familiar

One night at a party Gillie, perhaps half-jokingly, suggested we make a show together.
”I’ll make a solo for you to perform and you can make a solo for me to perform.”
We actually did it, and what resulted is a twinset of performances on significant otherness, dance/theatre, performer/director, back/forth, this/that and perhaps wider ideas of two-ness.

Against a strange scenic and costume design by Tim Spooner, Gillie and I present two works in which each of us performs in turn while the other watches from a dedicated booth.

Familiar is composed of:
Dog Years by Greg Wohead, performed by Gillie Kleiman
Study in Significant Otherness by Gillie Kleiman, performed by Greg Wohead

We began this project with a mutual affinity for each other’s work and an instinct towards one another, but did not know each other very well personally. We are friends now; the works have come out of this friendship.

“Familiar” can suggest a relationship between two beings in which one is at the service of the other: we think of a witch’s familiar as an animal who is cared for by the witch but who is necessary for her magic in a way that maybe only the two of them know. The term points to a family relation, given or chosen. Familiar is also about being kinda sorta recognisable, belonging to memory in a hazy way, or being ungraspably similar to something known.

The works in Familiar play out what it means to be significant others – ways of being together in which the relationship of two is complicated by thinking about distance and presence, connection and separation, service and care and power and intimacy – where we think we know everything about each other whilst facing the fact that we can’t.

Gareth Llŷr Evans, The Guardian:

Aided by two animatronic dogs, it’s a neat conceptual conceit, with both works to-ing and fro-ing around the impossibility of knowing everything about another person.

In the first part, Wohead performed a sequence of static canine gestures that evolved into a long sequence of movement under a dim red light. The second work was looser in tone and structure, with Kleiman parroting Wohead’s words as they were spoken into her ear. As she repeatedly asserted that she was here to make a meaningful connection with us, there was a playful, tentative ambivalence about whether it’s possible to fulfil such a promise.