Every spring since 1952, the Office of the Arts at Brandeis has held the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts. Founded by Leonard Bernstein himself, the festival features performances by students and other members of the Brandeis community and is open to the public. This year, 21 grants were given to a variety of community members, including graduate student Mu-Hsuan Lin, who received $350 for her multimedia performance.JustArts: In the list of grant winners published by the Office of the Arts, your project was described as "multimedia performance based on original story, with chamber music, dance and video." Can you describe it more?

Mu-Hsuan Lin: "A room of French windows and limestone sculptures" is a project derived from a larger project I am to accomplish in the near future. As mainly a composer, I do other acts of creativity in my spare time, and my creative mind has often been invigorated with the visions of beautiful experiences that are neither purely acoustic nor only visual. The idea of doing a project like this is a result from my long-time dissatisfaction of the limits of the art forms I have practiced individually-not that I deny the distinct communication of each art form, it is just that sometimes I experience "an experience" as in many art forms simultaneously.

In this, [my first attempt] at an inter-disciplinary artwork, I function as both composer and the writer and collaborate with a dancer to realize my ideas for the video and the dance.

JA: What is the original story about?

ML: I started writing a long story in the last winter which was inspired by and embarked with an image that haunted me for many years-a unisexed little girl the protagonist encountered in a bookstore restroom in Taipei City. The long story, a poetic magic realism piece (if you want to put a label), is structured by a linearity of displacements of time and space, inserted with several windows open to scenes on a stage or in a dream. With the encountering of the child as the start, the protagonist went through a series of events which she thought was chronological (like a stage project she directed, which spanned a year), but it never is clear what happens first; with the child popping in and out of the story between dreams and realities, readers will eventually get confused with the narrative. The part of "A room of French windows and limestone sculptures" is from a dream the protagonist had which involves the split of an individual's single narrative.

To realize the music part, the score calls for two singers, keyboards, strings, trombone, recorders, percussion and tape, or a simplified version of this instrumentation: singers, one keyboard, one string, two wind instruments and small percussion. The challenging part will be the use of the text-since I'm not writing "incidental music," how do I then apply the story unabridged while carrying the music into its fullest potential musical linearity? Though still in the sketching stage, I currently have a solution which was done before in my other music compositions: transform the music in time through different narratives-from an operatic duet to the ambient music with narration, from a song to a music drama, from text painting to the recitative, etc. The video, interacting with the dancer, will feature a gallery-like dreamland in which the dancer performs a dance with sculptures or, again, a simplified version of it. Depends on what I can get; the doubling and variation of the video and the dancer will, hopefully, demonstrate the split narrative the whole experience requires.

JA: Who is participating in the dance?

ML: So far I am still trying to find a dancer/performance artist.

-Andrea Fineman