Welcome to CAMPFIRE

THE LIVE IMMERSIVE SHOW: CAMPFIRE is a multisensory dance experience at the end of the world. Co-creators and performers Tony Bordonaro and Ingrid Kapteyn originally presented CAMPFIRE in an office space still under construction in Shanghai, China in June 2017. Recently reimagined for The Tank’s black box theater in NYC with an original two-part scent sculpture, CAMPFIRE engages performers and audiences in a collective experience akin to gathering around a campfire.

THE FILM: At the intersection of narrative and art film, CAMPFIRE uses physical storytelling to mine the relationship between two strangers whose paths cross unexpectedly in a dangerous post-apocalyptic city. The refugees’ desperate fight to survive challenges them – and us, the viewers – to question how we define humanity. The film will offer the same intimacy as the live experience while engaging wider audiences in its arresting and at times brutal test of the limits of human empathy.

Trailer for CAMPFIRE premiere in Shanghai, China © June 2017 

About the Artists

TONY BORDONARO is a choreographer, director, and performer based in New York. Tony was a founding member of the all-male repertory company 10 Hairy Legs and has also performed with the companies Douglas DUNN & Dancers and the Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company. Most notably, Tony performed in Punchdrunk’s hit show Sleep No More in New York and Shanghai and has worked with the company extensively on immersive events. In 2017, he choreographed and performed in the Oscars® winning student film Opera of Cruelty. His love for physical storytelling is the driving force behind his solo work and collaborations like Passport, a performance art piece with Guggenheim fellow Robert Whitman, and CAMPFIRE with Ingrid Kapteyn. He holds a BFA in Dance Performance/Choreography from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts where he currently teaches contemporary dance and improvisation. www.tonybordonaro.com @TonyBordonaro

INGRID KAPTEYN is a lifetime student of listening who currently swings eight roles in Sleep No More NYC and who recently spent fourteen months building and performing a new version of Sleep No More in Shanghai. While in China she also conceived, directed, and performed two independent installations including CAMPFIRE and later POP, a bubble-bursting romp through a gutted building filled with red balloons. She came home in December 2017 to immerse in the imagination of New York City and take lots of dance and acting classes. In New York, Ingrid has performed extensively with Brian Brooks, Danielle Russo, The Metropolitan Opera, and Sleep No More NYC, and she was an actor in Martha Clarke and Alfred Uhry’s Angel Reapers at The Signature Theatre in 2016 along with Martha’s GOD’S FOOL workshop in 2018. She has taught internationally, including for Juilliard Global Ventures/Nord Anglia Education (in Shanghai, Dubai, Switzerland, and Qatar), FRESH Dance Intensive, UNC: School of the Arts, and Princeton and Bucknell Universities, and she served for a year as Assistant to the Artistic Director of Springboard Danse Montréal. She cofounded HEWMAN, an NYC-based collective that aims to expand the potential for empathy between dance performers and audiences, in January 2014 (www.hewmancollective.com). Ingrid studied ballet near her home in Deerfield, Massachusetts before graduating from Juilliard’s BFA program with The Martha Hill Prize in May 2013.

CAMPFIRE in the Press

Preview by Emeri Fetzer in The Dance Enthusiast

Interview by Kathryn Yu in No Proscenium 

Tony in No Proscenium: “One day while we were wandering through Shanghai’s contemporary Power Station of Art museum and discussing art, I saw a futuristic exhibition of a spacecraft. I said to Ingrid, “What are you inspired to make?” She said, “Something about empathy.” At the time I was watching many sci-fi movies and what I loved most was the way the genre was able to ask provocative questions about human nature…The relationship of our two characters, their desires and objectives, became clear after months of late night rehearsals and existential discussions about whether empathy and compassion are innate characteristics of human beings or learned behaviors.”