“AntiCone” is a contemporary version of the Antigone story told through the language of physical theater, dance, clowning, and traffic cones. The piece began as an open exploration of what stories traffic cones want to reveal and then became, as a response to newly-elected 45’s “wall” rhetoric, a story about boundaries. It also became a physical embodiment of our shared inner turmoil during the months before and after the election. It felt like everyone was wrestling on the inside. We decided to turn that into dance. And because we are inherently hopeful beings, we wanted to give audiences of people a choice and an outlet at the end of it all.

Our source material, Sophocles’s “Antigone,” is a story about the boundaries that we build, that protect us, and that destroy us. Our fight with our own boundaries and the boundaries other people set up sometimes takes a whole lifetime, and very often it becomes so physically and psychologically tragic that it almost seems funny. Blending silent film hijinks with moments of great dramatic intensity felt absolutely right for our mostly wordless retelling.

What also felt right was involving the audience from the start. Audience members entered the theater to the soundscape of a construction site, and were asked to show their “permits.” They were then handed a cone (to be used later in wall construction). The final audience member to enter was Antigone, who was run through a slew of ridiculous requests before she was handed a bright orange vest and a STOP/SLOW sign. Thus began her job building the wall against the country she had just come from, under the command of newly-elected Creon.

Among the few words in the piece was a message chalked onto the set near the end, by an actor out of character: “Do YOU have a choice?” It was meant for the audience, who sat looking on as Antigone struggled. She had at this point become a part of the wall. The actor sat with the audience for a moment, watching Antigone with them… then got up and kicked down a cone. And without fail, every night, one by one, audience members stood up and kicked or threw a cone out of the wall. Until no cones were left, and Antigone was freed.

We had no alternate ending. The play relied on this act of layered audience defiance every night.