Review: Great Gold Bird, Great Dark Yawn, a wanderplay by Twin Alchemy Collective
by David Glen Robinson

Twin Alchemy Collective’s Great Gold Bird, Great Dark Yawn, playing now, is a mixed digital combination of internet web pages, cell telephony, web video and a round of advanced digitally clued geo-caching.  These media support content of visual art, music, voice theatrical work, and complex sound collages.  The presentation is a montage of these artistic forms.  It is all quite beautiful and well in keeping with Twin Alchemy’s abhorrence of conventionality and strong commitment to audience participation.  The company is also clearly focused on the concerns and visions of millenials.  

 

And what are the visions of millenials in art?  As expressed by Katie Green for Twin Alchemy, a short, incomplete list may include: the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the life of Nicola Tesla, horses, the Land of the Midnight Sun, the aurora borealis, and conspiracy theories.  Overpopulation and climate change are persistent topics in their work, and Twin Alchemy’s take on these themes is as eloquent as Glass Half Full Theatre’s Once There Were Six Seasons last year.  

 

Twin Alchemy Collective increasingly pushes its audiences into participation by moving the audience and themselves toward full co-equal creation of the performance.  In last year’s Twin Alchemy performance ritual The Society of Hard Determinists this reviewer wrote that it was “100 per cent audience participation.”  In Great Gold Bird, Great Dark Yawn (GGBGDY), the young millenials have taken it further: live performers have stepped out of the picture entirely, leaving the audience to find any narrative thread, story line, philosophical kernel, or any gem of value.  This extreme openness is marvelous to those with sweet imagination, but perplexing to those without.  

 

 

This reviewer, not particularly tech-savvy but committed to our digital future, worked his way through the web and cell phone segments of GGBGDY, but then hit the wall.  He found no weblinks, radio buttons, pull down menus, or phone numbers that when touched would propel him out of the house into what might be termed a cyber-scavenger hunt.  Actually, this was not very frustrating given that Twin Alchemy permits a strong element of opaqueness and misdirection in order to heighten feelings of suspense and mystery.  This reviewer resorted to the handy e-mail help line and gained a useful e-mail response to solve the problem (hint: it’s in the phone tree after all).  

 

The next stop was the fieldwork at The Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata in east Austin (where else?).  Preparation included hiking boots and a small purple bag of decoy star seeds.  Playgoers were asked to throw down a deception at the museum in order to find and gain the real star seeds.  This reviewer prepared a suggested story about narwhal tusks that he still rather likes.  This activity was beginning to seem like the scavenger hunt before the scavenger hunt.  Alas, the appointed time for the museum tour fell on the date of the fifteenth anniversary reception for the museum, and the place was jammed, partly with museum attendees, but mostly with Twin Alchemy questers.  Someone retrieved the purple bag with the real star seeds and—there was no note inside or further clue (the star seeds were quinoa or some damn thing).  The entire group had hit the wall.  

 

Yet as this reviewer drove home he relived a sense of the after dark fun he used to have in the backyard when the very stars were alive and monsters crept in the shadows.  The sense was aided by the museum tour by Scott Webel, the co-curator and owner of the Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata.  The place is one of natural magic.  

 

Later, another mysterious e-mail was received. . . .

 

Adult time commitments and deadlines halted further participation, but not before it became clear that Twin Alchemy has not lost its sense of childlike play in the collective.  One feels gratitude to this wildly experimental theater group for inviting us to play, and we look forward to their next concoction of art, fun, and theater.  The artists in Twin Alchemy Collective, Katie Green, Shawn Jones, Jesse Barksdale and the rest, are Austin acolytes of the imaginative.  

 

Twin Alchemy's second video trailer, with narration (36 sec.):

 

 

 

Great Gold Bird, Great Dark Yawn plays until May 31, 2015 at points around Austin, on your computer and cell phone, and deep inside your imagination.  

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Great Gold Bird, Great Dark Yawn, a wanderplay
by Katie Green
Twin Alchemy Collective

Click to go to www.twinalchemy.com for information and to sign up.

 

An alternate reality game inspired by  point-and-click games such as Myst and Kentucky Route Zero: a site-specific, narrative-driven, wander play happening in different locations all over Austin over the course of a month, on a person's own time, with a video game companion available to download on your smart phone to act as your guide throughout the city.