Lone Twin Research Articles

REVIEW OF LAUREL RICHARDSON'S "LONE TWIN: A TRUE STORY OF LOSS AND FOUND"

This is a review of Laurel Richardson’s book, Lone Twin: A True Story of Loss and Found. The book is powerful – a must-read. Laurel’s stories, questions, knowings, and unknowings offer an insightful narrative around her personal and significant relationships, eliciting an evocative opportunity for self-reflection. It will leave you feeling a strong sense of connectedness; possibly to something missing or perhaps something found?

Here we are, let’s go: Dartington College of Arts, 14 June 1997, Studio 11, 6.30 pm. A revision of Lone Twin’s On Everest

This article borrows the structure and content of a performance text (Lone Twin?s On Everest) and, through the intervention of a parallel discursive text, seeks to explore how the performance, developed on Dartington's Performance Writing BA (Hons) in 1997, functions as a response to, and a reflection of, the pedagogic environment encouraged by Dartington in the late 1990s. The article focuses on how textual and contextual practices were facilitated at Dartington, how ideas of writing, performance and performativity were shared and taught on Performance Writing and how Dartington?s interdisciplinary approach to pedagogy finds an expression in Lone Twin?s continuing collaborative practice.

The performance ‘apparatus’: performance and its documentation as ecological practice

ABSTRACTThe essay re-evaluates the relationship between performance and its documentation – particularly in the form of performance scores – as a means of exploring human–non-human, and specifically human–water, interrelations. It does so through reflecting on the interplay between performance and its documentation in my ongoing project, Guddling About, which, I argue, builds on materialist and ecological tendencies in other practices and practitioners that use performance scores, such as Fluxus and Lone Twin. Using Karen Barad’s concept of the ‘apparatus’, I consider the interweaving and reconfiguring of performance and performance documentation as a paradigm that recognises and troubles the paradoxes of performance as an ecological practice, such as the inescapability of human subjectivity and the extent of more-than-human agency. The ‘apparatus’ of Guddling About, I suggest, allows space for (human) accountability in fostering attentiveness and flexibility, while acknowledging and surrendering to the unknowability and unruliness of the universe.

Beyond the Blank Canvas: Lone Twin’s The Boat Project

This article examines Lone Twin’s The Boat Project (funded through the Olympiad’s Artists Taking the Lead scheme), which built a racing yacht from donated wood and gathered stories – both poignant and banal – of the donations along the way. Emphasizing the work’s focus on participation, the article argues that The Boat Project unsettles some of the official Games discourse around achievement and value, most notably in its celebration of the mundane as well as the extraordinary.

Making routes: Relational journeys in contemporary performance

ABSTRACTExploring an emerging trend in contemporary theatre and performance to utilize and respond to journeys and travel, this article focuses on Hitch by Kieran Hurley and The Boat Project by Lone Twin. As with many journey-based performances, these examples share a concern with meeting people and building meaningful relationships with different communities. As such, they are understood within the context of Nicolas Bourriaud's influential model of ‘relational aesthetics’, which was developed towards the end of the twentieth century. Responding to an increasingly globalized version of modernity, Bourriaud has since responded to shifts in the field of relational art, tracing its evolution as ‘a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities’ that connects to an expanded, global relational realm. This article argues that a wide range of contemporary performance practice uses the journey form as a conduit for a new type of social engagement with space and place that develops the concerns of the site-based relational artworks and performances of the 1990s.

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

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.

Twin Olympians: The Hard Science and the Lives Behind It / Research Summaries: Twin Study of Cardiometabolic Risk Factors; Postnatal Brain Maturation; Parental Responses to Rearing Triplets; Chimaeric Twins / General Interest: Lone Soccer Twin; Identical Triplet Birth; Life and Work of Twin Geoffrey D. Langlands; The Lone Twin

A look at scientific studies of sports performance is informative in view of the 2012 Olympic games in London. The athletic life histories of selected twin competitors supplement the scientific data. Reviews of recent twin studies concerning cardiometabolic risk factors, postnatal brain maturation, parental responses to rearing triplets, and the birth of an unusual chimaeric twin pair are presented. General interest items include the separate careers of twin soccer players, an unexpected identical triplet birth, the interesting life of twin Geoffrey D. Langlands, and the Lone Twin Boat Project.

Practising Participation A conversation with Lone Twin

In the discourses of art criticism and performance theory today, the word ‘participation’, like its antecedent from the 1980s, ‘postmodernism’, can sometimes appear to say so much that it means vir...

Breathing, Lying, Sitting, Standing, and Walking: Finland's ANTI Festival

Site-specific artwork developed out of the art world’s reaction against selfcontained modernist sculpture as a means of acknowledging the factors that are extraneous to the work of art, including environment, history, memory, and geography. Performance, which appeared in the art world at around the same time as site-specific art, was also concerned with reintroducing the extraneous into the hermeneutic environment of modern art through the agency of the artist’s body. Although site-specific art and performance share an intellectual and ontological genesis, there has been very little attempt to link them conceptually until recently. I propose to explore the implications of site for the performing body and vice versa in order to make a case for the centrality of the body as carrier, interpreter, and transformer of the meaning of the site through an examination of work made for the ANTI Festival, an annual event of site-specific time-based performance art that takes place in Kuopio, Finland. The ANTI Festival (Anti means “gift” in Finnish) is a unique festival that is premised upon site-specific performance art made outside of traditional institutions and spaces. Audience members who come specifically to attend the ANTI Festival become performers themselves as they traipse through the city and its environs in the wake of the performing artists. At the same time, the site marks the body of the artist in some way, so that there is a mutual exchange between the artist and the site. The first ANTI Festival, sponsored by the Arts Council of North Savo, took place in 2002. This festival was such a success that it has subsequently been held annually, with the most recent festival taking place in late September 2009. The ANTI Contemporary Art Festival was founded in 2005 and the organization of the festival transferred to the association. That same year, a seminar entitled Talks and Deeds, was held in April outside of the festival. Talks and Deeds was subsequently incorporated into the festival program itself, which has allowed for presentations by academics and artists to expand upon the theme of the festival that year. Although sited in Kuopio, which is about four hours north of Helsinki, the ANTI Festival has become an international event. The ANTI Festival was originally co-directed by Johanna Tuukkanen, a dancer and resident of Kuopio, and Erkki Soininen, a visual artist based in Helsinki. In 2007, Gregg Whelan replaced Soininen as co-artistic director. In the past three years, Whelan, a member of the successful British duo Lone Twin,

Walking, the Western and the tumbleweed

Abstract Notes [1] Statement by Gregg Whelan (Anti-Festival director and co-funding director of performance collective Lone Twin) at the Anti-Festival on Contemporary Art, Kuopio Finland, 27 September 2007. [2] This is the case in the John Wayne films Cowboys, Rio Bravo, Shane, and The Searchers, and in Sergio Leone's spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. [3] From sites such as www.CuriousCountryCreations.com (e.g. ‘Tumbleweeds for sale! Small: $18.99, Medium $24.99, Large $41.99), or they can be bought from www.realtumbleweeds.com and www.prairietumbleweedfarm.com, based in Kansas and Utah.

The Potential of the End(ing): Anticipated Nostalgia in To the Dogs by Lone Twin

The following article examines the functions and the effects of the process of setting an ending. The performance To the Dogs by the English performance duo Lone Twin stages its end(ing) by interlinking two phenomena which have often been separated in theatre criticism: the theatrical event – seen as something happening in the present – and narrative – considered as something belonging to the past. In To the Dogs the event is narrativized by the performers as it goes along, providing it with endings on the level of rhetoric, content and time structure. In this process the performance is transformed into a myth, in which the event is anticipated as a closed story, even though it is still about to happen. This future-poetics of the end(ing), in which a collective event, paradoxically, is being charged in advance with nostalgia, illustrates the affective force of a (narrative) ending as performance. It does so not only in a negative, restrictive sense of closing the event as story, but also in a positive, enabling sense: To the Dogs raises the question of how far the discourse about an event regarded as unique and inaccessible implies a narrative quality. The process of setting a future ending is revealed as being more than a generator of narrative closure; this essay aims to perform the fact that it is also an enabling moment of opening the seemingly closed event as myth into a time afterwards.

Palimpsest or Potential Space? Finding a Vocabulary for Site-Specific Performance

A recent preoccupation with space and place has drawn together theorists and workers in a wide range of disciplines, including human geographers, archaeologists, architects, cartographers, psychoanalysts, sociologists, poets, novelists – and theatre practitioners. There are therefore a range of lenses, a range of vocabularies, through which site-specific theatre and performance can be considered. In this article, Cathy Turner focuses on Mike Pearson's descriptions of site-specific work, particularly his involvement with archaeology, before proposing that we might find a useful, complementary vocabulary within psychoanalytic theories of object relations. She refers to performances by Lone Twin and to her own work with site-specific company Wrights & Sites, who created An Exeter Mis-Guide and A Courtauld Mis-Guide in 2003. Cathy Turner has produced a number of site-specific ‘mis-guided walks’, tours, and performances in her work with Wrights & Sites since 1998. She recently completed a Research Fellowship at Exeter University, investigating writing processes in contemporary performance, including site-specific work. She is now a Teaching Fellow at Exeter University and an Associate Lecturer at Dartington College of Arts.

Comments on and Extracts from: The Death of a Twin: Mourning and Anniversary Reactions — Fragments of 10 years of Self-Analysis by George Engel

Only recently has the special bereavement associated with the loss of a twin been generally recognised. With the notable exception of Joan Woodward, few have written on the subject. We, therefore, offer a shortened version of a paper written nearly 30 years ago. George Engel was himself a lone twin as well as being an eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in the United States. The length of the paper precludes reprinting the totality but we hope readers will be encouraged to seek out the original published in The International Journal of Psycho-analysis in 1975, Vol 56 part 1, 23-40.

Comments on and extracts from: the death of a twin: mourning and anniversary reactions - fragments of 10 years of self-analysis by George Engel.

Only recently has the special bereavement associated with the loss of a twin been generally recognised. With the notable exception of Joan Woodward, few have written on the subject. We, therefore, offer a shortened version of a paper written nearly 30 years ago. George Engel was himself a lone twin as well as being an eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in the United States. The length of the paper precludes reprinting the totality but we hope readers will be encouraged to seek out the original published in The International Journal of Psycho-analysis in 1975, Vol 56 part 1, 23-40.

The Lone Twin: Understanding Twin Bereavement and Loss

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