Story & Lesson Highlights with Ingrid Kapteyn of Manhattan

We’re looking forward to introducing you to Ingrid Kapteyn. Check out our conversation below.

Hi Ingrid, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re thrilled to learn more about your journey, values and what you are currently working on. Let’s start with an ice breaker: What are you most proud of building — that nobody sees?
I think a lot about how what we have in this life (for as long as we’re lucky to live), that underlies all material and metaphysical possessions, is time. Time is what allows us to be in a place, to be in a process, to be. Change in a 3D body is impossible without time. And in an ecosystem that lacks the resources to do anything but rush dance artists through rapid, product-oriented rehearsal weeks, I revel in making time for making. Against all odds, mystifying even ourselves, my creative partner and I have shaped our lives around a commitment to long-form rehearsal periods that birth new dance-theater creations over the course of 9-12+ months.

Trees take a long time to grow, and no one questions the complex, interconnected matrices of events that need to occur over years in order for that growth to happen. No one rushes a pregnant woman to finish her gestation in fewer than nine months. I wish it were similarly second nature to understand that creating a work of art which is worth the time of the watcher can take that long as well. It is a process that is as much about surrendering, receiving, and waiting as it is about showing up consistently with the necessary nutrients.

I feel unbelievably fortunate to have found a collaborator who is equally willing to orient their life to the time process takes, even when we have little to show for our work in the gaps between premieres and lead much less secure and less explicable lifestyles than convention expects. While we are in process, the doubt and the belief spar with equal force. Some days, justifying all the time we’re taking feels impossible. And yet we keep taking it. And when we are finally able to release a piece into performance, we feel the returns of all that time invested. But only we know how much time we took. Hopefully it shows in the work, but no one can really see the agonizingly many minutes and hours and days and weeks and months (plus the years of training) that we spent toiling. Any one who makes anything (artist or not) would say the same, I realize, but still it makes me proud. Making time. All the invisible time.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I am an international performer and creative collaborator with a BFA in Dance from Juilliard. After over a decade of freelancing (in concert dance, immersive theater, and off-Broadway), in the last year I have shifted the balance of my days to focus nearly full-time on my company, Welcome to Campfire. My co-director Tony Bordonaro and I have been creating and producing dystopian danceplays in Shanghai, New York, London, and Chicago for eight years. I continue to perform and direct for other people as well as teach, but my day-to-day most regularly consists of operating a dance-theater company in New York City. The intimacy, porousness, and productivity of collaboration are my soul food.

Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. What part of you has served its purpose and must now be released?
I hope to release the parts of me that show up to work to prove something. What if I gave my work no responsibility to reflect back to me that I’m competent, that I’m knowledgeable, that I’m unusual, that I’m skilled at compromise or communication, or whatever self-identification my ego comes up with on any given day. What if, at any given moment, I just bring to my work what the work needs?

When did you last change your mind about something important?
I change my mind all the time. To date, I have chosen to orient to creative process through collaboration, because it is in the space between selves that I believe ideas have the most potential to grow more complex and more powerful than any individual person could manifest on their own. I co-direct my dance-theater company with one other person, Tony. That means that my will and my taste are constantly colliding with his. In that friction, in that fire of collision, creation happens out of compromise. I love it. I think synthesizing a third path forward is a pinnacle of human intelligence and a rich mode of discovery.

Recently I’ve become aware of a physical sensation when my brain is restructuring around someone else’s idea. In a strange way I think I may be addicted to the chemical reaction. It feels like I use myself as a garden or something – decomposing a bunch of matter around a seed in order to create the burst of energy necessary to grow a new one. There strikes me as something distinctly feminine about this availability to concede and conceive. My next project, though, is to be sensitive to how much I am “using” myself, or allowing myself to be used. Changing my mind is not the only option in a collision. When do I let my idea persist? When do I compromise my love of compromise and NOT compromise?! I’ve been changing my mind about how quickly I’m willing to change my mind in service of the work.

Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
When I read the writing of AI, my blood pressure and body temperature rise. My heart races. I know it’s a hot and perhaps already tired topic, but my whole being revolts at how swiftly people whose vision and work ethic I respect bite the bait of ease. How much our society values convenience rattles me.

In my life, the moments that have offered true and lasting fulfillment – the kind that gives me hope and energy to keep going, keep trying – are when I have experienced the fruits of hard work over time. When I have accomplished something through labor and effort, I feel a pleasure, a pride, and a peace that are unparalleled by the feelings that come from any other kind of arrival or acquisition.

So, when an algorithm can take over an otherwise creative process like writing and rob children of the opportunity to even learn what it feels like to accomplish their own creative work, I imagine the doom of a world where there is no incentive left to work hard because no one has even had a chance to experience that unique joy. We could completely lose track of what we’re missing, lured on by the promise of effortlessness. I take the argument perhaps too quickly to the extreme. But it’s all or nothing for me. I don’t see how you can draw a line partway in. Really smart and sensitive people who are dear to me have already given up their autonomy in small ways, and it only continues to erode into an overwhelmingly bland soup of sameness. I’d much prefer a creation be original and organic than “good”. And I can FEEL the difference.

Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. How do you know when you’re out of your depth?
When I start defending myself.

Oh, to just admit ignorance. To not fear appearing ignorant. There is so much that I will never know – much, much more than I will ever know. Why not embrace it?

I try. Being a performer and maker to me is sort of like being a professional not-knower. I experience such fluidity of self – constantly shaping to the size of the container, morphing to the moment, experiencing the infinite flux of choices to be made in real time.

As a dancer, or a shape-shifter, or a human, or just me, I sometimes wonder: Have I built a profession around not knowing myself? To save myself the shame of not knowing? To be able to acknowledge and accommodate, authentically, the constancy of change? To dignify my unwillingness or inability to fix myself for long to specific definitions or boundaries? To keep space open for growth beyond my current understanding of myself?

I’m partly just playing with semantics for my overly analytical brain, but also I think folks seem a lot more unchanging to the people who know them than we do to ourselves. Do you?

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