Welcome to Campfire is an experimental dance-theatre company mixing sci-fi settings with stories that explore the roots of human empathy and connection. We join its creators, Ingrid Kapteyn and Tony Bordonaro, as they talk about their inspiration, their hopes for the future of the project and the novel ways of engaging with the audience that they are exploring as they tell stories around this very special campfire.
voidspace:
Welcome to the voidspace. First of all, please tell me about yourselves, where you come from, your background, and what Welcome to Campfire is about.
Ingrid Kapteyn:
I’m Ingrid Kapteyn, and I’m one half of Welcome to Campfire. I am a performer based in New York City. I moved to the city to go to Juilliard for dance conservatory training 15 years ago now, and I’ve been on the freelance circuit since then, performing in all kinds of contexts: concert dance, operas at the Met, Off-Broadway shows, immersive theatre, smaller freelance projects – in an empty pool filled with dirt, in garages, on rooftops, the works.
Luckily, I have had many path-crossings with Punchdrunk. I joined Sleep No More NY in 2013, which is where Tony and I met, and I was part of the original cast of Sleep No More Shanghai in 2017, where Tony and I made our first work together outside of Punchdrunk with what became Welcome to Campfire. I’m now in London, closing up my Burnt City chapter, where we were able to make our UK debut as a company a few weeks ago [the interview took place in October 2023, shortly after the end of The Burnt City’s London run].
Tony Bordonaro:
Well, first of all, thank you for having us. My name is Tony Bordonaro. I’m the other half of Welcome to Campfire. I joined the cast of Sleep No More in New York City in 2011 and have been working pretty extensively in immersive theatre since then, having originated roles in three other immersive shows and joined the cast of Sleep No More Shanghai with Ingrid. I’m a choreographer, a director, and a writer primarily based here in New York City, and I’m very interested in physical storytelling and communicating story, narrative, and character through images, through the body, through immersive experience.
voidspace:
You two met on Sleep No More, which obviously is a very different experience. What got you interested in branching off from that and working together?
Ingrid Kapteyn:
Tell the story, Tony!
Tony Bordonaro:
Well, both of us were working in Shanghai, in Sleep No More, at the time. We were consumed by the show, by our performance schedule, but we also had a desire to tell our own story, to make our own work.
That started as an itch to work together, and also to create a world of our own. And one day we were at a beautiful museum in Shanghai, and we were walking through and inspiration sparked and we were just kind of chit chatting, you know? I said to Ingrid, “What would you want to make, if we were to make something?” And she said something about empathy, something that encompasses empathy. I thought that was such a beautiful theme to express, and one that I’m very interested in as well. She asked me, and I was thinking a little bit more literally at this time; she said, “What would you want to make?” And I saw this amazing rocket ship exhibit that looked quite futuristic but retro, and quite bizarre, and I immediately said, “Something sci-fi.”
I’ve been very obsessed with sci-fi for a long time now. Sci-fi stories, TV shows, movies – just that sense of world-building that can transport audiences into another space that’s very familiar to the world that we have, but offers us a different sort of perspective, a different situation to conceptualize our own experience.
So those two ideas, empathy and this sort of lens of sci-fi, sparked our initial creation. Ingrid met a lovely producer who had a company called Beyond The Bund that was curating events for expats in Shanghai, and they were interested in hosting an immersive dance performance.
So we found a space together, and the space lent itself to our story. It was a co-working space that was still under construction, and this is where we built our first piece and world. The piece was called Campfire, and that’s where we subsequently got the name for our company.
voidspace:
That’s lovely. I like that idea of empathy being at the heart of it. Thinking how sci-fi and apocalypses seem to be all the rage at the moment. Why do you think the apocalypse seems to have such a grip on people’s imagination?
Ingrid Kapteyn:
I guess we’ve wondered that a lot too. And some of the thoughts I’ve had include that when you can strip all the claptrap of modern-day life and comfort away from us, we get closer to the animals that we are. And that feels like a way to pinpoint the physicality of survival mode, and what’s at the core of us when we need to be in fight or flight. It’s a way to distill humanity for us.
I also feel like going just a little bit ahead of where we are in time – even if it feels like a shorter and shorter distance between now and the apocalypse! – allows us to look back on ourselves a bit more clearly. So, The Pigeon & The Mouse may be set at the end of a world, but it’s also potentially a breakup story that anyone who’s ever been through the end of a love (or the continuation of a love in a new way) can understand, and relate to.
voidspace:
It’s a great metaphor, isn’t it?
Ingrid Kapteyn:
Yeah.
voidspace:
That transitional time.
Ingrid Kapteyn:
And doom seems to be around every corner these days. Maybe it has felt that way in every human generation, but it certainly feels amped up in ours, whether from an environmental or social or political – take your pick of poison – standpoint. Tony and I are holding out a bucket to what’s – or, what do we say? Our net is catching ideas that are in the collective consciousness, or subconsciousness, for sure. We’re just doing the catching our way, while many other folks out there are also doing it in their own unique ways.
voidspace:
What surprised and delighted me about The Pigeon & The Mouse was how playful it was. And I wondered if you had anything else to say about the power of play in your work?
Tony Bordonaro:
I think for this piece in particular, we wanted to make sure that the audience could see the lovers enjoy each other, that they could see the love and see how hard the decision is to leave one another. And I think a lot of those opening sections came from improv, from me and Ingrid. I think that we have a playfulness together. Our inner children come out when we’re together a lot of times. I think some of the stuff that we were making before we knew we were making The Pigeon & The Mouse came from our energy together and our love for one another. Our playfulness, our camaraderie, our goofiness.
I also think that this piece is definitely more playful than the other two sections of the larger-scale work that the three pieces make up. The Pigeon & The Mouse is the Past section of the larger work, which is called The End, and this point is where we really get to see the two lovers know each other, love each other, be familiar with each other. The journey on from here is really a rediscovering, a re-remembering of each other as soulmates. This is when they’re living together and we see the origin of that connection, we see the love and that it brings joy.
Ingrid Kapteyn:
Conceptually, at the heart of The Pigeon & The Mouse is the idea that humans seek story and fantasy as survival tools. Not as some superfluous luxury of life, but as an essential mode, where we find solace and hope and the ability to continue – just like the characters tell the fable to each other in the spoken scene, as a way to work through the reality in a heightened imaginary space. They play games even as the world is ending around them.
We made The Pigeon & The Mouse over the course of 2019, and we premiered it in January 2020, a month before COVID, so we didn’t actually know what was coming, or the quarantine effect that would come over everyone’s real life. But then, in quarantine, we found each other again in my living room with the furniture removed, saving each other’s lives by being in process to build our next work, called Subject, which takes place in a top-tier pharmaceutical laboratory running a drug test for a memory-erase medication. Rehearsing every day for a year during COVID: that was how we survived. We also performed a bunch of adapted versions of The Pigeon & The Mouse – outside, in a gallery behind glass – in alignment with pandemic protocol.
So as in life, in art: the play of making stories to survive is something we experienced, as Tony and Ingrid as well as our characters.
voidspace:
Life imitating art. That takes me on really beautifully to the different experiences you’ve had in terms of how you interact with the audience in this kind of work.
Ingrid Kapteyn:
We’re all Punchdrunk devotees, and that’s our lineage as performers and makers, for sure. We’ve never sought to imitate Punchdrunk, by any stretch, but we have learned a lot from it.
The first part of what hits me about immersive work is the proximity. There’s a much greater chance for the work to be felt viscerally when you’re close to it. When you’re lost in a dark house, 50 rows back, it’s a more intellectual experience. You can’t feel it the same way, the mirror neurons can’t fire the same way.
Because Punchdrunk is such a forerunner and behemoth in the world of immersive theatre, it’s easy for us Punchdrunkards to assume that their version of immersive theatre IS the definition of immersive theatre. But we’re always asking, what are the various ways one can define it?
Besides proximity, I think the other biggest part of what it could be to me is that the audience is in the world with us, not in a separate environment, watching the characters inhabit the world from outside. For Campfire, our original piece in Shanghai, we had the audience moving with us throughout the space and that was a lot like Punchdrunk, but we’ve also staged that work and The Pigeon & The Mouse, like you saw, in a space where the audience is seated and not mobile, but still in the room with us.
voidspace:
How did that change the energy, those two different types of performance? If it did.
Ingrid Kapteyn:
I think both felt quite intimate. A lot of audience members at The Pigeon & The Mouse at The Space in London remarked on feeling almost like impostors, or like there was a certain discomfort to how close they were to us in our world, because they felt voyeuristic. They also felt enclosed, in the way that we were, locked into a safe house.
We look forward to the day when we are able to set the work in an environment that is spacious and designed for the audience to roam and choose their own route. But in the meantime, sometimes ensuring sight lines requires that people sit. We want to give the best possible experience of the story and that always takes a different recipe. Story first, story first.
Tony Bordonaro:
Just to piggyback on what Ingrid was saying, about our original production, Campfire, in Shanghai, where the audience were on their feet: they did have agency over where they went in the space. We used light to outline where we were going with the story. Of course, they had the freedom to go anywhere they wanted and explore, but there was a bit more of a path and a trajectory where they could be with us. And I think that when we moved that piece specifically to a theatre in midtown Manhattan, The Tank, it was important for us to create an environment that didn’t feel like a theatre. So we took out all the seating and we encouraged audiences to sit 360° around us, but with no chairs, so that everyone could have their own vantage point and make a circle around us, in the same way that the audiences did almost instinctively during the first Shanghai performances. In Shanghai, because of the light design, they actually created a circle around us at certain points, which really felt like people gathering around a campfire.
We also teamed up with a scent designer – a perfumer – who built a two-part immersive scent sculpture that we diffused throughout the space over the duration of the performance. That was something that we added for the New York performance, because we wanted to find another way to activate the audiences’ senses in the new space. We thought about how a powerful smell can evoke memory and transport people to a certain space and time. A lot of people thought we used the smell of atomic metal. That’s what it was inspired by. And during the second half of the piece it transitioned to the scent of campfire embers. We really wanted to bring people on the journey with the characters from a place of anxiety, of fight or flight mode in a world that does not feel safe, into a place that felt very familiar, very comforting.
That was the journey that we went on, I think, emotionally through the piece, as well as through scent. So that’s one other way that we thought creatively about how we can continue to immerse the audience in this world, in this more traditional space. How can we change the space just a bit to give an experience that is beyond a proscenium performance?
voidspace:
That sense of reaching out, almost like reaching out a hand to do something, to extend that invitation and that idea of evoking that campfire, yeah. That’s a beautiful way of doing it, because it’s such an ancient kind of participatory space, isn’t it, that we don’t always access in the arts nowadays.
Ingrid Kapteyn:
Yes, we’ve been gathering around campfires to tell and hear stories since our species’ earliest days, so there’s definitely something in that that we hold dear. You had asked about the time when we performed behind glass in a gallery during COVID – that was really isolating. We were alone in that room and everyone who was watching was outside on the sidewalk. So a strategy we used to create more immersion was to have the audience plug into the sound that we were hearing inside on their own personal headphones. And our stellar sound designer, Mark Cardarelli, built a 4D sound score, so he took the sound and made it feel like it was traveling around your head and coming from multiple dimensions and directions. So it became arguably one of the most intimate ways to experience the work that we’ve ever created.
voidspace:
It’s interesting that you talk about the use of sound technology to draw people further in. There’s a question of whether technology in this space can draw you further in, or whether it can be more distancing than engaging. Where do you come out on that?
Ingrid Kapteyn:
I’m so partial to live art as a performer that I have a bias against replacing the wonder that is carried by the human body with anything else. But all we’re trying to do is tell a story, so that’s the only rationale we need to use when any potential storytelling tool comes up. Is it going to help us tell the story better? If it’s because of the story, then I can’t rule anything out. The large-scale vision for The End, which Tony mentioned – and which includes The Pigeon & The Mouse as one of three chapters of a story about the same two lovers – that world will probably require us to use a lot of the best digital tools out there, just because we want to tell the story the best way possible.
Tony Bordonaro:
I think that’s very fair. Just as technology can be used for good or for bad, I think it’s always about balance. I think at the root of the performing arts is live performance, actual human beings. That’s what people love about it. I have faith that that will always be the core. But as technology continues to evolve, I’m sure more technology, as we’ve already seen, will be used in theatrical performance. And as long as it’s done in a way that still respects the live artists, and the writers, and the people that are creating and performing, then I think that that’s a good use of technology.
voidspace:
The next thing I want to talk to you about is your plans for the future. You’ve mentioned a couple of times that you want to create a larger piece, bringing together, I think, the triptych that you’ve already worked on and adding to and augmenting that as well. Tell me about that.
Tony Bordonaro:
The next project is titled The End, and the idea is for it to be a multi-floor or multi-space free-roam experience. We would like the audience to have agency over their experience and to get to choose where they go and what they see. And as Ingrid mentioned before, it will house our three pieces, The Pigeon & The Mouse, Subject, and Campfire, in one story.
Ingrid Kapteyn:
It’s in three chapters: past, present and future. They will each happen in their own space (or on their own floor) simultaneously but be played by four interchangeable, non-gendered couples who are cycling in and out of each story throughout. So there will truly be a sense that this is a timeless and universal love story, about soulmates who meet in many different times and bodies and incarnations. There will be auxiliary characters in those worlds as well, beyond the lovers, and auxiliary spaces. But the basic content is that in the past, the lovers, Pigeon and Mouse, are squatting in an abandoned home in a city that is about to be evacuated because of nuclear fallout. And in the present, the two lovers are being observed inside of a holding pen in a drug trial for a memory-erase medication. And ultimately, in the future, they come across each other as potentially the last humans remaining on a desolate Mars colony, where a community has attempted to settle and been destroyed.
Tony Bordonaro:
That sense of remembering one another, remembering the love that they have for each other!
The audience will be invited as guests to Memredux Laboratories, the setting of the Present chapter. It’s a high-end pharmaceutical corporation that is testing the first ever memory-erase medication. Guests are invited to observe the trial between the two test subjects, and then as they start to branch off and roam through the space, they’ll encounter the test subjects in different spacetime situations from the past to the future.
voidspace:
It’s almost like an inner landscape as much as an outer one, maybe.
Tony Bordonaro:
Yes.
voidspace:
So, the role of the audience is going to be to roam through, to bear witness to these stories, to build these memories. Is that the shape of it?
Ingrid Kapteyn:
Yes. And there’s a layer in Subject, the present chapter that Tony was just talking about, which we premiered as its own entity in Fall 2021, where the audience is invited as prospective customers. These are the people that the drug company is trying to sell the drug to, because applicants to the new Mars colony are more likely to be selected if they’ve had their memories selectively erased, so that they’re more fit to start fresh with no baggage. In observing the trial, viewers take on a complicity in how the doctor is treating the test subjects, in how the drug trial is proceeding, and potentially in whether or not the subjects are able to escape their fate. But there are ways that we may blur the line between participant in the world and observer of the world. That remains to be seen through a lot of research and development.
voidspace:
It’s really exciting, to hear that you’re exploring, or bringing in different types of agency into your work that can rub off each other in different ways.
Ingrid Kapteyn:
Again, if it’s the end goal, interactivity loses its sparkle to me, just doing it for the sake of doing it. But if it emerges out of necessity from the story – as a means to the end of telling the story – we would love to discover that.
voidspace:
What advice would you guys have for aspiring creators in immersive or interactive spaces?
Tony Bordonaro:
It’s the same advice I would give to any creators, which is just to keep making work, to keep doing it. Sometimes as artists, we get so consumed with the process that we forget to – or we get scared and we become fearful and we don’t – share it. I think that actually sharing work, if you find the courage, is a useful tool in learning and evolving your creative process. So I think a lot of times, young makers feel like they don’t want to share until it feels right. But sometimes it’s part of the process of learning to be vulnerable in that way, to continue to learn from the work that you’re sharing and to stay open to possibilities.
Ingrid Kapteyn:
The hardest part is arguably just the part where you move yourself into the room, where you get yourself to the room to do the work. But if there are people that you love inside that room and you get there, something will happen. So, yeah, just keep showing up. I agree with that.
Tony and I feel really excited in this time of the world that we’re in, by the prospect of connecting performed work to new audiences who aren’t the dance audience that we know already and aren’t the theatre audience that we know already. Those audiences are perhaps a bit tired and dried up anyway, but being able to find new routes to connect to all the people who could love this kind of work but don’t know it yet, who might be drawn in because it relates to their love of history or their love of video games or their love of sci-fi. There are so many roads in, and I hope that we can all keep paving them, and welcoming people at the end of them.
Find out more about Welcome to Campfire here
Contact Welcome to Campfire here