publicity image / card for ‘twiceness’ (photo and design: Mark Leahy)
performance photo from SOAK Live Art: Tamas Kovacs @tomkov_photo
‘twiceness’ is a collaborative performance project I have developed with Shelley Hodgson (writer/sound artist). We were aware of each other’s practice for some years but had not found a way to work together. This piece arises from collaborative working, the joint development of ideas, and finding a form for live presentation.
We met in November 2022 for a first session in the studio together, with few preconceptions of what the work might become beyond a wish to develop something live together. Over subsequent working days fitted around our other committments we gathered material, developed a text, audio, and movement score, and made lots of notes.
By Spring of 2024 we had structured live piece that we felt ready to share with an audience. The marketing blurb gave a sense of our intentions:
Two performers are present, in the space, as themselves, and as participants in an act of communication. Blocks of information, of narrative, of action, combining the found, the given, and the made, are built into a sequence of telling and showing. The performance questions interaction, engaging with gesture, with doubling, with repetition, with exchange. Underlying the performers’ relationship is awareness of loss and gaps, what is missed or missing, what doesn’t carry across.
The work asks questions that the performers unpick, rework, worry at. How do we tell each other things? How do we know we mean the same? How do we move between registers and codes, adapting and adjusting to fit, to ease, to stick? What happens if we try to do it again? Moving between choreographed passages and improvisation, the piece engages the audience with consideration of what it takes to get along with each other.
‘twiceness’ was first performed as part of Mayfest 2024 in The House Studio, University of Plymouth on 22nd May 2024. We gave a second performance at SOAK Live Art, Leadworks, Plymouth on 25th July 2024.
Rehearsal photos by Mark Leahy
Tender and playful gestures and conversations that question the urge to fill the gaps or give things (people, objects and words] the space to be with each other in different forms of relation. Again and again. (Sarah Blissett @srblissett)
performance photos from SOAK Live Art: Tamas Kovacs @tomkov_photo
Further iterations of ‘the ‘twiceness’ project include:
‘What shall we call it?’ – a show for radio
In early February 2025 we presented a radio show for Soundart Radio’s First Spark festival. The show which was an hour and a half of song excerpts, prerecorded audio, conversation and performance, developed some of the themes and ideas of ‘twiceness’. We reconsidered the material as a work for radio and looked at how the different medium could offer conventions, forms, and opportunities to engage with naming, identity and power, while also playing with the double act or two-person format of many podcasts and radio shows.
thriceness: Name, Voice, and Gesture – a performative conversation
Shortly after the radio broadcast on Soundart Radio, Shelley and Mark presented a further iteration of the project as a performative conversation for The Convivial series hosted by Sophie Craven in Penryn, Cornwall. For this event they expanded on some questions around bodies, names, and communication. The conversation developed ideas and actions presented in ‘twiceness’ and picked up on threads and themes that emerged in the making of the radio show.
The live event operated on a formal-informal balance, with an audience on chairs loosely arranged in a space, after hours within a working shop. We used different props and scoring to engage with the intimate situation and generate a conversation. We had a set of small flash cards with prompts to structure the event, and we adapted some of the physical actions of ‘twiceness’ to suit the limited space. Acknowledging the people in the space, as we gathered to listen and to exchange, the conversation began with names and naming. Then considering connections to voice and to identity we raised questions around how we tell who we are, how we connect to others, how we bridge gaps between us. The discussion attended to matters of value, of exclusion, and how we are variously valued, differently excluded. Mixing scored actions, gestures, talking and recording, ‘thriceness’ addressed who it is that we are and how we tell this.
between twiceness and thriceness – a collaborative conversation on collaborative making.
In preparation for an online CAMP event in April 2025, Shelley and Mark reviewed the various iterations and materials of the ‘twiceness’ project up to that date. They considered what themes or findings they could identify, and how they might communicate these to an online audience. What the CAMP online conversation allowed us was a way to reflect on the project as a whole, and to consider what some of the drivers were for us, as well as some of what we found out through making and doing. Having not worked together on a performance before this project, we were curious as to the nature of this collaboration, and in the context of CAMP (a member-led artist network) we felt that we could share some useful discoveries with the audience.
We again used flash cards as part of the score and as visual elements for the audience, we included short recordings on dictaphone, and a short excerpt from one of our recorded rehearsal conversations. We again adapted our gesture sequence, this time to fit the online screen setting, and to play with the fact that we were sharing screen space while being over 600 km apart.
Our ‘findings’ were divided into three areas of focus, what we called ‘key’ terms for collaboration, the main themes that we identified in terms of content, and what we called our principles for making work. These had developed in different ways, with some having been introduced deliberately, some arising out of the studio and rehearsal process, and some becoming apparent in reflection.