About

Twins
Lotte and Gerta
Amelia and Angela
Lucy and Lily

Twins was the fourth partnership between Kim X Knowlton and Maggie Siena during their
years with Watchface; it also became their final collaboration. As in their three earlier
performances, the women wanted comedy to be a key element, but within a more serious
context. In considering a premise for this new and potentially more thoughtful show, they
decided to investigate the darker aspects of intimate relationships. The tensions of familiarity
experienced by various sets of twins seemed to be the perfect vehicle to exploit their humor
and to explore close and complex human connections.

Though they had already made a commitment to share a bill with Iris Rose and James Siena
at St. Mark’s Church, the women found the performance initially hard to conceive and
lacking a strong vision. Maggie recalls being in “less of a groove” and both found
themselves uncharacteristically inclined to procrastinate. After looking at their own bond –
how close they were socially as friends, emotionally as confidantes, intellectually as
collaborators, and physically as roommates – the show began to take shape. An outline
was established to include four fictional sets of twins within historical, cultural, and social
perspectives.

The writing for this performance was more traditionally theatrical than their three previous
works, featuring linear storylines. Watchface movement techniques were utilized to add an
additional layer of meaning to the spoken words.

To begin the performance, a pure movement prologue suggested the birth of twins. As they
sucked each other’s thumbs, wearing flesh colored slips, they embodied the oneness that
was the starting point for each of the sets of twins. The choreography came from Bodies in
Space exercises (for a description of this technique, see METHOD) based on ideas of birth,
sameness, harmony, and unity.

As in their other shows, Maggie’s love of history and research again was an influence.
The first set of twins was loosely based on the famous conjoined twin brothers, and onetime
public curiosities, Chang and Eng of Siam. Chang and Eng portrait After altering their
nationality and sex, many other aspects of the brothers’ lives were used to tell the tale of
their fictionalized counterparts, Lotte and Gerta Struden. To a voiceover narrated by
Maggie, the two women enacted the Bavarian sisters’ melodramatic story. They began their
life in the late nineteenth century as outcasts who were betrayed by their family and hawked
to owners of a carnival freak show. After one of the sisters murdered their cruel and abusive
caretaker, they escaped to America to begin a new life in vaudeville. The story continued
through both sisters’ marriages, sexual relations, childbirth, and eventual deaths. The staging
for Lotte and Gerta was very physical with long movement sequences and little actual
dialogue. The twins’ life on the stage was shown through a cabaret mode of song and
dance.

Transferring the conjoined reality of the twin brothers to the Struden sisters was the most
challenging aspect of their life to portray. The women bound themselves together by a
harness they constructed of belts, literally attached at the hip. In this way, the characters’
physical pain and the constraint of their closeness was automatically built into the
choreography. Yet of all the sets of twins, the anguished story of Lotte and Gerta contained
some of the funniest moments.

Teenagers Amelia and Angela were the second set of twins depicted. Their story dealt with
some of the more storied and clichéd aspects of being a twin. The two sisters shared a
mental closeness, developed their own language, ”Secret Language” script and combined
their separate talents into a singular resource. Looking the same, they enjoyed playing tricks
on their family and friends. But as the girls reached their teen years, they found their
similarities had evolved into disadvantages. High school had become their time to seek out
individual identities. Amelia and Angela developed good girl and bad girl personas that
clashed and, after playing mean tricks on each other on prom night, they mutually agreed,
“I have to get away from you!”

One set of twins was cut after only a single performance. Melody and Marjorie’s story was of
a reunion after being separated at birth. The perspective of disconnection followed by a
coming together was contrary to the theme of the other stories, in which sameness gave way
to each twin’s unique voice and true self emerging. Kim and Maggie’s own doubts about the
section, as well as some audience members’ observations after its first performance,
prompted the women to delete this tale.

The final set of twins, Lucy and Lily Doll, were written as older and wiser sophisticates.
Through their horn rimmed glasses, the Doll sisters were able to look back upon their lives
with introspection. The sisters had grown to become independent but accepted their
common thoughts, dreams, and premonitions. They learned to value the things that only
they could share and were forever bound by them.

In representing the twins, Kim and Maggie wanted to look as much alike as possible – they
felt it was critical to the characters’ success – even though it entailed elaborate costume and
wig changes for each story. It also created longer than desired time intervals between them.
“Overly ambitious,” as Kim has recollected. For Lotte and Gerta, they wore auburn pony
tailed wigs, shoes with buckles, and full-skirted dresses with aprons, as well as their
connecting harness. That section was followed by Amelia and Angela’s, in which they
changed into long dark haired wigs, matching sundresses but of different colors, and
platform sandals. However, these unwanted gaps proved to be an opportunity for assorted
entertaining voiceovers about twins – including fictional anecdotes and factual stories, tales
of physical oddities, a recording of the song “Sisters” from the film White Christmas, and a list
of twin names that Maggie narrated in a sing song voice. twin names chant

After its premier at the end of 1986, Twins was performed several more times the following
year. As Watchface shows would do again, the performance was presented as a series with
each set of twins appearing on a different evening at the intimate, informal, and very
charming performance space, Dixon Place.

During this time, both Maggie and Chazz Dean worked for a Mexican restaurant, Bandito,
that had locations on the east and west sides of Manhattan. Among the variety of events
and installations they created for the restaurants, they organized a performance series, The
Glorious Dream of Wisdom, at which Twins was highlighted. Twins was also among the shows
revived for Watchface: The Spring ’87 Collection at La Mama. La MaMa card The final
performance of Twins was in a collection of Watchface works in Tweed Ensemble’s Fourth
Annual New Works Festival only a few weeks later. Tweed postcard

In looking back on the creative process, both women saw what was not clear at the time –
that their own relationship influenced and reflected the show’s direction. Kim and Maggie
had grown so close, but now needed to become more separate and find clearer
independent identities. Their work on Twins helped them accomplish that.