If the purpose of art is to make us whole, then why is so much of it about our inability to connect with one another? It’s a paradox that may – or may not – lie at the heart of Last Act of Rebellion, Lone Twin’s performance at the Howard Assembly Rooms, which closed this year’s Leeds Compass Festival.
A celebration, a marker moneyed with possibility, Last Act of Rebellion was billed as “dances for men in their mid-forties who know no better,” but could just as easily have been a series of cover versions, with all the unevenness that implies. After 20 years of collaborating and performing together, Lone Twin’s Gary Winters and Gregg Whelan are certainly not going to suddenly make things easy. In the past they have filled rivers with their tears, built a boat from cast-off pieces of wood, and made near impossible journeys with only self-imposed geometric map coordinates to guide them. (1)
Last Act of Rebellion begins with an act of watching: Gregg looks on as Gary coils and snakes to the driving frug of Low’s Just Make It Stop. “I never know what to think about dancing. It’s like I never got the email,” Gregg confesses to the audience in a Brechtian aside which drives at the deeper truth of the show: that when we wonder what to think, we risk being alone. Thinking, it seems, can be bad for you.
The show is a series of responses, suggested by their many collaborators down the years, to a music playlist begun by the pair in 1997. It operates variously as theatrical spectacle, performance art and surrealist cabaret; it is a warmhearted Situationist comedy punctuated with outbursts of madcap exuberance and Dadaist spoon-bending.
There is also unexpected poignancy – Bruce Springsteen’s spoken word introduction to The River, for example, prompts one collaborator to ponder art and fatherhood. At other times, the tone is more strident, such as when American artist Bruce Nauman pushes the profanity envelope over Bob Dylan.
This wildly eccentric mash-up of styles – allowing for the occasional wrong move – fully suits the duo’s misfit brilliance. The two transcend the small stage of the Howard Assembly Rooms, in what amounts to a beguiling demonstration of improbable alchemy. It is like watching someone capture lightning in a bottle, and the show’s big ideas resonate long after the proceedings onstage have ended.
The last act of Last Act of Rebellion is a nicely judged joke at the audience’s expense. Having taken their bows and walked offstage, the pair returns for what appears to be an encore, only to collect a bottle of water and disappear offstage again. Genius.
Note
1] For Compass Festival, Lone Twin also recreated their Spiral project, originally conceived for the Barbican’s bite‘07 festival, embarking on a week long self-winding odyssey around the Holbeck area of Leeds.
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