On a green, baize-like strip, with a shimmer of summer, actions of crossing, from one side to another. People can change. ‘You can change your heart,’ we are assured. And yet prowling the green is a wrestler-helmeted enemy, a defined ‘identity’ trying to define others, one who cannot change (only enforce) costume or heart. Alice Bell is a gently told, but violently sourced, story of a woman who crosses the line from one ‘side’ to another, in the midst of war. She assumes a new name, but wrestler-helmeted evil demands more than that.
Lone Twin’s Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters have moved from being performers of their own work to become artistic directors of a piece performed by others. In doing so, they have passed on something of the ‘thingness’ of their performance voice – their restraint and optimism, their aplomb – to performers Antoine Fraval, Cynthia Whelan, Molly Haslund, Nina Tecklenburg, and Paul Gazzola.
To the thrum and strum of ukuleles and the semaphore of everyday actions, the practical transformation of people (even when they are working for the Bad Man), and the loss (to everyone) when someone is forced to leave, are played out in a clear narrative, and as a warm, hopeful signal across the green divide. In the words of Kwame Anthony Appiah: ‘the great lesson of anthropology is that when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real and present, sharing a human social life, you may like or dislike them, you may agree or disagree, but if it is what you both want, you can make sense of each other in the end.’