A Bit of Shenanigans and a Deep Purpose: Sibyl Kempson on Following the Creative Impulse
Photo: Matt Murphy
Award-winning playwright and writer Sibyl Kempson sheds some light onto her creative process, discussing how to work with what you’ve got while still stretching yourself to the limits of imagination and curiosity, how to intuitively uncover new narrative structures, and find the fun, the joy, and the buoyancy of creating. She also talks about COVID-19 and the potential opportunity to reclaim what has been taken away from is, if we are willing to do so.
Join us Sibyl and In the Balance for Rejuvenate, Create, Connect: A Virtual Retreat for Artists and Creatives in Dark Times June 6th & 7th, where Sibyl will be presenting a workshop her two-part workshop: Writing on the Right Side of the Brain.
Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn how to get out of your own way and “let your true creative agenda come forth, hold sway, and have its say!”
Meet This Episode's Guest
Sibyl Kempson
Sibyl Kempson began making her own performances at Little Theater and Dixon Place at the turn of the millennium. Her plays have been presented in the United States, Germany, and Norway. She launched the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. in 2015 at the Martin E. Segal Center at the City University of New York. The company’s inaugural production, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in NYC the same year.
12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten Heavens, a 3-year cycle of rituals for the Whitney Museum of American Art began on the Vernal Equinox in March 2016, and recurred on every Solstice and Equinox through December 2018. Other recent projects include true pearl, a new opera with David Lang for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and Sasquatch Rituals at The Kitchen in NYC, hailed by critic Helen Shaw as her “favorite show of the decade” in Vulture. Both premiered in 2018.
Kempson is the recipient of a 2018 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for an American Playwright at Mid-Career, for writers working indisputably at the highest level of achievement, specifically honoring "her fine craft, intertextual approach, and her body of work including Crime or Emergency and Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag." She is also a 2014 USA Artists Rockefeller Fellow, a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow and an alumnus of New Dramatists.
She holds an MFA in Playwriting from CUNY Brooklyn College, where she studied under the instigation of Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney, and a BA in Theater from Bennington College.
Photo: Maria Baranova
Other areas of concentrated study include: tracking and wilderness living skills, along with Earth-honoring philosophy and healing methods, both at the Tracker School in the Pine Barrens of her home state of New Jersey, and with her mentor Donna Brickwood. She also studies practical animism, ritual, and ancestral healing with psychotherapist Daniel Foor, and natural leadership with the Eight Shields organization.
Since 2014 she has been an investigator for the Bigfoot Field Research Organization (BFRO) for the Northeast Pennsylvania Region, documenting eyewitness sightings and participating in expeditions in New York State, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
Her plays are published by 53rd State Press, PLAY: Journal of Plays, and Performance & Art Journal (PAJ).
She teaches experimental performance writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and at the Victoria College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne.