Lone Twin are Gary Winters and Gregg Whelan, and I first worked with them in 2010 helping create their bespoke site-specific children’s show, Beastie - a wonderful project that’s still touring. In the show, while one of us getting into the character of Beastie - putting on its muscle frame, its fur, it’s size 18 feet, clawed hands, and giant melancholy head - the children are prompted to fill in it’s background: telling us where it’s from, is it a boy or a girl, it’s age, what it likes to do, how it acts when it’s happy, when it’s sad, when it’s afraid. When they finally give the creature a name, Beastie’s eyes open and it behaves exactly as they described until it makes for the door and breaks out of the theatre into the real world, taking the children with him (or her) on a one-of-a-kind adventure. It’s a uniquely memory-building experience, and we’ve met wonderful groups of kids around the world…
I’ve worked with Gregg and Gary on other Lone Twin projects as well: as cast member The Festival - the third in the Lone Twin Theatre Trilogy starting with Alice Bell & Daniel Hit by a Train. We also worked on the R&D phase of Hull City of Culture Festival with a community show called The Visitor: the Beastie costume was repurposed into a strange, mute visitor appearing in one Hull neighbourhood of Longhill - showing up at a high street cornershop, allotment, doctor’s office, council flat, bingo parlour - over the period of two weeks. By the end of our visit there we’d had families in the are on bikes shouting and following the visitor, calling their neighbours, creating a real buzz.
