campbell mccormack
In my chest, music becomes a feeling more than anything else. It swells like my breath and it pounds like my heart and it speeds through my body like signals from the brain. Music has a shape. All shapes have a melody. Music is like a racetrack or a water droplet or something else with a cyclical lifespan — it is always unmaking and rebecoming and moving, above all else. I prefer to feel things before I see them, when inhabiting the world of my body. In comes a bassline, and so my hips cut through the air and my head tips toward my shoulder. I don’t have time to see the shapes I’m making because all of my energy is directed toward feeling them. I like to close my eyes. Music is how I breathe.
I am made of music. Imagine the sound a newborn baby makes: wailing, squalling, screeching like a windstorm that has been trapped within a tiny ribcage and is now forcing its way into the sky through the canyon of the throat. That sound is a current, carving through the rock of the body. What is crying if not a precursor to song? I came into the world with music on my tongue. We all did.
Music gives me power in a way few other things do. When my body fails me in the mirror, when my bones feel birdlike and hollow, when my intellect dries up like wine grapes and my lungs shrivel and my blood curdles, I still have music. Deep within me — beneath my belly and my heart, tucked safely between my uterus and the softness of my stomach — there lies a song. It is always there, because music is made of breath, music is the act of touching noise to air, which means that music is physical. If I am breathing, I can sing, too.
Poetry — and therefore lyrics — gives voice to the things that prose collapses under. Love confessions, inner battles, the mind’s childish follies; they can all be wrapped neatly in verse and made charmingly abstract. The poet appreciates their own writing when no one else can, but when they lay that poetry atop the great green meadow of song, it becomes universal. My most personal thoughts are made ubiquitous when I set them before the temple of melody. Music — whether it’s the songs perched high atop the Billboard charts, or those that will never leave my bedroom — belongs to all of us. Music is made of feeling. It is public property because it is a language that everyone speaks.
The shape of every song I’ve ever heard is tied to a breath that I have taken. Music is a conduit of memory stronger than smell or taste or touch, because it envelops all of them and becomes the verb to feel. Close your eyes and listen to the radio. Pay attention. Slowly, life stands up around you. I’m in the car. I’m driving down the Schuylkill Expressway going east, toward the rapidly rising sun. Then, like the thousand shining crystals of an ancient chandelier, the tinkling melody of “touch tank” by quinnie filters through the stale speakers of my Subaru Outback.
My eyes are still open and seeing nothing but the sedan in front of me, but my body is deep within the ocean of memory, wrapping my chest in the rip current of the past. In the instant of darkness that is my blinking, I am pulled below the surface: Virginia sunshine coats my skin, coarse astroturf beneath my back, and I hear Sydney and Kylie beside me, cawing like crows with back-breaking laughter. It is 2022, and I am learning how to breathe in a body that doesn’t reject language. I am learning how to write. Poetry has crawled into my hands like a creature rejected by its mother, seeking nothing but the nearest gutter rushing with warm blood. I am privileged to be that gutter. I am learning how to bend words to my will.
All around me, as though her voice is leaking from the very sky, quinnie sings: You took my breath away, so now I can’t suck in my stomach around you anymore.
I open my eyes. The blink has ended, my vision restored, but the memory remains roosting upon my fourth rib, beside my heart. As an artist, I am nothing but the pile of scraps left over from all that I’ve been before, which means that I am everything.
If I, the artist, am quilt-like, then so too must be my work. Inspiration often finds me in the body of another person’s art. Pieces of dialogue. Bodies moving in sequence. A breath, framed in an image. The swell of many instruments. All of it is like discarded bits of string that are thrown around inside of my chest and become so tangled that they create an entirely new textile.
Think of a coin, sparkling up at you from the sidewalk. Think of fragments of light, tossed about by evening time sun. There is goodness everywhere we look. There are pieces of the world tattooed on the inner lining of my soul, the place that my thoughts rise up from, the little bason of song at the bottom of my spine. See them there, swirling about in the whirlpool shape of my personal melody:
Appendix A.
Dickinson, Emily. “I dwell in Possibility — // A fairer House than Prose —” (pub. 1919)
Fornes, Maria Irene. “Life is theatre. Theatre is life. If we’re showing what life is, can be, we must do theatre.” (1978)
Hozier-Byrne, Andrew. “Was it that or just the act of making noise that brought you joy?” (2019)
MacLaughlin, Nina. “If you have voice, cry out.” (2023)
Mt. Joy (band). “When I loved, it didn’t have to be a language // No written rules or commandments // It was enough to be alive.” (2018)
Sappho (poet). “And I am greener than grass.” (c. 600 BCE)
It is possible that these, the words of others, paint a more complete picture of my person than a photograph or the smooth surface of a mirror.
And what is art if not the product of its context? My art, born from fragmented moments and words, is cradled by all the years that surrounded me and them. To me, the context a piece of art is held in is just as integral as the medium, or the message. History becomes art. History becomes me. Through my art, I intend — above, not all, but many things — to churn history into a frothy mess that grabs present day attention. We must not forget. In the act of remembering our past, we are laying an offering at the altar of the future.
History resonates with my humanity. I read of all the havoc that my forebearers wrought and feel as though I might live another day. As a young person in a world as tumultuous as this one, I anchor myself with history. I remind myself: we have survived before, and we will survive again. History, with its many wars and deaths and failures, keeps the flame of my hope alive. History brims with lessons unlearned and, in my opinion, with possibility. Just because something has already happened doesn’t mean we understand the machine of its moments. Art is but one medium through which we may begin to make sense of the past. So I am history — I am the spaces between Sappho’s fragments, unfailingly alive and breathing, and I feel obligated to make art that might allow others to become history as well.
Appendix B.
Schwartz, Selby Wynn. “There is the hope of becoming in all our forms and genres.” (2022)
The hope of becoming. The reassurance that there is always more to be, that goodness thrives. The anticipation of the dawn, which comes again and again and remains a comfort. That is what I want to inspire. I want to remind my audiences that the world remains good in many ways, and it can still become better. Light lives on, always.
This is not to say I never fall into the trap of pessimism; I often need reminders of the goodness that surrounds me, gentle nudges toward the warmth of hope. Take, for example, the windowsill in front of my desk. The place where I write is sacred to me, and so I cushion it with mementos of Schwartz’s hope of becoming: Emily Dickenson, stylized as a saint, her image wrapped around a tall, thin candle. A picture, myself and my siblings this past summer, underneath a sign that cries See the magic of yeast! Three different jars of matches. My tarot deck. Scrawled on post-it notes and taped to the window, three mantras: don’t let it become wasted time; inhale love, exhale love; and it will all turn out.
These small things, trinkets, become art in the context of my life. They are my little sunrises, the hope of the morning twisted into objects. They become the context of my art, which then becomes the art itself. Like melody, memory, and shape, my art and my life relate cyclically to one another — when flattened out, they make a mosaic, the sharp edges of its many pieces smothered with clay.
There is a tradition in Japanese ceramic art called kintsugi, in which broken pottery is repaired and its cracks are lacquered with gold. Like patches on an old jacket or darning on a favorite sock, kintsugi is a form of visible mending, which treats fractures as part of an artwork’s history. What a thought — that the places where we were broken can be made more beautiful than when they were whole. I think often about where my past would be visible on the surface of my body, were I to be clay spun wildly into shape.
Appendix C.
Clavicle, left. Toward the center, an upward ridge. A place of unevenness. (2021)
Forehead, left. A neat, vertical scar. (2011)
My injuries, aside from the above, have left few marks on my person. This is not to say that I am unhurt: beneath the layers of skin and fat and muscle and organ lie my joints, tied to one another by faulty ligaments. Moving fluidly within the cage of my body, they often get lost. My knees are like trains derailed. My right scapula is permanently homeless. I crackle like a fire and soak up atmospheric pressure like a masochistic sponge.
All of this disappears when I see myself in a mirror. My surface is relatively unblemished, aside from the acne and self-doubt necessitated by adolescence, and I dress it up in skirts that go on forever and dangly earrings and the word whimsy. It is easy to see myself and think that my constant pain is nothing but a trick of the light. If my disability cannot leave through the door, it must escape through a window, and thusly it finds a home in my art, the version of myself that has been turned inside out and had its entrails made visible.
My body is more than just disabled: despite my transness, it is unfailingly female and so it bleeds but it bleeds wrong — too hard and too much and for far too long. That song-place cries out every month. My femininity fits me badly: my great-grandmother’s Polish physique, her average height and wide hips, makes me bottom-heavy. I sink into the swirl of my back rolls and cellulite and I try to love it like I love art but I can’t. When does the artist become art themself? Do they ever?
As posited earlier by the playwright Maria Irene Fornes, I believe that “Theatre is life.” As an actor, I am not escaping out of my body when I step onstage, but rather waking up within my own skin. I become aware of my every breath. I relearn the taste of certain sounds. I breathe newly. The theatre that I write and direct is meant to imitate life, but not in a naturalistic way. I don’t hope to recreate images or characters exactly as they might exist beyond the page or stage — instead, I want to inspire a feeling in my audience and my performers and myself that is reminiscent of the searing realness of being alive. When we feel hugely, we are shocked back into our bodies. There is no dissociating, when we are truly affected — only tingles up our spines and small earthquakes in our lungs.
Appendix D.
Vuong, Ocean. “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” (2019)
The cascade of feeling that is theatre forces me to live inside my pain. I cannot be anywhere but exactly where I am. In that, theatre has taught me how to be at peace with my body. It is has soothed my broken places with gold and mended me visibly, and it has forced me to acknowledge the history of myself and my skin. Again, there is history, and so there is light.
Making art is where I feel the most at home. Art makes me warm. It makes me soft. Like a stern matriarch, it keeps me honest. In my honesty, I am able to exhale and then I make my realest art.
The art, too, exhales. The art is alive. My art is personal and specific: I write songs for myself, direct scenes as I have imagined them, conjure the images that affect me most, and I consider it a beautiful coincidence when an audience resonates with my artistic vision. It is with specificity that I inspire the deepest feeling, because when art is specific its resonance is more than coincidental. My art is purposeful. It is made purposefully, by me and by my context. All of that together — the personality, the specificity, the purpose, the context — fosters connection between art and artist and audience.
Appendix E.
McCormack, Campbell. “Theatre is connection.” (2025)
First, there is the making: a deeply personal, living thing wherein something is born. Making can be many things: first, it is me, alone in my bedroom with my many window trinkets to guide me, writing. Often I am writing music. Sometimes dialogue or prose. From my bedroom, I take the seedling of my idea and plant it in the minds of friends and mentors and fellow makers and have it returned to me after it has blossomed in the fields of their imaginations. Their beautiful, tender hands take my art and begin shaping it into something that exists beyond me. Those blossoms are planted anew as actors, musicians, words on a page. They are tucked into bouquets and given to the audience as memories.
The making within high school theatre changed me as a person — not because it awoke an earthshaking talent within me, or because I dropped out to be on Broadway, but rather because of the people it exposed me to. By pure coincidence, I landed in an auditorium next to my best friends. I encountered teachers who would impact me on a fundamental level. It is trust, implicit within my theatre education, that has fostered these essential connections.
Educational theatre gave me not only the opportunity but also the confidence to exist within my own body. It taught me that I am more than just trans, or disabled, or teenaged, but that I am all of those things and also an artist. It gave me the chance to make theatre of my own, rather than just play-act inside the art of others. As one of my classmates so rightly put it, we’re making art for real, not just for practice. What a privilege that is — to have an adult look beyond the smear of my youth and see me as an artist in my own right, not just someone with artistic potential.
After the making is the performance itself. The connection between art and audience blurs existing lines that divide the public and the private, making the deeply personal experience of viewing art into something that is shared: amidst the audience itself and between artist and observer. Theatre is inherently communal. In particular, the theatre that I make — personal as it may be! — is intended for an audience of everyone, because it is based on feeling, rather than a moral or a message or something otherwise condescending. We all feel. We can’t help it. We’re human. And so, my theatre is human, also.
Yes, the feelings I try to cultivate are specific. Again and again, I return to Schwartz’s hope of becoming, because it crystalizes exactly what I reach for with my art. I am — I aspire to be — an optimist. Even when it betrays me. Even when it leaves me vulnerable to the realities that surround me. I refuse to be bogged down by the possibility (or existence) of the negative — when shadows loom behind me, when pain wrings out my body, I turn to those bits of dawn that litter the windowsill before my desk: Dickinson’s flat-faced image, See the magic of yeast!, inhale love, exhale love. I remind myself that the world is vast and so am I. When an audience has my art in front of them, I hope they are reminded of that, too.
I want many things for my future. I want to be an educator and continue passing down the torch that lights the flame of hope. I want to foster connection through artmaking. I want to always strive toward and reach for the hope of becoming, because such a thing is kept alive by being slightly out of reach. I suppose I won’t ever become, but I will never cease hoping. I will never cease to be surprised by the sunrise.
Future aside, the essence of theatre forces me to live in this exact moment. Not only in my body, but in the whole world, good and bad. Theatre asks me to come at that world from an angle of love. Theatre lives deep within my body, swimming in that sacred pool of song. Theatre tells me to keep a light on. I can call it hope, or sunshine, connection, or melody, or love, but the truth is this: theatre is all of those things. Cyclical, made of memory and music and touched by every other artist who has ever brushed past my life, theatre has made me who I am, which is everything. It is the light.