Raise Your Voice in Medieval Counterpoint
Photo courtesy of Nellie Tinder
“supremely balanced weirdness.” — Time Out New York
Nellie Tinder’s newest work in progress is a musical adaptation/riff on Grace Paley’s hugely influential short story, Faith in a Tree: an experimental post-modern narrative about a single mother in her thirties in the year 1970, who, one afternoon in a New York City park, decides to become an activist. Meta-fictive, digressive, unsentimental and funny, the story approaches lust, loneliness, proto-feminism, child-rearing and idealism with incisive candor. Using Paley’s lyrical language and shifting perspectives to create intricate madrigal harmonies, psychedelia, and “everybody now” folk-music, Nellie Tinder seeks to explore sincerity without going soft, to revisit old New York without getting nostalgic, and to develop a new structural framework for a musical, one that is as freely associative and wild as Paley’s story.
Artists Involved: Directed by Julia May Jonas; composed by the company, with Jon Lundbom; performers include Kate Benson, Nikki Calonge, Lisa Clair, Andrew Dinwiddie, Zoë Geltman, Hannah Heller, Lucy Kaminsky, Richard Saudek, Kate Schroeder, and Marisa Lark Wallin.
Lead Artist: JULIA MAY JONAS, with her company NELLIE TINDER, has created and
directed multi-disciplinary work since 2005. Recent shows include Evelyn, which premiered at The Bushwick Starr, For Artists Only, at the Ontological Incubator, and Take Heart, with TerraNova at PS122. She has performed frequently at the Catch! Series, curated by Andrew Dinwiddie, Jeff Larson and Caleb Hammons, as well as at the Little Theater Series at Dixon Place, and her writing has been published by The Brooklyn Review. She recently received her MFA in playwriting from Columbia University. The work of Nellie Tinder aims to create a unique, highly personal idiom of theater that is musical, spiritual, insightful, and guided by moral investigation.