Behind the Curtain: An Interview with Natalie Chinn about “The Cave"

The Cave dives deep into the idea of waking up to reality. What does that journey look like for your character?

In The Cave, the shadows are all the people know to be true. My character, The Child, gets curious and starts to question whether or not there’s more to life than what is in the cave. When she takes the step to venture outside of the cave, she discovers that there is in fact more to life. She experiences the sun, the light, the grass, and the warmth of the outside world. She in essence, wakes up to reality and finds that the shadows are only caused by the light and moving objects, and are not actually real. She finds too that the outside world is much less scary than she first believed, and is actually better than life in the cave.

How do you physically portray the tension between shadow and light, ignorance and truth?

Physically, when I’m portraying being in the cave and embodying the shadow side, there is more tension in the body and feeling like the environment is closing in on itself. It feels like the shadows and the cave are devolving the body into something more akin to a creature than a human. In contrast to the shadows, when The Child is experiencing the light, she’s more free and lifted. Everything feels lighter like I’m reaching up to the sunlight wanting to draw closer to it. It feels like the sun is rejuvenating the body and evolving it back to a more human state.

Similarly, with ignorance and truth, the other people in the cave represent the ignorance side while The Child represents the truth. With that, while embodying the truth, I’m thinking about being more direct and firm in my movements. Just like how the truth reveals and strips away anything that’s untrue or unneeded, after finding the truth The Child is more direct and stripped of the snake-likeness that the rest of the people in the cave are embodying.

Were there moments in rehearsal where the allegory felt especially relevant to our current world?

Yes, many times. One specific time was while we were creating the last scene where my character comes back to the cave to tell the others of the light but they don’t believe her. That scene seems very relevant to today in a world where it’s so easy to follow the masses and single out anyone who may oppose the mass thinking, even if it is the actual truth. Oftentimes we don’t question whether something is true or not for ourselves, but tend to believe whatever everyone else is. But sometimes that belief is not the truth and it’s hard to know whether your own questioning of the “truth” is valid, or if you’re actually the crazy one. The Child is brave enough to venture further into her questioning of the truth, and in this case, she finds that her questioning led her to finding the actual truth.

What has surprised you most about embodying a philosophical concept through dance?

It’s been interesting creating movement that will portray such a philosophical concept in a way that will be relatively easy for the audience to understand. There are so many thoughts and concepts that the allegory points to that it’s impossible to portray every single one in just 15 minutes. It’s been really fun and challenging to explore different perspectives during each rehearsal. With having so many different ideas to pull from, I can draw inspiration from a few ideas during each rehearsal, and then change them up in the next. It really gives me an idea of what ideas can be more easily read through the movement, and which ideas may not be the best suited to be told in this particular moment.

Learn more about The Cave and get tickets to the next Ballet 5:8 production at ballet58.org.