Unity over Unison: Creating AntigoneNOW in Lockdown:

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). [End Page E-29]

Fig. 1.

Rehearsal shot of Olivia Coca in AntigoneNOW.

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...