ABOUT TWINE, BY SELINA THOMPSON

I am currently sitting in the bar of The Yard Theatre in Hackney – which is like a pastel pink hive of activity, what is everybody doing? Maybe setting up for a thing, I wonder if I can get a beer – trying to think about how I want to talk to you about THE SHARING OF TWINE, OUR NEW SHOW, THAT WE WILL BE DOING HERE ON THE 29TH AND 30TH OF JUNE WHICH I WOULD LIKE YOU TO COME TO.

I’ve been describing what it ‘is’ to many groups of people, and I tell them all something different, so I tell actors and performers:

Twine is a four-part show, that takes one specific adoption as a starting point and uses that to think about the politics of adoption more broadly, including but not limited to:

1. Feminist ideas around family abolition, check out this podcast for a little more context on that.

2. Black feminist ideas around the structure of the family, and the lingering impact of slavery and colonialism in that structure – but also ways in which we remade the family.

3. How capitalism and the state use families to produce future generations of workers, and how adoption, in particular, exposes this.

But that’s all dry and theoretical, and actually, a big part of it is about grief!

Grief at the circumstances of a specific adoption, which involves a mother killing her baby, giving birth in prison, miscarrying, and hiding children from social services, because she knew they’d be taken at birth. Grief because a young man dies in a room alone during the pandemic, and someone who never met him mourns him alone – and grief is supposed to be communal.

Guilt at loving a family that has raised you, but also a family you never got to know. And thinking about how the tangle of all of these relationships might help us to think about love more expansively.

If it had a storyline, I guess it would be that on the death of her brother, a lumberjack suddenly finds herself pregnant, despite the fact she has not been sexually active. But what is growing in her stomach is not a child, but rather a seed, a physical manifestation of her grief.

It grows bigger, heavier, and more overwhelming until she cries out; a cry that pulls her future self back through time to help her find the source of her grief, come to terms with it and move forward. She goes to the state to get her adoption file and journeys through the chambers of her heart to commune with the ghosts she finds there before there is one final gathering of everyone that has ever mothered, fathered and loved her, from near and from far, to discuss the future of love, and its role in the making of the new world.

But it’s not just the story, it’s a new approach and form for me so I say to directors and movement directors and composers and casting directors:

"I’ve never worked with actors before! But we’ve got six of them, and they need to sing, and maybe think with their bodies in a way different to mine, and I don’t know how to jump from one body that I know intimately in space (usually standing still) to many bodies, could you help me—"

But you don’t want to sound too panicked in front of certain people so I present it to funders and partners and my board in another set of terms I say to them:

"It’s a work in progress sharing at the end of six weeks of R&D (Research & Development) (I’ve already spent one of those weeks being sick, cheers, thanks for that body!) where I’ll work on the 2nd and 3rd draft of my current 1st draft for three weeks before we spend 2 weeks trying things out and putting it on its feet to learn about it. This will be the springboard for the next stage of development, and a part of us defining clearly what a Selina Thompson work that I am not in looks like."

Which is a little dry but you know – public money and accountability and things, but after that, I sneak away to speak to my dramaturgs and associate artists and I say:

"It’s like four chunks, the first act is sort of a series of visions, maybe? I was reading Crave by Sarah Kane and A Dream Play by Strindberg and thinking about when I have seizures and some Pina Bausch stuff maybe and then the second bit is a courtroom drama(?) A cross between Saint-Omer and Officer Krupke and an article from The New Inquiry I’m obsessed with and the third act takes its cues from a Warsan Shire poem, where she talks about different chambers of the heart – I think I want the conversations in that bit to feel like the space between branches of dead trees in winter and then the last bit is all sung, like a bunch of theory presented as Opera, feeling a bit like Octavia Butler and Earthseed but the language breaks down and then it’s just sound."

And they’re kind so they let me talk it out but then I turn to my Set Designer person and I say:

"I think that the whole time we need to turn this dead barren space into a clearing in the forest, that’s what they’re all doing the whole show.”

But I think still, maybe the best description of what it is and why I’m doing it comes from the description that I give my mum.

"I only really had three new year’s resolutions, to see Beyoncé, to watch a film every day, and to put something back on stage, that is: to be in the moment (joyfully), to reconnect with and expand my knowledge of an art form I actually really care about and to remember who I am, and why I dedicated my 20s to doing theatre, to the detriment… kind of everything else. So it matters, I really do need to go to London, I really do need to make this thing where everything is new and I have to grow and learn and perhaps fail, because it’s kind of, you know, for me its–"

but the end of that sentence is private.

Come and see some early experiments in Twine at the end of the month, loves, and we’ll think about love and grief together, in the woods.