Inventors Lee Brasuell, left, and Henry Segerman demonstrate the Tao-Line at the Seretean Center.
PHOTO / JEFF JOINER
An unlikely partnership creates artistry in motion The device resembles an awkward skeleton of a large round animal — maybe a giant armadillo rolled up into its defensive position. But once a person steps into the device and begins rolling around in it onstage, the awkwardness disappears in a combination of human agility and geometric beauty creating artistry in motion. The device, called a Tao-Line by its creators, is designed to be used by circus performers or acrobats. One or more performers can interact with the device from inside and on the outside and manipulate its motion by shifting their weight. The Tao-Line can also be suspended to become a human-powered aerial apparatus. The Tao-Line was designed by OSU faculty Lee Brasuell, production manager and technical director in the Department of Theatre, and Henry Segerman, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics. The fields of math and theatre rarely cross paths, but Brasuell
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and Segerman had a chance meeting at an orientation for new faculty at OSU. Brasuell noticed Segerman drawing sketches of what looked like a device for acrobatic performers to use, and he asked the mathematician about it. That chance meeting led to the partnership between Segerman, who contributed his knowledge of 3D geometric shapes, with Brasuell, the theatre production master, who brought years of expertise in creating devices for acrobats. The collaboration perfectly used each person’s talents. Brasuell searched his contacts in the circus world to find experts who could build the initial Tao-Line device based on Segerman’s computer-generated 3D renderings. A company in Chicago built the prototype that was tested by performers there. The prototype is now at OSU where the inventors demonstrate and evaluate the design while working to come up with funding to continue developing and marketing the device.
“We were doing a lot of great research on the movements and balance points, but we didn’t have any funding,” Brasuell says. “I started writing proposals. I received a DaVinci Fellowship, and that was the seed money to get us going.” The team also received a Technology Business Development Program “gap funding” grant from the OSU Technology Development Center to help with prototype development. The two have learned that developing anything new from the ground up is an excruciatingly slow process. “There’s a lot of structural analysis we have to do to the hardware and the splicing so when it’s up in the air it will take the shock loads put on it by the aerial artists,” Brasuell says. “It’s going to take time because none of this is off-the-shelf. It’s all custom-made.”