Meet Ingrid Kapteyn

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ingrid Kapteyn a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ingrid, thank you so much for opening up with us about some important, but sometimes personal topics. One that really matters to us is overcoming Imposter Syndrome because we’ve seen how so many people are held back in life because of this and so we’d really appreciate hearing about how you overcame Imposter Syndrome.

I find that I feel free and grounded to stand by and for my work when I have created it in collaboration with people I trust. When we have continued to show up to process with enough persistence and openness for the work to take on an identity of its own, the idea starts telling us what it needs instead of the other way around. We transition from pushing the boulder up the hill to running down the hill after it, trying to keep up with it. I discover in that shift a kind of liberty from responsibility. The idea exists in the space between us. We are responsible for caring for it and responding to its every need, but it doesn’t belong to any one of us; by the time we share it, it’s up to us to step back, get out of its way, and let it live. Somewhere in all that practice and belief is a release from self – and so a release, fleeting as it may be, from self-doubt.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

At the moment, I am the Resident Director of Sleep No More NYC, Punchdrunk’s genre-defining hit immersive show that takes place on five floors of an abandoned hotel. I also co-direct Welcome to Campfire, a story-making platform which has been producing danceplays about lovers at the end of the world since 2017, in Shanghai, London, and New York. I am a dancer, an actor, a teaching artist. I want to be everything. I want to be nothing so that I can be a vessel for everything.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Self-awareness. You have to know what you’re doing (even when you think you’re doing nothing) before you can change what you’re doing. Honesty. If you can quiet down enough to really listen and react truthfully to each moment, you can trust that each link in the chain of events you’re threading will hold under pressure. Articulation. If you can express precisely what you mean (verbally, physically, or otherwise) in a way that anyone could understand, you always have a chance of feeling seen – and helping others feel seen. These are some of my most endearing, enduring, and endless practices.

What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?

Once when I was in high school and feeling particularly disillusioned by the impossible example set by the highest-achieving seniors who worked so hard they hardly slept, my father – who was a faculty member and dean at the school – encouraged me to try to get B’s instead of A’s. He understood my extracurricular devotion to dance, as well as my perfectionism, and he wanted to make it clear to me even back then that prioritizing quality of life and honoring my passion were much more important than being the best. I can’t say it was in my make-up to fully comply by curbing my ambition, but from that moment on, it became my choice how hard I worked. I could no longer be a victim to an unfairly demanding system. That is just one of innumerably many and long-lasting ways my parents threw open the doors of life for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.welcometocampfire.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ingridmkapteyn/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ingrid-kapteyn-b9950b7b/

Image Credits

1. Stephen Dobbie
2. Stephen Dobbie
3. Stephen Dobbie
4. Stephen Dobbie
5. Nir Arieli
6. Nir Arieli