Welcome to Campfire Interview — 8 years or One Year, Depending on How You Count It

Here, Picture This Post (PTP) talks with the WELCOME TO CAMPFIRE collaborators on Chalk Outline Portal, their new work, Dancers Tony Bordonaro (TB) and Ingrid Kapteyn (IK), and composer/musicians Marc Cardarelli (MC) and Lia Menaker (LM).

(PTP) What is the meaning of your tagline “Dystopian Danceplays” and how does that reflect your shared spirituality?

(IK/TB) We have been crafting stories about soul mates in apocalyptic environments for eight years now. Somewhere in the space between dance and theater, between abstraction and narrative, between body language and verbal language, between the world we know and the end we imagine, between the conscious and the subconscious, we find a freedom to express our most visceral and intimate survival instincts - as characters and as artists.

(TB) When Ingrid and I talk about a shared spirituality, we’re really talking about the way we approach being in the room together. We both have practices in yoga and meditation - mine’s been pretty consistent for over 12 years - and that really shapes how we make work.

For me, meditation is basically a practice of letting go. Letting go of control, expectations, needing to have the answer right away. We try to bring that into rehearsal. We try to make space for things to show up in a more intuitive way.

In many ways it’s a practice of faith - making something out of nothing. Making something out of nothing can feel kind of scary, and we both have a desire to step into the not knowing. We’re willing to sit in that space and trust that something will emerge, even if we can’t see it at the moment. Faith in the unknown and the unknowable.

I think what that leads to is work that feels more discovered than manufactured. It’s alive in a different way, and hopefully the audience can feel that.

(PTP) Why did you choose the subject matter of “a meditation on grief, consciousness, and the fluidity of the self” for Chalk Outline?

(IK/TB) Tony’s father died this past summer; Ingrid’s when she was in high school. So we’ve both been noticing our places on the circuitous and surreal path of grieving. As dancers two decades deep into the erratic freelance lifestyle, we are hyper-aware of how our longevity depends on our ability to shapeshift through constantly changing jobs, roles, and relationships to our work. As meditators, we marvel constantly at how what ends up mattering most seems to be what happens by accident while one works hard at something else. We are in love with the creative act, the process of witnessing something take shape where there was nothing before. All of this comes with us when we walk into a room and move our bodies together.

And then there was a new frontier we were feeling we’d reached as performers: how to bare all that we are wrestling with to our audience; how to be our most vulnerable selves with them; how to not perform while performing.

After all our years pouring ourselves into the vessels of characters, we decided to find out what would happen if we “played” ourselves.

(PTP) What do you most hope your audiences will take away from this performance?

(IK/TB) We hope they see us, and in seeing us, feel freed to see themselves. We hope our strange and silly romp through spacetime can also be a container for their grief and their processing. We hope they feel they shared in something raw and unfiltered and intentional as a respite from the highly mediated chaos of everyday life.

A lot of the material we perform “blind” we actually made while seeing. We want the challenge of execution to be real. The experience of “blindness” is not one that any of our collaborators have experience with in a literal sense. But in the sense that we are all tumbling forward in life with no knowledge of where we are going, only an impression of cause-and-effect in retrospect, blindness feels like a universal state of being. We are blind together. We are blind even when we can see. Can we see each other even when we are blind?

After courting the collective unconscious for considerable periods of improvisation (both free and structured), we subject our raw material to pretty rigorous editing. We capture a lot on video so that we can use playback to select the most evocative or descriptive segments to learn; we hone sequences through repetition until we collect many mostly discontinuous scenes; we storyboard and order and reorder for months; we let our bodies tell us in real time what comes next and what can go. At one point in the process (which will have been exactly a year by the time of our premiere!), we were stewing in upwards of two hours of material. A month or two later we had a two-act draft that ran 90 minutes. Now we’re down to one act that lasts one hour. “Killing our darlings” is painful but crucial, and we know that everything we learned from the missing pieces remains in our bodies and informs our sense of the world of the piece. It’s all there somewhere. But a mysterious internal logic often guides our gut responses - along with a lot a lot a lot of talking and hashing out between us - about what’s integral to the distillation and what’s not.

We find our way through a constant slalom between the poles of our two sensibilities. 

(PTP) (Question for the composers) How do you feel your work is impacted by seeing it transformed into dance/movement in real time as compared to when you are working solo?

(MC) Coming from a dance background, creating music for dance has always been a dream of mine. Having the opportunity for Tony and Ingrid to explain their vision and try to emulate it in real time provides almost instant feedback. That feedback isn't necessarily spoken but felt through the movement and images created. Getting that feedback, and being able to immediately respond to it, lets me into their process on a whole other level. That experience let me in as a part of the creation process, helping make decisions and influence the story in a new way.

​​(LM) When I create with movement in real time, it feels like I’m composing inside a living, breathing emotion. The body sets the tone before the music does.

Instead of searching, I’m witnessing—absorbing the rhythm, the tension, the release—and translating that into sound. I follow the movement’s emotional language and expand it, letting it bloom into melody, texture, and atmosphere.

It becomes less about creating alone and more about discovering something together. I never know where it’s going to go, so there is a real presence as I create. You have to really be in the moment, and there’s something so beautiful about that.

(PTP) How has working on Welcome to Campfire collaborations impacted your work as a teacher and vice versa?

(IK/TB) The amount of time we’ve spent wading into the unknown together has required and allowed us to become really comfortable with the messiness of process. The more safe we feel to express our own impulses, the more we can embrace and invite the uninhibited exploration of our students. The safer they feel to play, the more they discover. Supporting their research is a thrill.

(PTP) How would you compare the movement language you have developed for this work vs. your earlier collaborations?

This work grows out of our comfort with each other; after eight years of collaboration, we literally finish each other’s sentences on and off stage.

What that means is not that this piece is our cleanest yet but, perhaps, our messiest.

We put blindfolds on and allow our real struggle to keep dancing together be observed.

Cast:

Tony Bordonaro - Performer, Ingrid Kapteyn - Performer.

Creative List:

Tony Bordonaro - Choreographer/Director, Ingrid Kapteyn - Choreographer/Director, Roberto Araujo - Film Producer/Video Producer/Photojournalist, Marc Cardarelli - Sound Design, Lia Menaker - Sound Design, shiku thuo - Production Stage Manager.

WHEN:

May 14-23, 2026

WHERE:

Theaterlab
357 W 36th St.
New York, NY 10018

TICKETS:

For more information and tickets visit the Welcome to Campfire website.

All the images are by Stephanie Crousillat