived by Le Plus Petit Cirque du Monde and ki omOs kineitai, with Greek and French artists, musicians from the Eastern and the Western Mediterranean, creating art projects for private and public spaces, city planning and the multicultural social fabric of suburban cities; Mystery 119 HUMANOSPHÈRE, an invitation to discover contemporary circus with its various aspects and surprises by Clément Dazin; Mystery 116 LES AMANTS DU CIEL, a project directed by Marco Mannucci, where the wall of a building becomes the stage for a surprising play; Mystery 16 TOGETHER! A CIRCUS INVITATION with 20 circus artists from Greece, Hungary and Ukraine in interventions designed for the urban landscape; and SPARK – PLACEMAKING & PERFORMING ARTS, an interdisciplinary workshop on activating public space with the participation of citizens (placemaking) through the performing arts, and with the recent social circus, acrobatics and contemporary dance workshops by ki omOs kineitai, in collaboration and with the participation of the residents of Elefsina.