Brìghde Chaimbeul:
where the veil is thin

Friday, July 4, 2025, 8:15 pm, Festival Boat

Brìghde Chaimbeul: small pipes
Molly Scott Danter: performance

For her Signature Piece for Monheim Triennale, Brìghde Chaimbeul will lower the temperature a little. Loosely based on a previous project, it will see the musician collaborate with dancer Molly Scott Danter, who like Chaimbeul grew up on the Isle of Skye. “There will be a nod to traditional dance in the same way that the music is a nod to traditional tunes, but we will take it somewhere else,“ she says.

This is also true in regard to the underlying theme, informed by the many stories about the Gaelic folk character, the “sharp-witted old lady” Cailleach Bheur. “She is very wild and powerful. She comes around every winter and is usually described as the wind, the frost, storms, ice, the wintertime weather or landscape,” explains Chaimbeul. “The piece follows her journey of her waking up to the start of winter until her death, which marks the start of spring.”

Such personifications of the seasons abound in Gaelic folklore, as Chaimbeul notes. “It’s like you’re making a sort of human connection out of something that might feel out of your control.” The dualism of light and the lack thereof will also inform the added visuals, which Chaimbeul characterises as abstract. “They sort of react to what is happening—the movement of my fingers, the sound waves, Molly’s movements,” she says. “At the same time, it will create a dark, insular world.”

Excerpt from the Monheim Papers 2025, Kristoffer P. Cornils.