They’re formulaic and proud of it

Aaron Jungels, 42, is describing being sandwiched between two beds of nails as a block of wood is karate-chopped on the upper layer.

“The first time I did it, it was a little prickly,” he says. “But I’m pretty used to it now.”

“Because there are so many nails,” his mother says, “the body weight is distributed evenly, so it doesn’t hurt. If it was just one nail, it would go through him.”

No, Jungels is neither a South Asian mystic nor an old-school magician. Nor is his mother, Dorothy, an accessory to torture. Instead, he’s a prop designer and dancer with, and she’s the artistic director of, the Rhode Island-based Everett Dance Theatre, a five-member company they co-founded in 1986 with Jungels’ sister Therese, 45 (now the executive director). And the scene they’re talking about is a physics experiment “conducted,” so to speak, as part of the troupe’s aptly named “The Science Project.”

The 50-minute work will receive its West Coast premiere tonight through Friday at the Skirball Cultural Center as a companion piece to the center’s continuing exhibition “Einstein,” which ends May 29. (Everett will present a related educational piece, “The Marriage of Art and Science,” on Saturday afternoon.)

At first blush, science and choreography might seem strange bedfellows. But “The Science Project” -- which examines time, space, motion and experimentation and includes levers and fulcrums, weights dropping from ladders and swaying pendulums (not to mention that gruesome-looking nail bed) -- makes excellent sense: No other art form, after all, is as bound to gravity, one of physics’ mainstays, as dance.

Says Everett member Rachael Jungels, 41, the third sibling from her family in the company: “With movement, you’re often trying to find the most economical way of doing things -- moves that will have the most flow and through-line. Paring down and getting to the essence of things is like a scientific approach to understanding how things work.

“Dance, at its core,” she adds, “is physics. A pirouette is like a wheel turning where you push hard and let go -- the pull of gravity, how you push the floor and the floor pushes you, how you land from a jump.”

Thus, when four Everett dancers balance on seesaws, roll balls over their bodies and pour water from pitchers into tubs, they are engaged in a seemingly simple yet intricate movement vocabulary, albeit one that occasionally resembles a postmodern vaudeville act. (Company member Marvin Novogrodski has also engaged in circus arts.)

The Skirball’s director of public programs, Jordan Peimer, says he’s admired the work of 68-year-old Dorothy Jungels for some time, and presenting this piece as an adjunct to the Einstein show was, well, a no-brainer.

“By all accounts, this is their signature work. It’s fun, a little wacky and a good dance piece,” Peimer says. “One of everybody’s images of Einstein is the picture of him with his tongue sticking out. In my mind, there’s a lot of that irreverence in this, as well as strong dance and strong science that make it easily accessible.”

“The Science Project,” first presented at New York’s Dance Theatre Workshop in 1992, was the culmination of a two-year collaboration between the Everett gang and a high school physics class, which may help account for some of its lighter moments. But it also explores science’s darker side.

At intervals, the dancers recite from texts, including a personal narrative about the Holocaust spoken by Novogrodski and words written by and about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Head of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M., he is now widely remembered as “the father of the atomic bomb,” although he later came under attack for his efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons.

“Oppenheimer became thematic to the piece,” explains Aaron, who researched the life of the scientist and assumes his voice, “because of a combination of things -- his brilliant mind, his love of the arts and his humanity. After the genie was out of the bottle, he tried to keep it from turning into this big arms race.”

Dorothy, who has supplemented her dance career by illustrating three children’s books, says some of the experiments in “The Science Project” became metaphors for Oppenheimer.

“Lying on the nail bed was almost like a crucifixion: what finally happened to him at the end, when he couldn’t go backward, he couldn’t change things and was going toward the bombing.”

The Everett is reviving “The Science Project” this year for the first time since 1997, but to Dorothy, the dance feels far from dated.

“The choices we make -- to kill or not to kill -- seem relevant now,” she says. “To go to war, not to go to war. What to do and how far to take science. Could we just all open up our secrets to one another?”

Certainly the task of performing the work hasn’t diminished. Says Aaron: “The challenge is that we have these props that are supposed to work a certain way. But it’s very easy for them to do something else. Balls can take a bad bounce and roll in another direction. We’re constantly handling and switching props, making all of that flow and happen the way it’s supposed to happen.”

Scientists who have seen the piece “see atoms the whole time we’re rolling balls,” his mother says. But many others “see chaos.”

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Everett Dance Theatre

Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. today through Friday

Price: $25

Contact: (310) 440-4500 or www.skirball.org