The Queer Ecology Institute’s ‘HYSTERIA’ film fosters a ‘queer utopia’

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In 1518, a woman known as Troffea began to dance in the streets of Strasbourg, France. She danced herself to death, and up to 400 others were affected. Five hundred years later, Nicholas Baird, a dancer himself, was bedridden with COVID-19 when he first started talking about the “dancing plague” with his creative partner, Lee Pivnik, who also had the virus.

The two went down a rabbit hole reading about the socially contagious disease, reading theories on how and why Troffea started her dancing.

“The documentation is vague, it’s not clear whether she started it or was affected by it,” Baird said. “There’s tension of not knowing whether it was a choice or a compulsion.”

Troffea’s story was a perfect fit for the Institute of Queer Ecology, a collaborative group that focuses on the interconnectedness of the environment. For their latest project, “Hysteria,” Baird and Pivnik spent February in Syracuse as artists in residence for Light Work’s Urban Video Project. The final product is now on the Everson Art Museum’s facade each night starting at dusk from Thursday to Saturday. Throughout the film’s production, the team said they tried whatever they could to “queer” the production and final product.

“The entire package is just really a very compelling piece,” said Anneka Herre, the program director of Light Work’s Urban Video Project. “It’s exploring intriguing, complicated questions about marginalization, contagion, contamination, queer futurity, all of these different themes that they’re bringing together through this piece.”

Herre added that the piece was an international production as well. An earlier version of “Hysteria” was displayed in Germany at the Kestner Gesellschaft, an art association in Hanover, Germany, that co-commissioned the piece with Light Work, she said.

Baird and Pivnik are often asked what queer ecology exactly is. For Baird, there are as many answers as times people ask the question. Queer ecology isn’t just being queer and doing ecology, though he adds that it is part of it. Over the years he’s been able to distill his thoughts.

“Queer ecology is a way of thinking about the world that incorporates both the multi-species interconnectedness of ecology with the … intersectional, decolonial and intimate relations of queer theory,” Baird said.

The film continuously features water, whether it be a creek, waterfall or water treatment plant. It’s an understandable fixation of the film, considering many of the dancing plagues occurred in towns along the Rhine River.

After showing the physical manifestations of pollution and water seemingly coming together, the film focuses on an actor playing Troffea drinking the water with a steady shot. Troffea then begins to dance on her own.

Once an entire crowd joins in, the music runs wild and so does the camera, swooping in between the many dancers. The film ends by looping back to the beginning, a seemingly infinite blackness broken up by white, flapping specks and the sound of squawking birds.

Courtesy of The Institute of Queer Ecology

Nicholas Baird founded the Institute of Queer Ecology, the group behind ‘HYSTERIA.” With his creative partner Lee Pivnik, they adapted the story of Strasbourg’s dancing plague into a short film.
Courtesy of The Institute of Queer Ecology

While the film is a unique piece for Syracuse University, it’s nothing new for the Institute of Queer Ecology, which Pivnik founded in 2017. The goal of the organization, which they said is sometimes classified as a living organism, is to live in the small sliver of space where science and art can come together.

“Art and science are about investigation and curiosity and discovering more about the world. I think both of them are about that question, ‘What is this world that we’re in? How does it work? What is our role in it?’” Baird said. “And here is a space, a very thin space, I think where both forms of answering that question can happen simultaneously.”

At an Everson talk on Nov. 2 with queer theorist Jack Halberstam, Pivnik said the institute is a way to get artists and designers at the decision-making table for environmental remediation work and the conversations around them. In previous projects, the Institute of Queer Ecology has created a “social simulation game” for the Guggenheim, an exhibit on turning Miami into a “Symbiotic City” and a seminar on mutualism.

In their own lives, they’ve worked to find the intersection of science and art. While he is a dancer, Baird is also a biologist currently studying for his PhD in paleobiology. Pivnik graduated with a BFA in sculpture but also had a concentration in nature-culture-sustainability studies.

At the beginning of the film process, the pair sought to “queer” the film from start to finish. For Baird, “queering” something doesn’t necessarily mean relating it to LGBTQ+ issues. It instead means blending things that don’t seem like they should go together.

On set, Baird said they worked to flatten the hierarchy of the set. Each person working on the piece had a role on and off the camera. Baird himself makes an appearance in the film and a medieval historian on set was also in it.

A queer performance class taught by SU’s Jess Posner came to see the visiting artists’ work. They were also asked to join in.

“They showed up to have our visit and within five minutes they were all in costume and were on set,” Baird said. “It also helped that feeling of queer, collaborative making that made the whole project mean so much to me.”

“Queering” also came in the form of logistics. They wanted to collaborate with everyone who was on set, which meant not having a traditional shot list. After their first day of shooting, their cinematographer asked what the shot list was for tomorrow. They didn’t have a traditional one.

“We didn’t have a director, we had seven people on set making decisions,” Baird said. “And all of the people who did costume, sound, cinematography, choreography, props and admin are also dancers.”

Even the current projection of the film is atypical. The wall displaying the film is around 30 feet by 60 feet with studio sound that fills the adjacent plaza, Herre said.

She said that while there are other examples of public media art across the country, the Everson’s facade projection is one of a few that has been operating for over a decade. The piece will be displayed on the building’s wall until Dec. 16.

In “queering” the entire art process, Baird referenced José Esteban Muñoz, an academic who wrote “Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity” before he died in 2013.

In Baird’s interpretation of Muñoz, he said queer utopia can only exist in short bursts, existing for moments that eventually have to come to an end. At the Everson, PIvnik said Muñoz’s work was one of the first “monumentally optimistic looks at queerness” that he encountered. For Baird, the process of making “Hysteria” was a queer utopia.

“Like yes, there’s a film,” Baird said, “but the way of working we built together where everybody has a say in this project and everybody played a different role and we were all basically just saying yes again and again every day, it was very special.”