Lone Twin (UK)
The ANTI 2011 programme included a number of events that either targeted or implicated children, and as suggested above, all events apart from Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke were evaluated by the school kids who made up the jury of the Children’s Choice Awards. One work made specifically for younger audiences is Lone Twin’s Beastie, an encounter with an anomalous other: part Big Foot, part affable biped horse-muppet (the animatronic costume was designed by Darryl Worbey Studios in London), part imaginary friend concretised and unleashed into the urban everyday. Drawing on Gary Winters and Gregg Whelan’s experiences as writers for children’s television, Beastie has the characteristic immediacy and playfulness of much of Lone Twin’s work, its apparently joyous simplicity unfolding gently into greater complexities – related to imagination, desire, belief, identity, friendship and temporary communities constellating around stories.
The opening sequence of Beastie,
rarely witnessed by adults, occurs here in a closed room in the Kultuuriareena
youth centre. At each performance a small invited group of children become
active participants in the naming of this particular manifestation of the
creature. They propose certain attributes and narrative details, and help
assemble the costumed figure from inert body parts laid out in dismembered form
on a grid outline on the floor. In one performance in Kuopio, for example, it
is decided that ‘Otsu’ has been hatched from an egg on Jupiter, and is still a
youngster at 700 years old. Mistaking the egg for a football, another creature
had kicked it through space to land on earth near the youth centre. Once the
performer is ensconced within the full costume, an exquisitely effective and mysterious
transformation occurs at the moment when the seated figure’s head is lifted and
its aquamarine eyes blink open for the first time to countenance those who are
there. Although the process of construction has been witnessed from the outset,
and the creature’s artifice is wholly apparent – everyone knows it’s a
performer inside a costume - at this moment of initial animation the
impulse/desire to ‘believe’ the illusion seems to be compelling for the adults
almost as much as it is for the children. From this point the creature is seen
in a complex way that is reminiscent of a ‘both-and’ mode of spectatorship in
forms such as Bunraku: a pulse between immersion in a wide-eyed illusionist
credibility and a knowing distance that fully acknowledges manipulation and
artifice.
Beastie leads the children out into the streets of
Kuopio in search of a similar creature, a ‘friend’ on the loose and concealed
somewhere within the city, and they accompany him through comic chance
encounters with passers-by and moments of predictably unpredictable animal
behaviour (e.g. pissing out of an elbow). Finally, the friend is located and
the two waving creatures disappear into the distance, arm-in-arm. For the
children, perhaps this simple open-ended narrative trajectory seeds the
possibility of future encounters, other creatures, other forms of befriendable
life happily at large in their city. In
the course of the festival they have already had a fleeting encounter with
another anomalously shaggy ‘outsider’, Aaron Williamson’s ‘marooned wildman’, a
pathetic, abandoned figure glimpsed and heard in the undergrowth of
Vasikkaasaari Island, a short boat trip from the shoreline out into Lake
Kallavesi. The city teems with others, it seems, in need of our help.
Photo by Pekka Mäkinen 2011
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