The Wake

Nine is a tumultuous age, lying (or flailing or screaming) between childhood and adolescence. It’s a time when we leave “the sweet, dreamlike world of early childhood,” and become conscious of our bodies and their surroundings, according to the Waldorf education founder Rudolf Steiner.

For performance art mavericks Gary Winters and Gregg Whelan, nine years is how long they’ve been traveling the globe, recording their encounters, and dressing as blindfolded cowboys to line dance for 12 hours straight. (More on that later.) The duo, who go by “Lone Twin,” were commissioned to perform at art-houses in Belgium, Australia and Canada, to name just a few countries these long-haired Brits invaded. Upon arrival in a foreign land, they often spent the day riding around on foldable bicycles, collecting material for the night’s show. Other times a “show” lasts for days, like when they decided to lug a telephone pole across a Norwegian town—in a straight line, despite the shops, gardens and homes built in their path. Or it lasts for hours, like when they walked back and forth across a bridge, talking with townsfolk who would join them for a few minutes or an entire night.

And then there’s the blindfolded line dancing, an act Lone Twin performed in venues as diverse as an alley and town square. With neither sight nor music to guide them, Winters and Whelan depended on the sound of each other’s footfalls to stay in-synch. The act was conceived to test the stereotype of the strong, heroic cowboy, by dressing in wide-legged pants, fringe-laden vests and cowboy hats and pushing their bodies to the point of exhaustion, a point where even one simple line dance could cause them to crumble.

On the weekend of January 12, 2007, Lone Twin landed on the McGuire Theater’s stage in the Walker Art Center, entertaining audiences with “Nine Years,” a 90-minute reflection on almost a decade of travels, people, stories and landscapes.

“Look at me. Take a great big look at me,” began a monologue repeated throughout the show. Except for the bandana tied around Winters’s neck, he’s dressed as a cyclist in black, red and blue spandex, biking gloves and a cap with the bill upturned. “I should be out there. Where the world happens,” he says. “Where people bump into each other on the street, say ‘Would you like to go out for a cappuccino?’ and then get married.”

Lone Twin has earned acclaim since 1997, when they bought a box of donuts (for Winters’s sweet-tooth), boarded a ship and set sail. Winters’s plan was to “Watch the world go by and record what I see in these notebooks.” Whelan’s was to watch the first series of Ally McBeal (and later Sex and the City).

“They come from England. Bewildered, hopeful, dogged,” warned a review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Other reporters have called them “unabashed and droll,” with “salon-fresh Chuck Norris looks,” and the Scottish Herald described their work an “elegiac salute to the dreams that tease and elude us.” In “Nine Years,” that dream is sometimes an escape from the drudgery of working life.

“Do I look happy? Is this happiness? This isn’t happiness. This, my friend, is shittiness,” Winters states, matter-of-factly, as his monologue becomes increasingly frantic. “There should be more than this job. More than this half-life … I should be a singer (‘hmm’ he hums), or a dancer.”

“Children of [nine] develop a sense of self and find it important to gain social acceptance and experience achievement,” says the National Network for Child Care. This is true of Lone Twin’s more conceptual performance pieces as well.

“We’re interested in creating this social space where people can join in and be part of the work,” Winters says after the show. Sometimes they succeed—like when Lone Twin led a flock of bikers through Philadelphia’s streets. Sometimes, they fail—like when Lone Twin spent 12 hours holding hands on a bridge in the Quebec province, hoping passersby would grab their free hands. Nine hours in, Winters turned a video camera on himself and said, “I think things will get better from this point.”

Throughout the show, Winters and Whelan’s voices sometimes boomed, sometimes whispered, and once sang a Beatles tune. But always their presence could be felt as strongly as if a cast of characters stood by their sides. Winters quoted Herman Melville and adapted Walt Whitman (“I think heroic deeds are all conceived on the open road”). Whelan relayed the lore of the British money spider, an eight-legged creature that is said to get caught in the earth’s rising thermal columns, float to the jet stream, and shoot across the Pacific to land outside Las Vegas.

The stage was fairly bare. On its right stood a music stand decorated in peacock feathers and a rainbow-striped ribbon. On its left stood a long table draped in cloth and another music stand, taller and decorated with a giant flower, cattails, and a British flag. Against the back curtain hung a giant screen that announced each act (there were nine), and played video of a spider stumbling across a hand, the landscape seen from trains and bicycles, and footage of their previous stunts, including the time Lone Twin decided to make clouds by trekking through a city in layers of clothing before asking the locals to toss buckets of water onto their bare, heated skin.

Careful to balance the whimsical with the realistic, Lone Twin also told the story of Phillipe, a waiter newly arrived in Melbourne, who felt lost in his new city and confessed his anguish to Winters and Whelan. “It’s easier to tell things to strangers sometimes,” Whelan says after the show.

www.lonetwin.com