The Twin Stranger

The Twin Stranger is an artistic duo formed by Jude Cowan Montague, an author, poet and creative in audio and print, and Riitta Hakkarainen, a scenographer trained in St Petersburg. Together they make up The Twin Stranger, a duo of theatre makers who aim to rejoin art and science to inspire young people, taking extravagant, improvised journeys on the trail of history, poetry and lore from their own Baltic heritage and beyond. The core of The Twin Stranger enquiry is the relationship between the traditional art of theatre and computer coding.

Project

For their residency in the Netherlands, The Twin Stranger will develop a project centered around the figure of the forgotten African goddess Mefiti, the divine female power of the volcano, a goddess reputed to have come to Italy from Libya, cognate with the biblical demon Mefistopheles. Highlighting ideas of female energy and power, the project represents an attempt to resurrect her knowlegde as goddess of the volcano in times of global warming.  In order to display their immersive recreation of the power and energy of the goddess, they plan to combine the script of live coding with the changing script of a theatre. Blending these two scripts, working live with both chemical experiment and equation, the tools of scientific analysis and synthesis will be part of the script. Inspired by the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures which display science as theatre to a young audience their live coded and live scripted play will be entertaining and involve real physical experiments alongside the energy of improvised work.