Rossellini has a ‘Link’ to animals’ thoughts, behavior
The actress aims to entertain and amaze with whimsical ‘Link Link Circus’ show
Isabella Rossellini wants you to get in touch with your animal nature.
Or rather, she wants to talk about some of the ways that animal minds seem to work not unlike our own, and she’s coming to San Francisco venue The Chapel to tell us all about it in “Link Link Circus,” a theatricalized lecture packed with her own comedic films and puppetry.
Rossellini portrays various great thinkers such as Aristotle and Descartes, alongside a trained dog that plays various other animals.
The Italian-born film actress and model, 66, has a longstanding interest in animal behavior, and she’s about to complete her master’s degree in animal behavior and conservation at New York’s Hunter College. Rossellini has her own organic farm on Long Island, and she’s made three series of quirky short films with the Sundance Channel about various animals’ courtship and parenting behavior: “Green Porno,” “Seduce Me” and “Mammas.”
“Ever since I was a little girl I always asked if my dog was able to think and feel,” Rossellini says. “I went back to university and studied animal behavior and conservation, and there were things that were so magic, so amazing, it filled me with wonderment, but also they were humorous. I tried to capture that and transform it into a show rather than a scientific lecture. So I do it in the form of a little circus.”
The “Link Link” in the title refers to links between humans and animals. Rossellini also chose the title because it has a playful sound.
“Charles Darwin said we were linked with animals, that we have an ancestor in common with the apes,” she says. “And this offended many. In the show, I show comical films. In one of them I play Charles Darwin. It shows an X-ray of a hand, and the same bones that form the hand form the wing of a bat or the fin of a whale. Darwin said, in a famous sentence, that when it comes to cognition or intelligence, these are ‘differences of degree but not of kind.’ He never really studied animal intelligence, but he speculated as there is physical continuity, there must also be cognitive continuity.”
Rossellini describes some experiments she learned about that astounded her, such as pigeons trained to tell Picasso’s painting style apart from Cezanne’s.
“They would show a new painting of Cezanne or Picasso that they had never seen before, and they were able to distinguish it,” she says. “They were able to generalize, to see that there was a style, a continuity, like we can.”
And there are practical applications to this, she notes.
“This question about generalization and holding a concept came to me because I volunteer for the Guide Dog Foundation, and they train dogs to be service dogs. One of the basic commands is ‘find a seat,’ and the dog has to show you a chair. But there are many different kinds of chairs. And a seat can also be a bench; it can be a sofa. But you take the dog into a new environment and there is a chair that he has never seen before, and you say, ‘find a seat,’ the dog recognizes it. That ability to generalize is what led me to say, how can my dog do this?”
It’s that amazement most of all that Rossellini hopes to convey with “Link Link Circus.”
“I would like my audience to have two reactions,” she says. “First to be entertained, to really go, ‘Ha ha ha!’ And then to go, ‘Oh! Oh, I didn’t know that.’ I want this double reaction of laughter and wonderment, which I think is my reaction to going back to school. I tried to capture the sense of wonderment that I have when I study.”