Arts Editor Grace Novarr attended Everything Changes, Nothing Is Lost, a dance-theater piece co-created by Celia Krefter (CC ‘22) and Kate Purdum (BC ‘22), featuring performances by Pimprenelle Behaeghel (BC ‘24), Thaleia Dasberg (BC ‘24), and Amelia Mason (BC ‘24). 

If you’ve thought to yourself recently that the ocean is having a cultural moment — billionaires trapped in submarines, orcas fighting back against boats — Celia Krefter (CC ‘22) and Kate Purdum (BC ‘22) are one step ahead of you. Back in January, the two Barnumbia theater community alumni pitched an idea to the Brick Aux, a small theater in Brooklyn: what if they created a show about the ocean, about the relationship between nature and human life, and how ecosystems can model better systems for humanity? This pitch eventually became Everything Changes, Nothing Is Lost, a dance-theatre “aquarium piece” which ran at the Brick Aux from June 14 to June 17. 

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a dance-theatre aquarium piece, but I arrived on time at the venue, which was hosted in the back room of the MoDrag, Brooklyn’s inaugural drag museum. After taking a second to appreciate the exhibit, we stepped into the performance space, decorated gorgeously with silver streamers, a projector beaming video of gurgling sea life, and a long-leafed plant (credited in the program as Yortoise, a snake plant borrowed from the Barnard Theatre Department). Pimprenelle Behaeghel (BC ‘24), one of the three performers, was onstage, moving about the room, riffing with the audience and generating charming pre-show ambiance. They employed some ocean life puns — “You can’t tune a fish!” — and showed off some pirouettes, a preview of the energy to come. Eventually, after all the rows of seats were full, the other two performers — Thaleia Dasberg and Amelia Mason (also BC ‘24) — came onstage, and the atmosphere switched from bantering fun to something more fluid and focused as the performance began. 

“Aquarium” ended up being an apt description for the vibe of Everything Changes, Nothing Is Lost, in terms of both content and form. The performance was a collage of brief vignettes told through dance, music, and occasionally text recited by the performers or played over speakers. As if we were standing in front of the glass at an aquarium exhibit, each vignette held the audience’s attention like a glimmering fish swimming by, up close. Behaeghel in blue, Dasberg in green, and Mason in red each portrayed aquatic figures, at times cohering like a school of fish, at times displaying fiercely individual personalities. The three dancers were all supremely talented, conveying individual emotion and the natural force of the ocean through the conduit of their bodies. The music flowed between atmospheric instrumentals and classics like “La Mer,” interspersed with sound bites of interviews, presumably with members of the production team, sharing their reflections on the ocean. One audio clip recounted the speaker’s persistent nightmare of a clash with the power of the ocean; another clip shared the speaker’s memories of going to the beach as a child and feeling the ocean waves rock them to sleep after they returned home to bed. 

At other times, the dancing paused as one of the performers recited a piece of text. Behaeghel read “L’infinito” by Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, a piece which ends with the lines “It is sweet to be shipwrecked in the sea.” Dasberg recited an article published in LiveScience on May 18, 2023: “Orcas have Sunk 3 Boats in Europe. But Why?” Excerpts from the comments section of the Marine Insight blog also made their way into the show.  

There were many joyful moments in Everything Changes, Nothing Is Lost: at times, the intimacy of the dancers suggested a love story, perhaps the unending love affair between humanity and the sea. Other moments were darker and wracked with pain, reminding us that this was a piece about a natural force that is being irreparably altered by a catastrophe of human making. If it’s a relationship, it is a toxic one — but perhaps, one that can be healed, or one in which salvation can be pulled from the wreck.

Watching the performance, I was struck by the thoughtfulness of the piece, a devised work about a universal concept that felt very touched by the personal. After the show, I asked co-directors Celia Krefter and Kate Purdum about their inspiration for the work, and how the piece came to be. Krefter, who was also the show’s main choreographer, shared that she had grown up on Cape Cod: “all of the beachy and nautical influences are very much a part of me.” She had spent the previous summer, right after graduating from Columbia, on Cape Cod, working on a few theater productions. Her working hours were at night, but by day, she went to the beach. Back in New York in the winter, she found that separation from the ocean was affecting her, and thus began to think about creating a show about the ocean. She added, “I’ve always been interested as an artist in exploring the relationship between nature and humanity. What if we made a piece exploring that? What if I made a piece saying: what if we tried to live by the ocean’s rules instead of trying to bend the ocean to our will?”

Purdum, also the show’s dramaturg, added that she had been influenced by Barnard theater faculty member Hana Worthen, whose work in performance studies is “post-humanist in its bent and looks at animals and nature and the broader question of nonhuman life on Earth.” Purdum has spent the past year working at the Columbia Climate School, which has been inspirational in its foregrounding of interdisciplinarity in the question of climate storytelling. According to Purdum, “we were both really interested in having a piece that was getting at issues of climate that didn’t necessarily have to be a Capital C Climate Change piece of theater.” 

In this aim, they were successful. The themes of climate change, where present in Everything Changes, Nothing Is Lost, were subtle, suggested through melancholic dance language. The production managed to envelope the question of climate catastrophe within the fold of the fluidity of time and nature. As opposed to framing climate change as a disruption, the piece positioned it as a development, a next chapter—a chapter in which resistance is possible. The righteous anger of the orcas, carried in Dasberg’s soft but commanding voice as she read from the news article, could represent hope for the ocean’s autonomy, its ability to save itself. (Purdum emphasized to Bwog that the orca article has been in the show since the first orca headline more than a month before—though the show’s run coincided with a viral Twitter moment for the orcas.)

After pitching the show to the Brick Aux in January, Purdum and Krefter set to work on putting it together. Krefter worked on developing a “choreographic language” for the piece, inspired by shows like Pina Bausch’s “Agua” at BAM. Meanwhile, Purdum found pieces of text and other sources that contributed to fleshing out the world of the show. Purdum shared that she was especially inspired by the genre of French oceanographic documentary, particularly the work of Jacques Cousteau. An episode from Cousteau’s “Mysteries of the Hidden Reefs” featured in the show. Purdum wanted to explore the irony of Cousteau’s work as a pioneer of oceanography, juxtaposed with his sometimes destructive methods, such as blowing up a reef in order to catalogue the species inside. 

Eventually, Krefter said, “Kate and I came together basically with a big pile of index cards compiling all the different bits and creatures of ocean things that belonged in the piece and basically put them all together and started figuring out what the order could be, figuring out a rough sketch of flow and scenes. And then we rehearsed for three and a half weeks—it was a short rehearsal process.” The cast rehearsed in 229 Milbank at Barnard, only moving to their performance space at the Brick Aux two days before the show opened.

The show was devised in collaboration with the cast, meaning that Dasberg, Behaeghel, and Mason came to the rehearsal process with their own ideas for choreography, texts, and ordering. Talia Hankin (CC ‘22) provided intimacy consulting and choreography for the show—her work was visible in the tenderness displayed between the dancers. Another Barnard student, rising junior Amelia Lang, joined the team as production designer. Lang’s vision of an underwater haven came through beautifully, and was designed with sustainability as a chief principle. The production’s materials were sourced mainly from Barnard’s supply of prop rentals, and from the organization Materials for the Arts, a creative reuse center that supplies free materials to NYC arts nonprofits. According to Purdum, this ethos of sustainability is an ingrained value in Barnard theater education. 

Extracurricular theater originating from the Barnard and Columbia community is not an infrequent phenomenon. Two summers ago, a group of Columbia students performed a musical in Central Park’s North Woods in August, getting ahead of the university’s official reopening of live, non-virtual theater. The Pale Fire Theater group, founded by Columbia and NYU students, staged two off-campus productions in the past year. Though Columbia’s performing arts groups are thriving and the Barnard Theater Department is robust, student artists are evidently continually in search of further opportunities to make art. I asked Krefter and Purdum what it was like to take a collegiate performing arts community off campus—what differed from putting on a show at Barnard, and how these two alumni are carrying their college experiences with them.

In many ways, one of the biggest privileges of being an undergraduate theater artist is the availability of space and lack of costs. Krefter shared that, “even at subsidized rates, rehearsal spaces are ten dollars an hour. We would have been down $1000 just for rehearsal space… We were so lucky to have [Barnard] space.” Thanks to Purdum’s continuing affiliation with the Barnard theater department, they were able to rehearse in Milbank for free. “To be able to use any space for free for performance projects is such a luxury, such an amazing thing to not take for granted that becomes so much more difficult in the postgrad world,” said Krefter. 

Purdum reflected that, because of the pandemic, her engagement with student theater was interrupted, and most of the shows she worked on were affiliated with Barnard’s theater department. Thus, for her there has been a longer gap since the last time she worked on a proper “student piece.” Nevertheless, she reflected that, though working on a production independently entails less access to official mentorship and advising, mentor figures from undergrad remain relevant, able to provide wisdom, resources, and support.

She discussed  how this support was manifested during the show’s run: “Both of us felt really supported by friends from the Barnard and Columbia sphere—current students, people who graduated with us or a few years ahead of us, faculty and staff. I think there were a handful of people who came to see the show who are current students but didn’t personally know anyone in the show; they had just heard about it from friends and knew it was happening. And we ended up selling out all the shows, in large part thanks to that really excellent community of people.” 

Krefter added, “With this type of work—less mainstream, edging on experimental, dance theater—it’s not a super commercially viable genre and it relies so much on new audiences finding excitement and a taste for the work. So it was really exciting for us that so many people came out to see it and were excited to be there.”

Everything Changes, Nothing Is Lost was certainly experimental, but it was far from alienating. My favorite moment in the show came toward the end, when the dancers pulled out bubble guns and turned on a spray of bubbles, filling the room with glistening spheres and activating a universal childhood joy that was palpable in the audience—we reached out our hands to touch the bubbles, feel them, and pop them. In that moment, the show managed to transport the wonder of underwater life into the theater, making tangible the beauty and the urgent impermanence of the natural world. 

Header via author’s iPhone

Performance shots via Jane Mok