Shari Mastalski of Butler seeks to combine the arts with science in her Dance on Water performance company. Here she demonstrates movements.

Butler County is filled with a variety of people doing interesting things. This weekly feature offers snapshots of some of them by asking five questions. The latest installment appears below.

Butler resident Shari Mastalski doesn't view science and art as opposing forces. Rather, she feels that only by combining the two can answers be found to pressing ecological and economic problems.

Mastalski, the holder of a master's from Slippery Rock University in Sustainable Systems, seeks to combine the arts with science in her Dance on Water performance company, which features her word and movement pieces telling stories of social and environmental import. Her idea is to engage people in dancing with questions and feelings beyond intellectual understanding.

In addition, she has been involved in sustainable design projects including the barn renovation and commercial kitchen at Blackberry Meadows Farm in Natrona Heights and the fabricated soil research team's research plots at the Jennings Environmental Education site in Hazelwood.

She used her 27 years in horticulture and landscape design, as well as her minor in dance and theater, in one of her performance pieces “Playing in the Dirt.”

“It's the idea that we could do things in a way that we maintain the systems we live in for future generations,” she said.

Mastalski believes our natural environment is our life-support system, but in the words of Eugene Odum, a pioneering ecologist, “People take all of the things the natural environment does for us for granted because we don't pay anything for it.”

She's expanding her concept of serious play with the Life in Motion group which will soon begin meeting Monday nights at the Grace Youth and Family Foundation, 100 Center Ave., and Worship in Motion at Community Alliance Church, 800 Mercer Road.

She recently answered five questions.

QUESTION: Can you explain what sustainable systems means?ANSWER: Sustainable systems is a holistic way of living today to insure healthy life for future generations.It's about the three environments we occupy: the natural environment, the cultivated environment and the built environment.

QUESTION: How did you arrive at your idea for your performance company, Dance on Water?ANSWER: I've always loved to move and I've always loved words, and I like to put words and movement together. And that's telling stories with movement and words.It's the combination of arts and sciences that's the key to utilizing our full capacity to solving problems.And we are human members of the ecosystems we live in, and we've caused some severe problems, and it's our job to solve these problems because we are all stewards of our life-support system.

QUESTION; Is the sustainability message getting through?ANSWER: Yes, because it's back to what I said earlier about the interplay of arts and sciences.There's the actual design of a barn and kitchen and there's transforming the food system in Pennsylvania to have healthier food for healthier people, but there's an educational component as well.On the arts side of that, you can take these ideas to people in a way that's fun and playful, so I have this piece called “Playing in the Dirt,” and it sums up many of the concepts of sustainable systems in an eight-minute piece. It's creative movement with the spoken word.

QUESTION: What is the greatest block to a healthy environment?ANSWER: Thinking that “Nothing I can do makes a difference.” The flip side of that is every one of us can do one thing today and every day that makes a difference.We are all stewards of our life-support system. We are all designers. We are designing our environment every day just by our presence. What kind of presence are we in those?How do we see, how do we look at our environment? Every day we make choices. We actually shape the space we are in. We have the opportunity to make the world a better place by our presence in it.

QUESTION: Do you see your work as a synthesis of science and art?ANSWER: Yes, it's the place where the creative side versus the logistic side. They need to work together to solve the problems we have in life.Life is messy and when we try to solve the messiness by forcing everything into some kind of controlled perfectionism, it ultimately doesn't work.Sometimes we find a better solution by dancing with the questions. That's where this comes in. Dreams in Motion is a class designed to bring out creativity, playfulness, so that we have better intuitive skills to navigate the uncharted waters of life.