Repeat repeat: Returns of performance in the work of Lone Twin Theatre

Abstract

Within contemporary performance and dance practices repetition emerges as an important structural and constitutive means. Repetition used in speech, movement and in structure challenges temporalities of experience and explores notions such as exhaustion, difference through repetition, becoming and the possibility of finitude, amongst others. Specifically, Lone Twin Theatre's creative process uses repetition to create a distinct performance vocabulary, which structures its choreographic practice. The present article explores repetition as generative of ways of making, experiencing and writing about performance work. It argues that performances that use repetition invite, in some cases, a repetitive encounter with the performance beyond the live event. This article uses Daniel Hit By A Train to explore Lone Twin Theatre's choreographed repetitions and returns as well as the ways in which performance remains, to use Rebecca Schneider's term, in memory and writing. In giving an account of the re-performances of the live event two kinds of writing are used here: writing as a space within which the performance event takes place again and again, and writing that theorizes the experience of performance in a useful way. The 'choreographic', in this case, is dealt with as the graphein/ writing of the choros/dance, which takes place during the creative process as the repetition in movement, speech and structures, and beyond the performance event itself as repetition's return.