We were lucky to catch up with Ingrid Kapteyn recently and have shared our conversation below.
Ingrid, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
The daily risk of recommitting to the creative path is the one that mystifies me, even as I take it, day after day. Freelancing seems to ask for the faith of a saint, the endurance of a triathlete, and the courage of a skydiver. I feel unbelievably lucky to have experienced a decade of short-term contracts sliding into miraculous sequence like puzzle pieces – and if it’s worked this long, simple logic dictates that it will continue to – but the psychological gymnastics of surrendering each new morning to the uncertainty of the future remain conscious. Still, as a chronically curious adrenaline junky, the constant change of my lifestyle is a privilege more than a burden. Saying yes only to work that feels in service to my artistic evolution is a particular and precious kind of freedom. It also feels increasingly defiant, even radical, as I age, in the face of conventional pressures to accumulate resources and stability. The line between belief and psychosis thins. Some days, trusting the unknown feels like the most inevitable and spiritual given; other days, a delusion. This is an old story. Often I relate to our original forebears, the hunter-gatherers who lived vividly on the precipice between feast and famine. And daydream as I do (since questioning everything all the time comes with the territory) about full-time positions, law school, grad school, I cannot walk away from the glistening moment where, if you just keep practicing how to listen a little more closely, a little more closely, you might actually coax something brand new out of absolutely nothing.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Dance has brought me to New York, London, and Shanghai to perform; Iceland, Dubai, Qatar, Switzerland to teach; Montreal, Tel Aviv, Moscow to train. I have performed with concert dance companies, operas, Off-Broadway shows, immersive productions; in galleries, garages, storefronts, wharehouses, lofts, even an empy pool filled with dirt. The rich variety of freelancing has sustained me practically and artistically since I graduated from Juilliard with a BFA in Dance in 2013, but what perhaps defines me most these days is my creative work with Welcome to Campfire. Tony Bordonaro and I have been collaborating to conceive, create, choreograph, direct, and produce scifi danceplays about lovers at the end of the world since 2017, when we overlapped in the original cast of Punchdrunk’s “Sleep No More” Shanghai. Merging dance and theater, Welcome to Campfire’s live and film productions immerse performers and audiences in dystopian futures that both engender and endanger human intimacy. We have presented five productions of three danceplays in Shanghai, New York, and London, to date, and we are currently dreaming up an immersive experience of the apocalypse that unites our past works as three chapters of one story about the same two lovers.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
After COVID vaporized a year’s worth of work overnight on March 12, 2020, Tony and I – like the 5.1 million other Americans whose livelihoods in the creative sector rely on live, in-person experience – spent a few months reeling in the blind hope that quarantine would end soon. Eventually, Tony started venturing up to my apartment each day to pass the time. We formed our own “COVID bubble”, cleared the furniture out of my living room, and ended up rehearsing and producing a new show 7-9 hours a day, everyday, as the pandemic dragged on for a year. By the time New York City was opening back up in the fall of 2021, we were ready to premiere an immersive production in a vacant retail space on West 42nd Street, in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district. Unemployment had provided enough security (effectively the longest government-subsidized artist residency we may ever experience as Americans) for us to focus full-time on our collaboration, and in the process, provide each other with daily structure that felt life-saving. The momentum we built as a company during that time continues to inform us, and we consider it a tremendous silver lining in what was a scary and destabilizing chapter for everyone.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
Modern life is increasingly oriented by, if not obsessed with, binaries, whether ideological issues, political parties, relationships, sexualities, you name it. Are you for or against, in or out, this or that? While that kind of thinking can be efficient and productive for creating cohesion or organization in society, it is also painfully limiting. The arts are a context where we can practice existing in the vibrant space between recognizable extremes. In that ambiguous “in-between”, multiple truths can endure simultaneously or not demand to be named by concrete words or explanations at all. Whatever response you are having to a work of art is “correct” because there is no right answer. Or, every answer is the right answer. If your mind races to create a story to make sense of what you’re perceiving, more power to you. Enjoy the ride! That’s the MO of our big, perceptive brains. But surrendering to your reaction without having to categorize it in relation to anyone else’s is a rare and invaluable luxury. If you can let go of the need for it to make perfect sense, you will open yourself up to an in-the-moment experience of presence that is expansive, exhilarating, multi-layered, ever-changing, and complex – just like nature is. Just like we are. By practicing not knowing, we can then return to ourselves and each other with more understanding and compassion, in all our exquisite and contradictory complexity.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.welcometocampfire.com/
- Instagram: @ingridmkapteyn
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ingrid-kapteyn-b9950b7b/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAUs39HfKKjXsSeCZQ_C3XQ
Image Credits
1. Headshot by Nir Arieli 2. Natalie Deryn Johnson 3. Nir Arieli 4. Thomas Rowell 5. Ori Flomin 6. Khai Nguyen 7. Jan Sol 8. Erin Baiano