In 2000, Magnetic North began moving at an erratic, sudden speed. It’s averaging 34 to 40 miles per year. It’s been scientifically proven that human beings can feel this, and we’re learning that it’s affecting us in wide-ranging ways.
When magnetic fields move erratically and quickly around us, the part of our brain that makes ethical decisions becomes impaired. Changes in electromagnetic energy, caused by magnetic movement in the Earth’s core and in the magnetosphere around the Earth, can affect our health, our potential, and our physical and mental well-being.
True North is a guidebook for all of us, combining the latest scientific research with ancient practices that enable each of us to ground ourselves in the midst of uncertainty.
There will be a virtual première at 7pm on Thursday with a post-show talk back with artists,
a chance to offer a virtual cheers on Friday at 5pm with Happy Hour with Heidi,
engage with our community on Service Saturdays,
and join in the discussion during our virtual Art of Activism brunch on Sunday from 11am – 1pm.
Markell Williams is an award winning actor based in Atlanta. He helms from the state of SC where he earned a BS in Chemistry with strooong encouragement from his parents ( HEY, Ma! HEY, Dad!). After 10 plus yrs of working in Quality Control and R&D he allowed his heart to direct him to his original passion for performance art. He has performed for the Alliance Theater, 7 stages, Birmingham Children’s Theatre, Found Stages, Weird Sisters, NC Black Repertory Co.,The Object Group, Center for Puppetry Arts, Impulse Rep, and Theatre in the Square. Favorite roles include: Lord Byron in NYE Frankenstein Ball, Booth in Top Dog/ Under Dog, Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, Peter in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe where he and cast received a Suzi Bass Award for Best Performance and a guest star role on the FX TV series Atlanta.
Contact him at: https://resumes.actorsaccess.
Scott Turner Schofield (Magnetic North) was named a “Trans influencer of Hollywood” by OUT Magazine after over a decade of leading groundbreaking transgender representation on screen behind the scenes. He is an Emmy-nominated actor; a Lambda Literary Award Finalist; an indie producer with Tribeca laurels; and the role he helped create as a consultant on HBO’s EUPHORIA has been called “TV’s most interesting trans character” (Daily Beast) and “the future of TV” (Marie Claire). His one man show special, Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps, was nominated for a 2020 WOWIE from World of Wonder, celebrating the best in artistry, activism, entertainment, and more. The live show of the same name was co-commissioned by 7 Stages and the National Performance Network.
Scott is delighted to come full circle to his artistic home with this project. Find him on social media @turnerschofield.
Dorothy Victoria Bell-Polk (Noosphere) is a singer, writer, composer, actor, and educator from Detroit who earned a degree in English from Clark Atlanta University and an MFA in Theater from Louisville University. Dorothy is currently theatre teacher at Dekalb Elementary School of the Arts and is a lead performance teacher for 7 Stages Youth Creates summer theatre training program. She has been a part of their Holland exchange program since the inception. She has performed internationally and nationally with local productions including Robert Earl Price’s All Blues, Hair, The Crucible, Mass Transit Muse, fml: How Carson McCullers Saved my Life, 3 Penny Opera, and Human. “It is an honor to be an Artistic Associate to my theatre home, 7 Stages!
Thank you to my perfect husband Detrick and creative son Sam for their love and support.”
Lee Nowell, creator of True North, is an actor, director and playwright. Her previous work has been workshopped, commissioned and produced at many theatres, including Actor’s Express, Found Stages, Horizon Theatre, and Synchronicity. Below, find out more about inspiration, research and writing process that went into True North:
Q. What inspired you to create a production focused on science?
A. This all began when I saw a Time magazine sitting open on a table. The open page read “Average number of miles Magnetic North has moved since the year 2000: 34.” I thought, gee, I wonder if we can feel that?
I dove into scientific research for a year and a half, reading scientific papers from NASA, Cal Tech, and Princeton, and then kept searching and reading papers and books from scientific experts around the world. It turns out that we can feel the movement of Magnetic North. Not only can we feel it, but it affects us in significant ways. When magnetic fields move erratically and quickly around us, the part of our brain that makes ethical decisions becomes impaired. Changes in electromagnetic energy, caused by movement in the Earth’s magnetic field and in the magnetosphere surrounding the Earth, can affect our health, our potential, and our physical and mental well-being.
There are scientific reasons for the sudden surges of nationalism and hatred around the world, and they are connected with the sudden, erratic movement of Magnetic North. People who can’t adjust to the movement of Magnetic North know that something feels unstable; instead of understanding the source of the problem, they turn on other people. When people feel threatened, they circle the wagons. They decide that “only people like me” are safe. If the people who are freaking out could learn how to ground themselves, they’d realize that there’s no impending threat to them from other people; they’d learn to harness the potential of this energy as it moves through them. Historically speaking, some of the greatest achievements in human culture have come during great shifts of electromagnetic energy. True North is a guidebook for all of us, combining the latest scientific research with ancient practices that enable each of us to ground ourselves in the midst of uncertainty.
Here’s the best metaphor I’ve developed for the way this works:
The universe is a power grid. Each one of us is basically an electrical outlet that receives and sends energy. The magnetic field of the Earth is essentially a power station. The magnetosphere that surrounds the Earth is another power station. When there’s a geomagnetic storm, it sends surges through the entire system. You want to be a grounded outlet. If you aren’t grounded, you can’t handle the power surges, and your health and well being can be seriously impaired. If you are grounded, you become capable of greater breakthroughs in the arts, sciences, philosophy, and social progress. That’s what research covering the past three hundred years of human civilization has shown us. This electrical system doesn’t just send energy. It also sends and receives information from people you know, from the collective human consciousness, from the magnetosphere that surrounds the Earth, and from the Earth’s magnetic field. This transfer of information works in much the same way that wifi works (and P.S., wifi is an electromagnetic energy transfer of information).
Q. The film focuses on scientific theory for magnetic fields and their affect on our well being but also ancient practices in grounding and dealing with these affects, what was that research process like?
A. The research process started by reading one article, then having a question about it, doing a search about that question, and then discovering another article that explored that question. This has gone on for a year and a half now, so it’s turned into a process of going down the rabbit hole, and then realizing I’m living down the rabbit hole. It’s also a process much akin to a spider spinning a web: this all started with one filament of a thought that then spun into threads that connected to other threads, until I realized there was an entire completed web with a pattern that I’d created, based on all of this research. Examining that web, once it was completed, and teasing out the meaning of it, and developing a unified theory based on the implications of this research was the most complex part of it. After I’d completed the first draft of the script, which is based on this research, I realized how complex it was. I also realized that I needed a scientist to read through it in minute detail to check and make sure that what I had written was not only cohesive, but also scientifically accurate and true to the body of research that formed the basis of the script’s thrust. I was lucky enough to connect with Heidi S Howard’s father, who is a retired science teacher, early in the development of the script, and he really guided me through a lot of complex trains of thought. He helped me during a particularly baffling research period, and I am very grateful for his insight. Once the script was completed, I stared at it, realizing I also needed an astrophysicist to review it for clarity. I had no idea how to find an astrophysicist. The next day, a friend who went to high school with me asked to be my Facebook friend. We had been in high school band together, and I hadn’t been in any sort of contact with him since then. I accepted his Facebook friend request and then read in his profile that he was an astrophysicist who had worked with NASA. I asked him if he’d review the script, and he said he’d love to do that. We spent a few weeks going over each word in the script, and we examined the source research in detail to make sure the script represented it factually. I still am amazed that I had a thought of “where can I find an astrophysicist to help me?”, and the next day, the perfect astrophysicist for the project showed up. With that being said, the research in this script explains how something like that happens, so it’s gratifying to think about that as well. In terms of the ancient practices for grounding and dealing with the effects of magnetic changes, I pulled practices from my classical yoga training. The scientific research talked about yoga and its effect on the ability to find balance in uncertain situations. As soon as I read that, I realized that different disciplines are trying to say the same things, using different modes of language to describe them. The scientific community talks about frequencies; the yogic community talks about modalities that end up creating those same frequencies scientifically.
Q. Have you adopted any of these practices? If so, how has it changed your response to these uncertain times?
A. Definitely. I was already using these practices – I’ve done them for over 10 years – without realizing the implications or the extent of the effects they were having. I knew I felt better, that I felt more grounded and universally kinder towards other human beings (and less erratic inside myself) when I practiced them, but I didn’t know how or why they worked. It was gratifying to have my intuition resound in such a big way with quantifiable, proven scientific experiment results. There’s one yogic technique in the script, for example, that’s colloquially called “the bee breath.” When you practice it, even for one minute, it eliminates anxiety, panic, stress, and monkey mind. From a scientific perspective, what it’s doing is balancing the right and left brain in terms of activity, and changing the type of brain waves that you’re producing from an anxious wave pattern to a calm, coherent wave pattern. I use the term “wave pattern” to suggest the printed readouts you’d get from an EEG machine. Those wave patterns are the result of the frequencies you’re creating. That’s the connection between the yogic perspective and the scientific perspective. It’s powerful to bridge the two ways of thinking about the same thing.
Q. What do you hope audiences will take away from watching this film?
A. I hope audiences will consider the things around them that they can’t see, like electromagnetic energy and the way we interact with it, in addition to the way it affects us- all of us. There’s a more subtle concept I’d like for people to explore, which is that we – all individual human beings – feed energy and information into the global electromagnetic field. What we think, how we choose to move in the world, has measurable effects not only on our lives but on the lives of everyone and everything else. Electromagnetic energy is the only type of energy that has no end point in the universe – it keeps going, so it isn’t physical-location-specific in terms of its ability to transfer information, including thought patterns and emotions. We have the ability to measure the effect that human thoughts and emotions have on the collective energy pattern now, and we’re just starting to really investigate how and why that works the way that it does. What it basically comes down to is this: each of us is responsible for what we put into the collective energy of the world. What we put in has scientifically measurable effects, from the symmetry (or asymmetry) of the subatomic particles directly around our bodies, and the timbre of the emotional and creative and intellectual movement of the collective energetic system. What we think, how we feel- becomes what we create, whether we intend that to happen or not. When enough people start thinking towards creating something – even unintentionally because of an emotional reaction – something in the world called The Noosphere moves to make those thoughts a physically measurable, actual reality. What we think, we create. So learning to be intentional and, more importantly, responsible for our input into the creation and evolution of the world is the most basic, fundamental thing we can each do to move the world, to help evolve the world, in a better direction. True North is a guidebook, compiled from the greatest, most recent achievements of the world’s best scientific minds, that will help you do just that.
