Choreographing Life’s Un-Choregraphed Moments: A Conversation on Intimacy and Combat for the Stage

#TKapowConversation #Season 17

Since returning to in-person rehearsal rooms and performance spaces after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, safety and well-being took top priority among tKAPOW’s practices. Of course this meant testing, masking and livestreaming whenever possible and necessary, but it also meant reconsidering our theatre-making process with our actor’s wellbeing as the top priority. Like all art forms, acting is incredibly vulnerable. It requires one to put their body into various states of physicality and emotion, and even though we know cognitively that the circumstances are fictional, our bodies cannot always tell the difference. This is the reason that Intimacy and Combat choreographers have become essential members of well-rounded, safe theatrical teams. 

Theatre KAPOW has been working with Intimacy and Combat Choreographers consistently since the start of our fifteenth season. At the most basic level, Intimacy and Stage Combat Choreographers are responsible for creating the sequences of movement that make up moments of physically intimate contact between two or more characters, such as stage kisses, slaps or even weapon work. It’s a means with which to choreograph a character’s most raw and impulsive actions while keeping them organic and appearing completely un-choreographed. 

“A stage combat choreographer looks at the violence of a piece. So if there is either scripted violence, or a director has an idea of violence that might occur based on the acceleration of the scene, we are brought in to look at the background of the characters and dramaturgically assess what kind of choreography would fit on the bodies of two people engaged in a violent encounter, or the bodies of two characters who are engaged in a violent encounter and where those intersections come together,” shared Kyrie Ellison-Keller, who has worked with tKAPOW as both an intimacy and combat choreographer. Kyrie has choreographed two instances of violence for our September production, LIFE SUCKS. “My favorite Stage Combat Company to study with, Neutral Chaos Combat, they call us all Violent Dance Magicians. What we’re doing is we’re choreographing violence, but violence on stage is inherently not real, so it’s choreographed illusion. And if it’s done well, it looks violent.”

Samantha Griffin, Intimacy Choreographer for LIFE SUCKS., grew up as a dancer and finds the two artforms very comparable. “My dance background informs a lot of the ways that I choreograph without using sexualized language,” she says. “With dance, we’re very specific, like: on this exact count you move your hand this way, and on the next count you step here. That’s how I approach choreographing intimacy. I give people counts. I ask: how many steps will it take you to close this gap between you? I give actors a certain amount of seconds to hold a kiss or an embrace, and use the language of music and dance like ‘staccato’ or ‘languid.”’ 

Kyrie shared similar sentiments, saying that “a lot of the language [fight choreographers use] is co-opted from dance words, because most of the time when you walk into the room as a fight choreographer, you’re not getting to work with people who have been trained in weapons. You get to work with people who might have a really strong movement background, or who might have danced for 20 years, and you have to find ways to adapt.” Plus, she shared an interesting tidbit about the origins of swordplay language; dating all the way back to the 15th century, Fencing and Ballet were studied by the upper middle class simultaneously, which created an overlap in their terminologies. 

That being said, creating choreography is not the only purpose of having an intimacy professional in the space. “Intimacy choreography is a practice that’s been developing over generations. In simple terms, yes, it’s the practice of consent and boundaries for actors. We are people who can come into the space and arm actors and professionals with language and tools to create a consent-based environment that will safely allow us to step into characters and emotions that are not our own,” says Griffin. “A lot of my practice is working with actors playing emotionally-turbulent roles to figure out how they can connect and disconnect from them, so that they do not carry it with them into their personal lives.” Ellison-Keller adds: “There’s so much about stage combat and intimacy that looks really easy, because we do our jobs really really well. The people who come into those spaces to choreograph instances of heightened emotional turmoil have sensitivity training, have trauma-informed training, have choreographic training, and have experience beyond just looking at how to make something look violent or intense.”

A shared sentiment between the two was that their work goes beyond simply creating movement sequences. Sam says she thinks of herself as “an advocate for the actors,” and Kyrie says that “for a lot of people we’re check boxes, but we empower creators and creatives to tell risky narratives in a way that doesn’t end their careers.” Kyrie encourages any theatre professionals or companies who are interested in the work but are unsure where to start to simply ask questions. Both Kyrie Ellison-Keller and Sam Griffin remarked that the two mediums are commonly misunderstood and shied away from, but that the work is essential to the sustainable creation of bold theatre. 

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Join us for the first production of our 17th Season, LIFE SUCKS. by Aaron Posner (sort of adapted from Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekov) at the BNH Stage in Concord, NH on September 20, 21, and 22! Tickets are available here.

Thanks to Samantha Griffin and Kyrie Ellison-Keller for providing their insight and for the incredible work they do!

Technology and the Regression of Communication

It is well documented that the advancement of technology has ushered in a society that is more connected than it ever has been, yet (somehow) continues to regress in its ability to communicate truthfully.

“Today” we are told “we have knowledge at our fingertips that we could only dream of in generations past.” It is true; in 2018 you are mere keystrokes away from the extended works of William Shakespeare, a live stream of Earth from the International Space Station, or an instructional YouTube video on how to best prepare salmon steaks. We can FaceTime, voice chat, text message, SnapChat (take your pick) with people on the other side of the planet with next to no effort.

Objectively, these tools provided through technological advancement should only further enable us to communicate with our fellow human beings. Bring us closer together, not isolate us. The barriers of distance, time and language (thank you Rosetta stone!) have been torn down by iPhones and touch-screens, and yet YouTube comments and Twitter are inundated with hateful, poorly-spelled, half-baked excuses for thoughtful discourse.

At what point do we stop blaming the tools and start holding ourselves accountable for our behavior? The reality is, barriers of language and trust are only brought down through vulnerability and honesty, behaviors that are not made easier through the newest gadget or social media. In fact, there is a very real case to be made that the interconnected modern society is actively detrimental to the idea of being truthful and vulnerable.

By connecting society through cell phones and computer screens, people are more exposed than ever. An errant tweet from years past is now grounds for firing, not to mention the vicious witch-hunt that comes, fully enabled through social media. “Burn in hell, sinner!” is so much easier to tweet than it is to verbalize; to speak to someone’s face.

Brian Friel so perfectly illustrates in his play Translations how difficult it is to truthfully communicate with one another. We are so eager to throw up walls (be they technological, cultural or linguistic) to avoid the effort and discomfort that comes with a real human connection. “Say anything at all; I love the sound of your speech” says English Lieutenant Yolland to the local Irish woman Maire Catach. She is speaking Latin (completely unintelligible to the Lieutenant); desperately trying to communicate with him despite this seemingly unassailable barrier. And yet this young, earnest pair connect in a very real way, speaking in the universal tongues of smiles, laughs and sighs. No computers, no Google Translate, no cell phones. Just two people and the warm, Irish air of a summer night in 1833. Intent is everything, and this highlights the exasperatingly simple solution to this age-old problem:

Make an effort.

Society, it seems, has come to the conclusion that technological advancement enables our problems to be solved for us. The average first-world citizen has been given a free pass to check-out; intellectually as well as socially. We, as a society must recognize that the advancement of technology must be accompanied by a commensurate advancement and evolution of our intellectual and civic responsibilities. The technological marvels at our disposal are not crutches. They’re ladders. Let’s start using them.

~Jimmy Stewart

tKAPOW's production of Brian Friel's Translations runs September 28 to October 6, 2018 .

Saying Goodbye to Thebes

My first main stage production with theatre KAPOW was in September of 2013 when we mounted our first run of The Burial at Thebes. It is a beautiful contemporary adaptation of the Antigone play by the famous Irish poet, Seamus Heaney. It is an uncommon privilege in the theater world to come back to a script and perform the same roles over several years, however, this was the experience for myself and a handful of other actors. For the past 5 years we have returned to Thebes each September to perform for the freshman class at St. Anselm College to coincide with the these new students’ reading of Antigone. We have also performed on a few other occasions for high school students.

This September will be our last run of the show and our 7th time re-mounting the show. Many actors have performed in various roles over the years and just the other day in rehearsal we were attempting to count up the total number of people who have contributed to the production. For the past 5 years I have marked the coming of fall with not only my return to teaching and my children’s return to school but also with the mid-August email from Matt Cahoon, usually entitled “Return to Thebes” or most recently, “The Very Last Thebes (We think)”. Facebook and Instagram have faithfully popped up pictures of the original show photos and many other rehearsal pictures from over the years.

As I reflect on this, it occurs to me how much I will miss receiving Matt’s email and how sad it will be when we actually do put this production to rest. Like many greek tragedies, Antigone deals with the flaws and strengths that make us human and is full of timeless themes such as love, pride, power, morality, betrayal, loyalty and fear. Each year as we’ve return to the play, we’ve found new relevance in its content. For me, the poetry and themes never get stale. We have found connections to 9/11, the Boston Marathon Bombings and other news stories and political climates throughout the 5 years.

I have played Ismeme, sister of Antigone, each year as well as a chorus member. Each year I’ve found a new lens to see Ismene through and different ways to analyze her relationship with Antigone and her decision not to follow her sister's plan to go against the “laws of the land” and bury her brother. In her I have found a fierce love of her family, but a true fear that perhaps we’d call her tragic flaw. Fear is certainly an emotion we can all connect with and one that so often decides our decisions in life. Was Ismene wrong to deny her sister her support and to not, as she states, “defy the laws of the land”? This question of who was right, Creon or Antigone, has been an ongoing conversation for the company and one that is always discussed in our talk backs after each show. There have been many different opinions and insights over the years, but as Tom Hanks as Forest Gump says so eloquently when describing what life might mean, “maybe it’s a little of both.”

Ismene is spared by King Creon and we never really find out what happens to her. Fear may have been her flaw, but it wasn’t a fatal one for her, unlike most of the other characters in the play, so maybe she’s wiser than we thought. Last year one of the college students asked me what I thought happened to Ismeme at the end of the play.  Where did she go? I have thought about this a lot and my favorite imagining is that she fled far away to the seaside and lived out her days watching the tides in solitude. Perhaps never forgiving herself for living and her sister dying, but somehow finding peace in her escape from the tragedy at Thebes.

~Rachael Longo

(photos by Matthew Lomanno)

A Cliff's Edge

Then know this: where you are standing now

Is a cliff edge, and there’s a cold wind blowing.

~Tiresias, The Burial at Thebes

It is probably safe to assume that if you are reading this blog you are at least somewhat familiar with theatre KAPOW. It is probably equally as safe to assume that if you are somewhat familiar with theatre KAPOW you are aware of the company’s relationship with the Antigone. Every year for almost six years now, theatre KAPOW has produced The Burial at Thebes, a version of the Antigone, at St. Anselm College. So, when I recently heard an interview with Lucas Hnath, playwright of our current project, The Christians, in which he said, “the bones” of his play are the same as the Antigone, it definitely changed my perspective on the piece.

When we do The Burial at Thebes, we often discuss how much like a courtroom drama the show is. Creon and Antigone go back and forth and the chorus (and the audience) is swayed one way or the other. In The Christians, there is a similar courtroom dynamic. The tension from both pieces comes from the conviction of their characters. Characters on both sides are absolutely convinced they are right and are capable of articulating their sides really well.

While there are some similarities in the plots of the two plays, the real parallels between The Christians and Antigone are found in the relationships. The dynamics of the father/son relationship for example are very present in both pieces. As is the relationship between the leader and the elder. In Antigone the prophet Tiresias comes to Creon and warns him that that his actions will lead to disaster. Similarly in The Christians we see Elder Jay come to Pastor Paul and warn him about how his sermon may cause problems with the church community.


**As an aside, one of the greatest things about having a company of actors that work together frequently is that they bring every character and every relationship from previous shows to each new show. In this case, Peter Josephson who plays Creon in The Burial at Thebes and Elder Jay in The Christians has in those two roles played both the warned and the warner. It’s a detail that perhaps only the most diehard of tKAPOW fans will catch, but I think it adds a depth to the company’s work that wouldn’t exist if we worked with new actors for every show.**

While he may bristle at the comparison, but another similarity between the work of Lucas Hnath and Sophocles is an incredibly poetic efficiency in the use of language. At one point a musician friend of mine told me that in music the rests are just as important as the notes. That’s how it is with both The Christians and Antigone. Both plays are relatively short but so skillfully crafted that they land with more impact than most longer plays. The information communicated in a look or a breath is sometimes even more powerful than what is said aloud. In one scene of The Christians there is a page with only 17 words on it. It comes at a critical moment and the stakes are incredibly high. Many playwrights would overwrite this sequence, but Hnath lets it breathe. He lets the subtext dominate and allows the text to take a backseat. Like the composer using rests, Hnath expertly creates a piece where what he doesn’t write is as important as what he does.

I will be so curious to take part in conversations with audiences following The Christians. I recently had a conversation with Bryan Doerries, the Artistic Director of Theater of War Productions, who said that the basic tenet of their work is that the audience knows more than they do. tKAPOW truly has the most intelligent audiences members I have ever met so I certainly understand what Bryan is saying. I just can’t wait to hear from you all about your experience with The Christians. I will be particularly interested to speak with those of you who have seen our version of Antigone. The Christians absolutely stands on its own as a brilliant piece of dramatic literature, but the theatre nerd in me relishes the opportunity to consider this piece in relation to some of our other work. I really look forward to seeing you there and learning from everything that you observe.

~Matt Cahoon

The Christians by Lucan Hnath runs April 27 through May 5, 2018. More info here.

Names Read Aloud

"Tigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names."

-Japanese Proverb

The list of names on the 9/11 Memorial in New York City

I’m not giving anything away when I tell you that names play a major role in Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a post electric play.  

In act one we meet a band of travelers sitting around a campfire.  We come to learn that these people are living in a world after a cataclysmic event that has destroyed the electrical grid. Before too long a stranger enters and, after a few tense moments trying to ascertain whether he is friend or foe, the group pulls out their notebooks and reads lists of names of people that have gone missing.  It is clear early on that some of the names only remain on the lists as a way to remember them rather than out of any hope that they will be found.  

In act three, 75 years have passed and the notebooks have been replaced by a large tome from which the names are read aloud.  For a contemporary audience, this moment is clearly reminiscent of the annual tradition of reading the names of people who died on 9/11.  Washburn includes names that clearly indicate that their owners were from a variety of backgrounds.  The apocalypse didn’t discriminate.  

Street artist writes out the list of the victims
of the Sandy Hook shooting

Unfortunately these lists of names have become commonplace in our culture.  On December 16th, 2012, Broadway composer Jason Robert Brown wrote a song in response to the Sandy Hook school shooting which had taken place just two days earlier.  He entitled the song “Twenty-Six Names” and posted it along with the names and ages of everyone who died in that shooting on his website.  At the top of the page he wrote, “I will remember their names and I will sing them to a safer place.”  It’s a beautiful and haunting piece of music and I try to remember to listen to it every December 14th.  I’m ashamed to say sometimes it’s hard to remember to remember.  

Like many of us, last week I was glued to my TV watching the news about the horrific events at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.  On Thursday afternoon, just about 24 hours after the shooting, Broward County Sherriff Scott Israel started his press conference by reading the names of the victims of that senseless and still inexplicable act.  He was emphatic that their names be the focus and that their families be respected during this period of immense grief.  

The conversations that I had with my co-workers, my students, and my daughter following the Parkland shooting give me hope that this would not be an event that would fade so easily from our collective memory.  This time, I swore to myself, would be different.  This would be a call to action.  While there is certainly more that can be done, my first instinct was to seek out way to make a financial contribution to help make a difference.  That’s when I came across Sandy Hook Promise and I encourage you all to check them out.  Based in Newtown, Connecticut, Sandy Hook Promise’s intent is to honor all victims of gun violence by turning their tragedy into a moment of transformation by providing programs and practices that protect children from gun violence.  Sandy Hook Promise is absolutely taking the lead in training students and adults to know the signs of gun violence.

I was walking across the Pinkerton Academy campus this afternoon plotting out this blog post and how I was going to discuss the listing of names in Mr. Burns in context of current events when my phone buzzed signaling an incoming email.  The subject of the email was “Honoring Dylan” and it was written by a woman named Nicole Hockley whose six year-old son died in the massacre at Sandy Hook.  Even though I had made my donation last week, I knew that it was an automatically generated email sent from Sandy Hook Promise.  It’s a heartbreaking but inspiring email filled with pictures of Dylan who was just the absolute cutest kid you have ever seen.  Then I came to this passage which I share here in its entirety:

Dylan Hockley

After my precious Dylan was killed in the senseless violence at Sandy Hook Elementary, my other son Jake asked my husband and me not to say Dylan's name aloud. The reminder of how quickly and violently his best friend had been snatched away was too painful and raw.

Now, I sometimes hear Jake talking to Dylan, just chatting to his brother quietly while he plays. I stop, steel myself, allow myself to feel the anger that Jake can no longer play with his brother, and then I remember that this is Jake's way of moving forward, of keeping Dylan's memory alive.

I hate that this woman had to write this, but I love this sentiment.  Even after we are gone, our names will keep us alive in the memories of those we’ve left behind.  

These blog posts almost always end with some kind of pitch to come see our next show.  While I certainly want you all to come take part in the craziness that is Mr. Burns, a post electric play, what I really hope is that, in light of current events, we will all take a moment to remember the names of those lost.  Let’s write them down and read them aloud and, more importantly, let’s work everyday to make the world a better place.  

~Matt Cahoon

A great thing

Five years ago, our artistic director had an idea for a project. I thought, "Well, that could be a thing. Sure, lets try it." We put together a series of three plays to share staged readings of at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester. We wanted plays that were directly related to works in the Currier's collection or to special exhibitions at the museum. We invited Dr. Landis K. Magnuson, professor of theatre at Saint Anselm College, to lead a discussion with the audience after the play was read.

Sure, I like reading plays. That's what I have been doing all weekend. Reading plays that stimulate thought and conversation. I know it's a good play when I tell my husband he needs to read it when I am only at the end of the first act because I want to talk to someone about it. But who else likes reading plays as much as I do?

The first season we read Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still because the Currier had mounted an exhibition of Vietnam War photography. We read Edward Albee's The American Dream because the Currier had acquired a screen print by Robert Indiana, so named after he saw the premiere of that play. We read John Logan's Red because a 1967 painting (Untitled, Red Over Brown) by Mark Rothko is a favorite in the Currier's permanent collection. Each play was followed by a discussion with the audience. We launched the program and thought, "Will anyone else come?"

We're in our fifth season now of the ARTiculate Playreading Series, and it is always an absolute joy to have as many as 75 people join us in the auditorium at the Currier on a Sunday afternoon to listen to a play, to talk about the ideas in it, and to look at art. Doing a script as a reading really harnesses our focus (and the audience's) on the words of the playwright, and on the stories and ideas in the plays. It's funny, because stripping away design and the visual element of theatre (sets, lights, costumes) seems antithetical in a setting which celebrates the visual. An audience member told me recently that the play readings have become her favorite program at the Currier, and provide her a new lens through which to look at the art.

We'll be back at the Currier again this month to read Sight Unseen, another play by Donald Margulies. Among other things, the script raises questions about the value of art, the definition of art and who can be an artist, questions of cultural appropriation and gender politics, and truth/memory/ownership/identity. It is not uncommon to have to cut off the conversation after a reading because the galleries are about to close but folks are still talking. Now that's just a great thing, isn't it?

~ Carey Cahoon

Exploring story

In The Winter’s Tale Polixenes, King of Bohemia, muses on the relationship of art and nature:

“Nature is made better by no mean

But Nature makes that mean. So, over that art

Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. . . .
The art itself is nature.”

For its tenth season, theatre KAPOW is developing an original piece of theatre rooted in the legends, archetypes and arts of the First Peoples.

The approach to making theater through the archetypes and legends of indigenous peoples offers an opportunity to make an art that integrates layers of experience – of nature, the human, and the divine – and that tells a story that treats the natural, the human, and the divine as fluid categories, always in contact with one another.

Our artistic aim is to uncover the “art that nature makes,” and to get back to the essential or archetypal image, gesture, sound, and story.

We began our work during KAPOW’s annual Artists’ Retreat at Chanticleer Gardens. That week we told stories and read poems of the Yupik, Inuit, Haida, and Tlingit, examined artifacts, and work-shopped approaches to devising (with Michael Chekhov practitioner Jason Lambert) and mask work (with award-winning actress and director Leslie Pasternack). The great lesson of that week is that this approach yields immediate results. The quality and depth of the images in these stories – their resonance – is immediately clear. By the end of the Retreat we knew that we already had more than enough material (so of course we sought more).

This winter we’ve returned to our exploration for six workshops. We expanded our library of stories, images, and characters (especially to add stories of Coyote the Trickster), and began to experiment with approaches to storytelling through the exploration of images. We’ve been experimenting with “moving images.” Beginning with a picture, we play with ways to put it into motion, and through that enactment we can discover the possibilities of meaning that will allow us to make choices in story-telling. We have now glimpsed how the moving image becomes an archetypal gesture or essential action. As we do that work, more images and ideas for staging come to us. We’ve found that this approach has helped us quickly shed preconceptions about storytelling and staging to open up some ancient and elemental possibilities.

At the conclusion of our winter sessions we’ll have a collection of images and archetypal characters that will form the spine of the piece that we will begin to script through further workshops in March. In May we will begin the final phase of the devising – rehearsing in preparation for performance. the weekend of June 29th.

A Story That Cuts Like a Knife promises spirits, sacrifices, foolery, quests, and transformations and opens at the Derry Opera House on June 29th.