Alone, Together: Finding Connection and Healing Through Cabaret

By Alexis Bensoussan

Flagler College’s Music Department is finding healing and connection through song with this year’s cabaret theme of, “Alone, Together.”

Kip Taisey, a theatre and music professor at Flagler and Key of Seas director, selected this year’s cabaret theme after being inspired by both the song, “Alone Together,” and a jazz series done by his mentor Louise Rose during the pandemic.

Rose did a show called “Alone Together” at Hermann’s Jazz Club in Canada during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Every Wednesday, she played piano and sang jazz and soul. The show was live-streamed to bring people together through music and keep the club running.

The song “Alone Together” is an old jazz standard by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, and Taisey found that the lyrics shared a beautiful message.

“The idea of being alone together is obviously an oxymoron, but also comforting,” Taisey said. “The lyric basically kind of brings everything back to this idea that we may be alone, we may feel alone, but we’ll always be alone together at least, right? So we can make it through the blinding rain, the storms that’ll come, and all the other metaphorical relationship snafus that may come into one’s life.”

Taisey picked this theme for this specific group of students because of their unique experience of dealing with a pandemic that was dividing the nation at such transformative years in their development.

However, Taisey did not want “Alone, Together” to be about COVID.

“I wanted it to be about human connection and what connects us more over than what divides us,” he said. “And I think it’s easy to focus on the negative and easy to focus on what divides us. I wanted this to focus on what connects us.”

The college’s Key of Seas a cappella and vocal ensemble focuses on the art form of cabaret and puts one on each year with a theme. The songs that make up the show are informed by the theme and its message.

This year, the structure has been divided up into four different sections: alone with one’s self, alone with an other, alone within a community and alone with the human experience. Each song fits into a category to share the different meanings of being alone together.

Sophia Massebeau, a senior English major, Theatre Arts minor and a member of Key of Seas, helped create the four sections after being inspired by hearing her fellow ensemble members’ takes on the theme.

“There were so many different ways that they interpreted that one theme of ‘Alone, Together,’ so I felt like it would be easier for an audience to understand the theme if it was broken up into different sections,” she said.

Though Massebeau’s favorite section is “alone with one’s self,” she is grateful that Key of Seas has helped her find a sense of community and belonging with others.

“Naturally, if I don’t have things planned, I’m gonna be like, ‘I’m gonna go home,’ you know? ‘I’m gonna be with myself.’ So I’m glad I have these things that like, get me out,” Massebeau said. “Cabaret has made a really tight knit community.”

Another one of Taisey’s students and a member of Key of Seas is Angelica Parisen, a senior Theatre Arts major and Music minor.

The section that resonates most with her is “alone with the human experience.”

“We as people are always living our lives alone, but just trying to make by by being around others, and trying our best to do this thing called life. And we get by by being around others, but it’s very easy to sometimes feel alone when you’re in a crowd of people,” Parisen said.

Cabaret is an art form that specifically focuses on connection with the audience. Parisen feels it is special to be able to use music and the theme of “Alone, Together” as a vessel for connection.

“I think that music is a really beautiful way that people in this world connect. It’s like a universal language in some ways,” Parisen said.

Though “Alone, Together” has songs of joy, it also has songs of loss. A reflection of life, this theme expresses being alone when facing loss.

Taisey has gone through over a decade of grief, first when he lost his mother, and then more recently when his father passed away in 2023. The moments where he felt most present during this time of grief was when he was with his daughters and while making music with his students.

“Moments with my daughters, I’m just there. When making music with the students, I am only there,” he said. “My mind is not anywhere else. My heart is not anywhere else. I am in that moment. And I crave those experiences. And I really am passionate and grateful for those experiences.”

For Taisey, he thought he would be stuck in his grief forever. But his daughters and music have helped him overcome his grief.

“They helped me cope. They helped me grow. They help teach me patience, they help teach me gratitude, they help teach me all the things that, you know, I think that one would hope for in a well lived life, in a full life,” he said.

As the students performed the entire cabaret show for their fall semester final exam, Taisey was overcome with emotion watching Parisen sing her song “Joy” by Louise Rose–a song he cherishes, as it was played at his mother’s funeral.

“[‘Joy’ is] just about how, when we see that there’s things on the horizon that aren’t, you know, great and amazing, we know that the sun’s always going to rise again,” said Parisen.

Healing has come full circle.

Going through grief and loss can bear a heavy weight, but for Flagler’s theatre and music programs, healing can be found through song.

“Alone, Together” runs Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 at 7 p.m. For tickets to the show, visit: https://www.givecampus.com/schools/FlaglerCollege/events/cabaret-2025-alone-together