AntigoneNOW was created in lockdown in April 2020. When the COVID-19 pandemic closed the theatres, the work’s co-directors, Margaret Laurena Kemp and Sinéad Rushe, radically reimagined their originally planned stage production at University of California, Davis as a twenty-minute performance film that was rehearsed, directed, and created online. Devised from Sophocles’ Antigone, in Seamus Heaney’s translation, a cast of twelve women––each in isolation, each playing Antigone––filmed themselves on their mobile phones, iPads, and video cameras, together forming a chorus that portrays Antigone’s defiance of the law forbidding her to bury the body of her dead brother.
Choreographer Roger Ellis created ensemble movement, and sound designer Lex Kosanke composed an original sound score. During 2020–21, AntigoneNOW screened at UC Davis, Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre, Northwestern University’s Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts, London School of Sound, Michael Chekhov Association USA, Valparaiso University, Louisiana State University, SPE Media Festival and The International Online Theatre Festival 2021.
The following conversation is based on a talkback with the film’s creators that followed a screening on November 13, 2020, hosted at Northwestern University’s Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts.
Dassia N. Posner:
At the beginning of AntigoneNOW, you introduce the piece by saying that it features twelve actors, across time zones, in isolation, filming themselves on their personal devices. Immediately, as I watched, I started thinking about how to practice theatre differently. Could you talk about what it means to gather, to be together as collaborators in breath and time, but not in place? Has your understanding of place changed, and how did this affect your piece?
Margaret Laurena Kemp:
Place became layered in ways that extended beyond text or narrative. In rehearsals, we worked physically through sensations of the body. Since we were not there when the actors recorded the scenes, they had to start thinking about themselves and their bodies as a place in conversation with the actual material environment around them. Thinking about the body as a place was something that I was very conscious of.
Sinéad Rushe:
When making a live show, the sense of place is so tangible. We’re in a physical space, and we also conjure a fictional place together. In this process, by contrast, there is no place in the sense that we understand it traditionally in the theatre. Place is fragmented and dispersed across the world: me in my study in London, Margaret in her home in Sacramento, Roger in Chicago, and the actors in their countries and time zones. Despite this, the actors’ propositions in their film clips often had a strong, surprising evocation of the physical place they were in: a forest, a suburban street, or someone’s living room. So there was a multiplicity of place. We were all in some sense trapped in a place, but didn’t necessarily feel it was the right place or where we wanted to be. Suddenly place became charged with a sense of sadness and tragedy that was relevant for Antigone (fig. 1).
MLK:
We also started to think about domestic space; we had an all-female-identifying company, and we thought about what we do at home. There’s silence. Aloneness. There was something very tender about the actor who recorded herself just eating a meal. What do you do in your domestic space, and how? How does that interweave with a forest? So, we had an altered sensation of place and how it impacts us as individuals.
Roger Ellis:
There is something life- and community-affirming about the fact that despite all the external forces, this project was still able to go on. At the same time, we were all working from our own location, our own body, our own perspective, and our own experiences. Even though the actors were working in isolation, they also weren’t. They could see themselves represented in conversation with others, and the audience could make meaning out of disparate places that collided.
SR:
What a rehearsal process on the internet offers, in a new and interesting way, is privacy. It’s very different from a rehearsal room, which is a collective space where you are witnessed and coexist with others. Before receiving the actors’ films, we didn’t know what would arrive or what they were doing. And then we would receive an offer that was personal to their imagination. I liked that. It’s a different way of thinking about creativity for actors; it’s more akin to the visual artist.
DNP:
I found myself thinking that the pandemic itself has become a kind of place that isn’t geographically based. Your piece also raises interesting questions about hope and healing and finding meaning within trauma. There’s a particular resonance during the pandemic, with family members and friends lost, and Antigone losing her brother and not being able to bury him. Along with the isolation and loneliness, can you talk about meaning?
MLK:
When I began reading the various versions of the play, I thought about how Michael Brown was left lying out in the street of St. Louis for hours, with the authorities saying that no one could touch this body. This is directly in the text. By the time we started working on the play, it had a global resonance that reached into the experience of the African American and people-of-color community in a way we could not have anticipated. So thinking about burying the dead wasn’t metaphorical, but actually quite specific.
SR:
The stories of people not able to be in hospital with their loved ones or to gather to have a wake or funeral felt very present. Margaret and I each came into this project carrying a certain amount of personal grief, which was part of the reason we chose Antigone. The process of grappling with a big text with other artists that you appreciate is tremendously healing. There is something simple and ancient about the transformative power of art to help us understand and get through a difficult moment.
RE:
Creating spaces for contemplation on the internet is a radical act right now, when we’re having to develop new rituals. When you are engaged in art-making, you are contemplating and making meaning every day. I hope this points the way for more people to make contact with the materials of performance and with their own experience at a time when connection with others is fraught (fig. 2).
DNP:
One of the moments that struck me most was the image of all the Antigones together at windows at the same time. Early in the piece, the audience understands that there are multiple Antigones when they see one actor and then hear a different voice. It was very moving to have so many Antigones––to have everyone be Antigone––because it affirmed that in this isolation there is a broader community. Can you talk about the multiple casting and what it contributed to the piece?
MLK:
We discussed the troublesome fact that Antigone disappears in the last third of the play. So the play actually should be called Creon, because it is really about Creon. Nevertheless, it is called Antigone and Sinéad and I wanted to create a work about her. We cast the show before the pandemic, and we had already cast all women before we knew we were going to have only one character.
SR:
In its original conception, we discussed the idea of a terrible sorrow that is much bigger than one body can contain. We were already thinking we would have three or five Antigones: the traditional Greek chorus would be displaced by the protagonist, Antigone, and the chorus would be a single actor. Once we shifted to the digital arena with everyone in quarantine, that idea expanded naturally: there would be nothing but Antigone and her enormous grief at being unable to bury her brother. We honed the play down into this one simple thing, yet expanded it out in terms of its polyphonic exploration of character: we found a theatrical form for the emotional experience of the character rather than representing the character per se.
RE:
If everyone is the chorus, then the focus is on the harmony of the whole, which requires each actor to bring their perspective to the work. When you take away the ownership of one person as the originator-creator, everyone becomes an observer-participant in the experience together.
MLK:
These things are mirrored in our contemporary life. The coalition of women who gather because their sons have been murdered, for example. It is too much grief for one body to carry, so the women meet together––and move together––as a way of bearing it. In rehearsal, the actors explored how to carry grief by physicalizing it, feeling how heavy it is and what that does to the body. Witnessing that through Zoom was itself really moving.
RE:
We have an opportunity to reconsider how we are together on the internet, which can be a toxic, unseemly place of darkness. We can practice building community, supporting each other, amplifying each other’s voices, carrying each other’s grief, and lightening the load.
DNP:
We often think of an actor’s creative contribution as being the voice and body in space. Returning to the word polyphonic, there’s a wonderful use of polyphony in the soundscape of this piece in terms of voice, song, the sounds of nature, and the contrasting physicalities of the performers. I’m interested in hearing more about those things in the context of the actors’ engagement as makers (fig. 3).
MLK:
Our company was multigenerational. Chilean actress Verónica Díaz-Muñíz had experience with the disappeared, so she was already reaching beyond the personal to bring in a collective grief. She said, “If you really want me to explore how my culture experiences grief, it’s in silence. So I won’t be able to speak.” This sent her on a unique journey of exploration that was purely borne out of her own cultural expression.
SR:
Antigone seizes her agency in the play. No one wants her to have it––not Creon, not her sister—yet she activates it anyway. This wasn’t a conscious link, but over time the company became more confident in staking claim to their work. Often, we gave the cast a set-up to film, but sometimes they did something else. Then they began to watch and be inspired by each other’s footage. The actors were on a quest to contact the material through the multifaceted ways they proposed their shots, in terms of lighting, place, angle, and action. So we stopped giving them set-ups. I think we find our true path as an artist when we listen to our impulse: what touches me, and what do I really need to express to give truth to this material?
MLK:
It was challenging for them to realize that we were not going to tell them what to do. But once they embraced that, they expressed thankfulness and felt they grew from making choices out of their own impulses.
SR:
There was a beauty in receiving propositions that we were not in control of. The material became dispersed across a range of creative beings. I was also in an eight-hour time difference, so often I was either ahead of the process or behind. So I had to give up some control, which produced something else.
DNP:
Thinking about the actors’ agency to propose different moments, how did that process unfold in terms of suggesting or responding to the actors’ movement?
RE:
When we began this collaboration there was an existing shared vocabulary. My role primarily involved shaping choral moments—moments of coming together. Even though there was a seven-millisecond delay, even though everyone had different proximities to their cameras and different ideas of what a shape looked or felt like, we sought to make it all cohesive. Ultimately, we ended up with something that wasn’t completely in unison, but reflects the individuality of each performer. It was a way of saying that we don’t have to sacrifice our differences to be in harmony. We are not the same, yet we have a shared humanity. We’re tryingto be together but we’re not actually together. This creative process foregrounded horizontality and non-hierarchy, which allowed beautiful things to emerge.
MLK:
Early on, I said to Sinéad that we needed to attend to ensemble-making. During our Saturday rehearsals the whole company worked together, no matter where in the world they were, even if it was the middle of the night. It was the only time they were trying to do the same thing together, so it was important for the process.
RE:
It gave us a form to depart from and return to. There’s something powerful in the iterative process of coming back to the campfire to do the ritual again and again. That creates a strong texture of experience in the film.
DNP:
What you’re talking about here is prioritizing unity over unison. That’s powerful now, in a world in which this kind of separation is a new experience. Yet people across time zones could come together, and actors could engage with real physical materials and environments. Did you make other discoveries about what’s possible in this new kind of theatre space?
MLK:
In some ways, these collaborations have leveled the playing field. Before, they would only have been able to take place with the most well-funded institutions, but now two small theatres can collaborate in three countries and work together in ways I don’t think anybody would have imagined before.
SR:
I’m struck by the amount of shared conversation on virtual platforms about how to deal with this crisis, in which 200 artists who would never have been in the same live space are all on the same call. A crisis is good for creating new possibilities and a democratization of exchange. We’re in a moment that demands us to ask probing questions and to rethink our creativity.
RE:
It’s having the openness and willingness not to shoehorn what you’ve always done into a new context, but rather to adapt to the new context and have a role in shaping it. That takes flexibility, humility, and joy in not knowing.
MLK:
And a willingness to fail. I always tell my students: we could fail, and that’s okay.
DNP:
As you leap forward into the unknown of change, are there things that you’re excited to push further or that you have discovered from this process? How might explorations in the digital space impact your theatre-making or training in the future?
MLK:
I’m thinking about a deeper, more expansive role for intimacy training as part of what we offer to actors in every part of the discipline, because pedagogy is very siloed. As digital devices become more part of our lives, actual intimacy is something that’s going to need to be honed and trained, as a reminder of the humanity before the digital.
RE:
Even across virtual distance, we still sense that the two-dimensional image on the other side of the connection is a full human being. Even though we’re not physically touching each other, there is a level of intimacy that has to be cultivated.
SR:
There’s a different sensation of time on the internet. Sustained rhythm is hard to achieve, and the intensity is different. The charged, absorbed experience we seek in the theatre seems like such a precious thing now that we’ve lost it. Maybe our time with each other in these different formats will make us more conscious of this so we don’t take the contact and connection of the old days for granted.
DNP:
Yes. They’ll be the old new days.
A video extract from AntigoneNOW can be found on the ATHE Journals YouTube Channel at this link: https://youtu.be/oBXKybWva2Y.
Note
1. Margaret invited Sinéad as Granada Artist in Residence Spring 2020 at UC Davis to co-create AntigoneNOW. The performers were Mayuko Agari, Regina María Gutiérrez Bermúdez, Alessia Bothorel, Arianna Castillo, Sasha Chavez, Olivia Coca, Verónica Díaz-Muñíz, Yishan Hao, Aliya Hunter, Margarita Olmos, Arden Siadek, and Chloe Wasil, with additional vocals by Zhenglin Zhang.