One of the great joys of 2025 for us in the Voidspace has been the chance to discover incredible experimental theatre, through small festivals and alternative venues.
One piece that stayed with us long after we saw it was SCAPE, which we saw at Side/Step. SCAPE invites us to step into the world of a young woman’s grief, as she communicates with her deceased father through his old camcorder footage. A techno seance that transcends its cleverness to provide a poignant mediation on grief, haunting and the power of our past to control us or liberate us.
We welcome writer and director Kyndall Sillanpaa to tell us more about this extraordinary production and the “tenuous dance between time and fear.”
Voidspace:
Please tell us in a few words about SCAPE.
Kyndall:
SCAPE is a show written and directed by myself and developed in collaboration with performer Sophie Vincent. In SCAPE, a young woman summons her dead father through an old VHS, only to find his ghost waiting on the other side – alive. As home videos distort and childhood memories warp into something sinister, she must confront not only the spirit of her father, but the child-self she buried with him.
As a hybrid of traditional theatre, performance art, and installation art, SCAPE reconsiders traditional methods of archiving and engaging with memory, prompting audiences to reflect on how we construct a dialogue with the past. Anchored by my own childhood home videos filmed by my father the in the 1990s and early 2000s, these recordings act not only as a narrative core and aesthetic touchstone, but as a scene partner for the solo performer on stage.
Voidspace:
Where did you first get the idea from? Any influences / eureka moments?
Kyndall:
In the fall of 2018, I began working on my first project about my dad, a piece centered on the dreams I was having constantly about him in the years immediately following his death. I sought to ask the question: when someone dies which one is the nightmare – being haunted by their ghost while you’re asleep or being haunted by their death while you’re awake? This project was called DREAMSCAPE.
This short-form performance art piece used archival home videos filmed by my father to reconstruct my memories of him, placing the footage in contrast with moments of an idyllic dreamworld. The goal was to create a piece where the nostalgia of my childhood is twisted into the haunting reality of my grief. I constructed a 2 metre tall bed draped in white sheets that functioned as a video projection surface while I slept on the top only to wake up after the final moment of the piece where the audio of the last voicemail my dad left me played.
Since making this piece, it felt like continued development of it was inevitable.
Five years later I made SCAPE using those same home videos in a piece for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
When I first started working on SCAPE, I had a conversation with my oldest brother, Tyren, nearly 18 years my senior. I told him that I’d started watching the videos our dad filmed and edited more than 30 years ago. He would overlay music and television clips, film out of the car window driving through his hometown, and edit together extended montages of family photos printed out at Costco. I told Tyren my plan for the show, how I’d be bringing our father back to life onstage by reverse engineering conversations with him out of these videos.
He told me this format was the perfect way to tell a story about our dad, editing together videos of him using the videos he’d edited together of us.
Voidspace:
I understand you used real camcorder recordings from your own father. How did you go about reshaping then to form a narrative / conversation?
Kyndall:
In many ways, this process of going through these videos has been 5 years in the making. My brother, Kellen, started digitizing our home videos in 2020 taking them from the original 8mm tapes they were recorded on and burning the footage onto DVDs. He had to move the footage over to a more stable format because those kinds of tape are known to deteriorate over time. There are three main issues that will cause a vintage tape breakdown: playing it, storing it poorly, and time. Being that most of these tapes were 20-30 years old, we were up against the clock to preserve these videos.
Once I started development on SCAPE those DVDs were then turned into digital files that could be shared online. Due to the sheer number of tapes my father filmed, Kellen only sent me a portion of the videos to work with. I spent two weeks processing over 100 hours of home video footage.
While watching the videos, I worked in a spreadsheet taking down anytime anyone spoke, anytime my father was on-screen, any particularly impactful visuals, etc. This document became the roadmap for writing the script. We could only write to the dialogue we had so it became a real exercise in working within an incredibly rigid framework.
After processing all of the footage, there were a handful of stand-out moments that became key pillars in the progression of the story so we built the narrative from there.
It’s ironic in retrospect because the fear of vintage technology inevitably failing is at the core of the play as much as it was at the core of our process. It was important to me that we actually run the show on this technology because it, in and of itself, is breaking, is disappearing, and is going to stop working one day. I wanted the form to mirror the story.
Voidspace:
I can imagine there was a significant emotional impact, spending so much time with the recorded memories of a lost loved one. How did the experience of making it impact you?
Kyndall:
There were a decent portion of the videos I’d seen before beginning work on this project, videos that have been hugely influential in how I remember my childhood. It was the videos of my father I’d never seen before that had the largest impact on me – most notably the final video of the play.
In this video, my father is home alone rocking me to sleep in the living room. He talks in depth about having had a panic attack the night before while trying to explain how irrational his anxiety is. He explains how all he wants to do is sit there and rock me to sleep but simultaneously feels trapped by his lack of freedom. In the final moment he says, “So this’ll just be our little secret – that the perfect dad had a panic attack having to take care of his own kid.”
This video was one of the last ones I watched in processing everything for the show.
I’d never seen it before, my brothers had never seen it before, and we don’t know who he was filming it for or why. He was home alone so he had to set the camera up himself to film, there are cuts in the video right before he starts talking so it means he had to have edited it. My father wasn’t one to talk about the details of his severe depression and anxiety that grew to control his life so this was the first time I ever heard him speaking openly about it.
I’d always know that, as his child, I’d had a predisposition to those same mental health issues but it wasn’t until the years following his death that they started to control mine too. I’d wished he was there to tell me I was okay, to help me rationalize my irrational thoughts, to tell me it happened to him too – but he died before he could.
In this clip, he explains the details of a panic attack almost identical to the ones I’ve had throughout my adult life. I couldn’t help but make meaning out of that.
Voidspace:
The key message I took from SCAPE was the difficulty of letting go and moving on through grief and yet that it is possible. I found it a very relatable piece beyond the trappings of the uncanny: I think a lot of us find ourselves in an unfinishable dialogue with lost loved ones.
The constraints of the video tape medium spoke to that common experience – that we only have the past to rely on to make up the other side of the conversation.
Does that resonate with what you intended? What reactions have you had from audiences so far?
Kyndall:
A recurring touchpoint for Sophie and I throughout this process was the issue of time. Sophie as I had very different relationships with our fathers and siblings but there are two major overlaps – both of our fathers died when we were in young adulthood, myself and 18 and Sophie at 25, and we both have much older half siblings who had our fathers around well into their adulthood. Sophie and I have worked to process the feeling of having been robbed of the time we didn’t get with our fathers. SCAPE has become my response to the question, if I had more time, what would I want to say?
I’ve found that our audience responses go 1 of 2 ways – people either being struck by the technical feat of the show or resonating with it on an emotional level. Fathers talking to us about holding on tighter to their children after, young adults holding tighter to their aging parents after, or the people who already know what it feels like to lose a parent.
All three types of people walk out of the theatre having understood the tenuous dance between time and fear.
Voidspace:
What was the experience of staging the piece at Side/Step like?
Kyndall:
From the onset of developing this piece, we knew a traverse staging was the right set up for this story. The play depends on a spatial relationship that allows the actor to face off with the television because that is her scene partner. In the long, narrow space of Tunnel 1, the dialogue between the two characters turned into a tennis match, with the audience caught in the middle
Working in an unconventional space gave us freedom to reimagine how the world of the play could exist following our run at the Fringe. Without the confines of a traditional proscenium, we were able to explore atmosphere and intimacy in new ways. The absence of theatrical lighting, for instance, gave us the opportunity to use practical lights which is something we couldn’t have done in our previous run. Choices like that added an immediacy and realism that felt essential to this iteration of the piece.
Voidspace:
What plans do you have next for Scape or other projects?
Kyndall:
Our next step with SCAPE is to bring the show to the United States. My dad never left the US and never had a passport so I’ve found a bizarre tension in watching UK audiences respond to him and the American sports he loved.
More importantly, I want people who knew my father to be able to see SCAPE.
Sophie and I met at NYU, where we both studied before our early steps into the professional world were disrupted by the pandemic. Moving to London separately has given each of us a chance to start fresh creatively through SCAPE. We’re excited to keep building on this collaboration and to welcome new artists into the process as our small, mighty, company continues to grow.