a festival of duet performances, March 2017

—blog posts associated with this event

—"a walk through London" Mary Paterson's written response to the duet festival

Twofold: the Particularities of Working in Pairs
a 2-day symposium 3rd & 4th March at Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre

Alongside academic research from practice-based and non-practice-based contexts, duet performances in development will be presented via Birkbeck’s partnership with Camden People’s Theatre.

"Questions about TwoFold" Mary Paterson's written response to day 1 of the symposium (delivered at the beginning of day 2)

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TwoFold
a festival of duet performance at Chisenhale Dance Space 9th 10th, 11th, 16th 17th 18th March

Taking place over two months and across three weeks the festival presents works from my duet series: three studio projects (So Below, Control Signal and the London premiere of miles & miles), shown as part of double bills, partnered with four duet projects programmed through CDS (Being Together, Jacket Dance, How to keep our friends from drowning), and two programmes of duet lectures/talks.  Additionally, an outdoor duet performance (Seven Falls), will take place on 27 May and will include guest performers. Two public workshops will be offered, one during March and one in May in advance of the presentation of Seven Falls (with participants appearing as guests in the outdoor performance).

I am devoted to the investigation and strengthening of collaborative methods of performance making, and because of our focus on communication and method, the style of the work and the form it takes varies from project to project.

The partnership of two people carries a significant power. It may be related to the fact that every one of us is alive due to a partnership between cells from two different people. With society’s current focus on the fluidity of gender and sexuality, and the rising use of the word binary as a pejorative, it feels important to examine the duo or the significance of working in pairs quite apart from gender issues in order to sort what might be underlying the intimacy of the one-to-one.

TwoFold was supported by Grants for the Arts.