INTERVIEW: The Kilbanes and their modern take on an Ovid classic
Photo: The Kilbanes consists of Kate Kilbane and Dan Moses, and their new work is called Weightless. Photo courtesy of Pamela Gentile / Provided by Vivacity Media Group with permission.
The Kilbanes consists of the married songwriting duo of Kate Kilbane and Dan Moses. They have been making rock music for years, and during this global pandemic, they decided to branch out and try something more theatrical. The result of their efforts is Weightless, a new rock musical that previously played venues in New York City and San Francisco, and is now being streamed on demand through May 30, thanks to the Women’s Project Theater.
“The piece is streaming through WP’s website, so, of course, folks can go there and grab a ticket and watch anytime from their couch and their pajamas,” Kilbane said in a recent phone interview. “It’s a donation-based performance, so in that respect it mimics a lot of the way we’ve been able to take in content during this time. But obviously one of the things that we’re really proud of and excited about is we really wanted it to feel live, to feel like a part-concert, part-theatrical event, which is what it is. And so we hope that audiences will really experience that as well.”
Kilbane said she and Moses originally thought of themselves solely as a rock band. They admitted to being highly theatrical in their presentation, but still a rock band. They would play blues clubs, bars and other music venues, and throughout those early years, they consistently came back to the power of story and narrative. Kilbane described herself as a “collector of stories and a lover of stories.”
“So, when I was working for material for our next record, one of the things that I ended up rereading was Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” she said. “I should come clean and admit that I’m the child of two English professors, so I come by my voracious reading habits really honestly. And I was reading the Metamorphoses again and all these wonderful stories of transformation.”
In Ovid’s classic text, Kilbane came across the tale of Procne and Philomela. These two characters leapt off the page and thrilled her and Moses, and they almost instantly thought there was a project to be created based on the ancient story. Director Tamilla Woodward helped them fine-tune the idea.
“There’s a moment in the middle of the story when Philomela has been fighting to get to her sister [Procne],” Kilbane said. “Tereus has cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling her sister the things that he’s done to her, and Philomela is locked in this shed. She can no longer speak, and then she remembers that she can weave. She decides to weave the story of what happened to her and find a way to get it to her sister, so this idea of a woman who will not be silenced, who will continue to tell her story, find ways of reaching the world, was incredibly powerful to us.”
In this theatrical-rockified mashup, Kilbane plays Procne and rocks a bass guitar, while Lila Blue plays Philomela. Joshua Pollock is Tereus and on guitar, while Kofy Brown is Iris and provides percussion. Moses is on keyboards and vocals for the performance, and he is joined by Dan Harris on percussion.
“The second element of the story that we really loved was, at the end, these two women turn into birds,” Kilbane said. “We delighted in the total theatrical impossibility of that and thought we have no idea how we could accomplish this physically, but that transformation seemed ripe for music. We thought we can do this musically, so we took that on as a challenge. That’s how we came to fall in love with the story and spent a long time working on telling it.”
Kilbane and Moses have a deeply collaborative, enmeshed process of creativity. They will often plot a story together, looking with one set of eyes at the big moments in the narrative. They decide on a basic skeleton for the piece, and then they branch off individually to work on specific songs.
“I think sitting in a quiet room and waiting for the muse in the walls to whisper is an activity that is easier done by oneself,” Kilbane said. “So we get the germs of our ideas for songs alone, but we bring them to one another in a very new, very raw and partial state. And then we finish all of our songs together, so one of us will come to the other and say, ‘I think I’ve got something.’ And then Dan will sit at the piano. I’ll sing, or I’ll sit at the bass, some combination, and we’ll work together and develop and revise and re-harmonize and flesh out. So by the end of it, it’s impossible to remember who did what.”
This process works like a charm — under normal circumstances. But, of course, there is a global pandemic that has disrupted the creative process for many artists and performers. Throughout the past 14 months, Kilbane and Moses were able to quarantine together because they are married, but when they wanted to include other cast members and crew in the process, they needed to ensure the COVID protocols were in place and being respected.
“The most obvious thing that we did is we filmed the entire thing outside,” Moses said. “That choice was made very deliberately, both in terms of story but also for obvious COVID compliance reasons. The other thing we did was we had an amazing set designer, David Reynoso. We sort of turned the fact that we all had to stay 6 feet apart from each other into a feature in a way. The set is designed specifically with beautiful lines painted on the ground. Everyone has their space that they occupy, but it feels connected in a really beautiful way. We just had to lean into it as best we could.”
And now audience members can see the result of their creativity thanks to the on-demand performance on WP Theater’s website.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Weightless, a theatrical concert film by the Kilbanes and directed by Tamilla Woodard, is available on demand through May 30 on the Women’s Project Theater website. Click here for more information and tickets.
