Review: RADIUM GIRLS-Inspiring Empathy & Action Through Dance

“..the body says what words cannot… Dance is the hidden language of the soul…” – Martha Graham.

Lena Wolfe’s Radium Girls achieves exactly that. Wolfe’s first immersive dance production draws inspiration from Kate Moore’s book The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, which chronicles the young women employed in New Jersey and Illinois factories painting watch dials with luminous radium paint. 

In this immersive production, Wolfe is the alchemist, transmuting choreography, an original score, and interactive technology into a luminescent lens on the past.  She invites audience members to walk in the glowing footsteps of the “ghost girls” whose pleas for safer working conditions were ignored, until they fought back, sparking historic workplace protections.

 Photo Credit: Adam Fontana

For Wolfe, a multi-hyphenate with a background in optical engineering and the performing arts,  the Radium Girl’s story became a choreographic inspiration. In the talkback after the performance, Wolfe explained how the workers’ daily ritual of “lip, dip, paint” — shaping brushes with their lips before dipping them into radium—was the tincture of choreographic inspiration that led to building out what an immersive Radium Girls world would look like.  

Photo Credit: Adam Fontana

In this production, audiences walked through an excerpt of the Radium Girls universe in a “playtest” format.  Radium Girls took place at the Playground: Immersive Works in Progress, a co-production between What May Come Immersive and Culture Lab LIC, which treats audience interaction not as an afterthought, but instead as a core ingredient in the creative process. The playtest approach is perfectly suited to immersive works like Radium Girls, where the audience’s involvement fundamentally shapes the development process, allows creators to test hypotheses, and influences how the work will develop going forward.  

 Photo Credit: Adam Fontana

Radium Girls

Director/Choreographer - Lena Wolfe

Associate Director / Choreographer - Jake Corcoran

Composer - Kate Olson

Cast:  The Girls - Sophie Morris, Emily Hart Lopez, Nellesa Walthour; The Chemists - Kendall Greyson Stroud, Kim Ross; The Doctors - Jake Corcoran, Miguel Anaya, Mollie Downes, Ford Haeuser; The Corporation - Connor Schwantes; Swing/Dance Captain - Adrianne Chu

Production Manager - Emily Derrick

Key Art - Scott Lilly

Dramaturgy - Sarah Sutliff

This excerpt of Radium Girls drops the audience into an eerie, industrial world: dim warehouse lights, fractured industrial space with alchemists concocting unknown substances, and the subtle neon shimmer of an imagined radium glow, all overseen by a suited caricature of the corporate overlord.  The focus of this excerpt is on the dynamics between the sickening Radium Girls and their doctors.  As you move through the space you observe storytelling through dance movement that is both delicate and unsettling at the same time.  

Photo Credit: Adam Fontana

Dancers in mint-green dresses trembled with pain, clutched their arms, and bent with a deep sense of trust into the palms of white-coated “doctors” who rocked them in unison as a form of “treatment” only to turn and betray them after being paid off by the corporate overlord. Other sequences between the doctors blurred into haunting duets, with sharp angles and lifts that suggested unity amongst the doctors and betrayal of the Radium Girls’ trust. Meanwhile synchronous, repetitive movements between the Radium Girls evoked factory-like repetition of a day's work, while still feeling light and effervescent as if the Radium Girls before us were in fact visiting us in ghost form. 

Photo Credit: Adam Fontana

Supported by glowing jars, neon gels, interactive technological projections, and a haunting original score with flecks of nuclear radiation geiger counter noises and deep harrowing heart beats, the staging created a charged environment where beauty and trepidation co-existed.

As a play test, this version was a mere fragment of what Wolfe hopes will become a full-length immersive production. Even in play test format, the structure invited audiences into a “choose your own adventure” experience: some attendees painted themselves with glowing makeup offered to them by the Radium Girls, others were scanned by the “doctors” in white labcoats, seeing the neon green outline of their bodies cast upon a screen, while others observed the story unfold from a distance. Wolfe emphasized that she wanted dance to communicate emotion without dialogue—movement not only as metaphor, but as a catalyst for stirring empathy in the audience.

The effect worked. At one point, the audience collectively felt the helplessness of the Radium Girls’ pleas for aid, unsure how to respond. Wolfe was giving her audience a moment of agency in the immersive universe, and one brave audience member took action. The characters’ visible relief in response to the audience member’s action rippled back through the room. This shared exhale was extraordinary and a reminder that immersive theater, when well-executed, collapses the distance between spectator and subject and can create genuine, urgent feelings that spur action.

Photo Credit: Adam Fontana

The cast carried the weight of the history of the Radium Girls with a raw, physical honesty. While a longer version will allow for more character depth and exploration, the cohesion of the group made the plight of the Radium Girls deeply felt. The integration of multimedia effects was seamless, and enhanced the choreography in a way that pushed the story telling forward.

If there was any critique, it is simply that the performance ended too soon. Those of us in attendance weren’t ready to clock out of our shift at the factory, quite yet. The play test felt like an amuse-bouche of what could—and should—evolve into a full immersive meal.  

 Photo Credit: Adam Fontana

In Radium Girls, Lena Wolfe has done something rare: crafted an immersive dance production that is at once historically grounded, emotionally devastating, and socially resonant.  She has proven that carefully curated choreography can evoke empathy so intense, it spills into audience action. 

Because Wolfe brings both her artistic and scientific backgrounds to the work, she shows how representation and lived experience expand what’s possible in immersive productions—offering audiences richer, more inclusive, and more resonant ways to connect.

Radium Girls is not only a story worth telling—it is a story worth supporting. To think what the full length production could become with additional partners and supporters should spark excitement, not only for audiences, but also for institutions in STEM, labor history, and women’s advocacy who wish to shine light on the themes Radium Girls addresses.  Walking in the footsteps of the Radium Girls reminds us that, despite progress, echoes of inequity persist in today’s world and the work is not yet finished.

As Wolfe showed, the body can indeed speak what words cannot. And in this case, it speaks for women whose voices were silenced a century ago, but whose legacy still glows today.

This immersive dance production ran at the Culture Lab LIC August 15-17th. For more information and to learn about the next iteration of Radium Girls follow @radiumgirlsimmersive on Instagram or contact at radium@lenawolfe.com.  

Lead Photo Credit: Adam Fontana