Join Walt Whitman Initiative President Karen Karbiener for a conversation with Karin Coonrod, who has brought the many voices of Whitman’s multitudes to life with her extraordinary, interactive musical/theater piece “More or Less I Am.” Based on Whitman’s epic “Song of Myself,” “More or Less I Am” was conceived by Coonrod, who directs the international and site-experimental collective Compagnia de’ Colombari. Performed continuously from 2012 to this year, when Colombari released new virtual performances of the piece, “More or Less I Am” “vitalizes Whitman’s call to us, then and now, a declaration of interdependence, an awakening of the American consciousness.”
Karin Coonrod is a theater director and writer whose work has been seen and heard across the U.S. and around the world. Recently she directed More Or Less I Am (drawn from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”) virtually and on tour around NYC; The Merchant of Venice on tour in the USA and the Jewish Ghetto in Venice, Italy; Babette’s Feast in Portland , Maine and off-Broadway; her own texts&beheadings/ElizabethR at the Folger Theater in Washington DC and at BAM/Next Wave Fest. Founding Director of Compagnia de’ Colombari (2004-now), an international company which performed Strangers and Other Angels (medieval mystery plays re-imagined for the 21st century in the streets of Orvieto, Italy), she and the company launched a new tradition of theater in Orvieto. Coonrod is on the faculty of the Yale School of Drama.
Karen Karbiener is a Whitman scholar and teaches at New York University. Winner of the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and a Fulbright recipient, she has published widely on Whitman, including an edition of Leaves of Grass, two audiobooks on Whitman’s life and influence, a book introducing Whitman’s poetry to children, and a collaboration with Brian Selznick on a new edition of Whitman’s “Live Oak, with Moss” poems. Karbiener is the president and a founding member of the Walt Whitman Initiative, a 501c3 nonprofit organization serving as an organizing center for cultural activism and poetry-related events.
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