Weird’s Tale

This is an excerpt from an hour-long multimedia work Weird's Tale made in a collaboration with butoh dancer Julie Dind and videographer Rolf Gerstlauer. In this work, motion sensors on the wrists and ankle of the dancer allow her every gesture to influence the soundscape. A simple rotation of her hand can either amplify the chorus of birds or silence them altogether, illustrating the intricate relationship between human actions and their impact on the environment.

About Weird's Tale’s components

Music: Composer Inga Chinilina structures the performance in five tableaus: 

-  Soft Rains (intro) -  Birds -  Oceans Apart - Whales - Soft Rains (coda) -

The piece begins with a cello duet, exploring the boundaries of traditional cello performance by using innovative bow techniques and elusive harmonies. This opening, characterized by its instability, invites contemplation on the delicate nature of the present moment.

Transitioning seamlessly, the sound of rain gives way to the joyful melody of bird song, highlighted by a striking blackbird solo piercing through the persistent rain. This connection between nature and movement is exemplified through Julie's use of motion sensors on her wrists and ankle, allowing her every gesture to influence the soundscape. A simple rotation of her hand can either amplify the chorus of birds or silence them altogether, illustrating the intricate relationship between human actions and their impact on the environment.

The performance also explores the indirect effects of human activity on nature. Through a poignant representation of two whales communicating through cello music, the piece brings awareness to the tragic consequences of human interference on marine life. These whale melodies are transcriptions of the actual recordings from the Watkins Sea Mammal Archive. The subsequent inclusion of actual recordings from the archive serves as a reminder of the dependency of these creatures on Julie's movements.

As the piece draws to a close, the gentle patter of rain returns, accompanied by Sarah Teasdale's poignant poem, "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1918). Written during a tumultuous period in history, the poem resonates with the overarching theme of the intertwining of nature and humanity explored throughout the performance, providing a fitting conclusion to this evocative journey.

Visual Environment and Scenography: Rolf Gerstlauer usually performs together with Julie while registering her movements together with the environment on video and photo. From this material he then crafts their a(u/r)tistic ecoperformance on film, but for this performance the process is reversed and Rolf manufactures three multi layered videos for each of the five tableaus. The videos are treated like paintings, both figurative and abstract, and consist of digitally altered photographs and video footage provided by Rhode Islanders interspersed with footage made by his students. The various layers of these video paintings are screened on two transparent screens (scrims), on Julie’s dancing body, and at times also onto the audience. The two big scrims are building both the stage and the scenography, or the visual environment Julie interacts with and/or dances within. The experience, although a stage-performance where Julie will appear in-between the two scrims, is expected to create an immersive dreamlike sensation for the audience, showing the alchemy or magic of transmuting matter – and perhaps revealing both the strengths and the weaknesses of our imagination. 

Costumes: Wenkai Xu invites cats, foxes, elephants and many other animals to partake in the performance by being part of the costumes. The glass pieces which appear in the films are literally materialized on the costume, through a cyanotype printing process. 
Dance: Julie Dind, also known as NN - Nomen Nescio, No Name, or just Not Neurotypical - is Weird. Interacting both with the visual environment created by Rolf and with the soundscape created by Inga and the costumes created by Wenkai, she aims to dance not in but with the environment. Her dance is rooted in (her) autistic embodiment and ways of perceiving the world. Whereas we tend to regard dance as a human practice and as a practice that centers the human, she is interested in exploring ways of dancing that do not center the human, but open space(s) for the environment to come dancing. She moves at times erratically, sometimes in stillness, but always autistically.

Performed by: Julie Dind

Scenography by: Rolf Gerstlauer

Composer: Inga Chinilina 

Musicians: John Popham and Tyler J. Borden 

Costumes by: Wenkai Xu

Media Contributors:  Ariana Amir-Mokri, Eli Backer, Damaris Borden, Theodor Burås, Ciprian Buzila, Bruce Campbell, Catherine Cressy, Eric Dobson, Judith Dupré, Francesco Finotto, Jason Goodman, Devanney Haruta, Susan Johnston, Kirsty Kerrigan, Joseph Maffa, Valerie Malínková, Lily Mathews, Mary McMurtery, Luke McSherry, Matt Messer, Mia Prausnitz-Weinbaum, Claudia Alexandria Regalado Torres, Michael Russo, Calder Smith-Montross, Henri Vierimaa

Production Assistant: Maxime Hendrikse Liu

The project was created with support from the Brown Arts Institute (BAI) as part of the inaugural IGNITE Series.