Inside the Dystopian Fever Dream of Chalk Outline Portal

Created by artists with roots in immersive theater experiences like Sleep No More, Campfire’s Chalk Outline Portal transforms Theaterlab into a disorienting dystopian game room where dance, audience participation, and sensory overload collide in a fever dream of play, violence, intimacy, and control.

This Friday night, I was invited to enter a different world. One where time seemed to move differently, where the sensorial input of one moment overlapped with another. I think this is what they mean by “time closing in on itself.” Welcome to Campfire, the storytelling platform of Ingrid Kapteyn and Tony Bordonaro, which curates dystopian dance plays and transformed Theaterlab’s white box into a dystopian game room with their work Chalk Outline Portal.

I like to watch shows with limited information about the artists or their work because it allows the work itself to create meaning rather than what I read about it online. As I walked in, a tall guy with beautiful orange hair and a pink tutu dress stopped me in my tracks. He had a microphone and an exuberant presence as he asked me a few questions before allowing me to move to my seat. From that moment, I knew this was going to be immersive as fuck, and I was in for a ride.

The room consisted of the two main artists blindfolded with white bandages, orienting themselves by touching their surroundings, including the front row audience members, with their hands. A live DJ vibed behind a turntable in the back, and three blocks each displayed two game consoles. It is hard to even chronologically recollect how the show started, continued, or ended because the shifts in tone were so sudden, surprising, and disorienting.

One moment, the performers connected with the audience in a club-like setting. The next, audience members were participating in a sexy rendition of the Macarena. Then came recollections of traumatic experiences in a psychiatric-like setting, sexy garbage bags, morphing into a lion, joyfully playing games, and outlining each other with imaginary chalk while Ingrid and Tony chased one another from one corner of the room to the other.

What inspired me most, as a theater maker and choreographer, was how these artists layered elements of one world onto another, fragmenting and collaging sound, projection, visual, verbal, and kinesthetic cues. For example, we heard the sound of a lion before it shifted into a psychedelic soundscape followed by one of my favorite dance duets of the night.

Tony, snaking his head similarly to a wild animal, took me by surprise as he reached for Ingrid’s neck like a lion going in for the kill. Ingrid crossed the entire space, melting in and out of the floor as if gravity did not exist. This creative duo captured a sense of chase, play, violence, and the taming of the animalistic within moments of intimacy and sex, using dance and kinesthetic storytelling in an intelligent and skillful way.

This show, and the lion duet in particular, is a great example of how to showcase mastery and skill as a dancer and choreographer while also acknowledging the power of perception and the story unfolding right in front of the spectator. As I watched Ingrid and Tony dance together, using specific points of contact to move from one place to another, crawling under, on top of, and through a jungle of body parts, I was in awe of their strong yet responsive listening and their highly attuned awareness of one another. I could imagine the joy, laughter, patience, and sense of play they must have experienced throughout the rehearsal process while figuring out what limb went where and when.

There were a few scenes where audience members sitting next to the game consoles, now referred to as Players 1 through 6, were asked to “bring Tony and Ingrid home.” The players took their job seriously, pressing buttons with excitement as their actions were projected into the space alongside audible directions: left, right, forward, back. Tony and Ingrid became passive game characters being controlled by us, the audience.

It gave me an uncanny feeling, being in charge of someone else’s body. Sometimes the two characters would bump into a chair, a wall, or even an audience member, and the crowd would laugh while I felt a sense of sadness and frustration, noticing an overlap between this “game” and the world we actually live in.

Because of the high amount of audience participation, both before and during the show, and because the production took so many unexpected turns in tone and setting, I would have appreciated a verbal disclaimer about audience participation and our role within the experience. A clearer setup could have made the space feel more transparent and safe. At times, I felt pressured to participate in movements or tasks that made me uncomfortable because I was afraid of upsetting one of the performers and being publicly shamed for it.

That said, I do want to give a shoutout to our amazing host in the pink tutu dress and his sense of comedy. He genuinely seemed interested in connecting with audience members individually, and he skillfully used our personal stories to make fun with us rather than of us during the pre-show.

Another thing I absolutely adored was the way they included all of their collaborators in the storytelling process, acknowledging the host, the DJ, and even the camera operator, whose footage appeared to be projected live onto the wall behind the dancers. This is a great example of “yes, and”-ing your given circumstances and elevating the work through that acknowledgment.

I love experimental theater. I loved the way they fragmented this theatrical reality and then wove it back together. However, there were moments when it became difficult to follow the central point or plot of the show. I found myself craving more articulation of the ideas behind the world they created.

What were the rules of this world? What was the relationship between these characters? How did they develop over time? How did time itself function here? Why did these characters dance, and when could they speak? What was the significance of outlining each other with chalk, and how did it connect to the game and the title of the show? When were the dancers aware of the audience and each other, and when were they not? What role did the audience ultimately play? What made the ending different from the beginning?

All in all, I left this dystopian and magical experience with a sense of awe, inspiration, creativity, and hope. Ingrid and Tony created a world where dance and theater collide while showcasing authenticity, play, lightness, humor, vulnerability, bravery, skill, craftsmanship, and passion for both movement and storytelling.

I am excited to see more of their beautifully curated work, and I would highly recommend joining them on their creative journey. I cannot wait to see where they go next.