Together /// Alone

Love is the one thing every person alive has a story about, and somehow it still feels unfinished, unspoken, barely scratched.

Together Alone is a new performance by Know Promises lead by Doris Vahtra and Brian Francis Devaney, two performers and directors who are also partners in life.

Together Alone is made from the inside out. Doris and Brian bring their actual relationship into the room, and ask what happens when two people from different countries, different cultures, different unconscious rules about love, try to be honest about all of it. Through movement, text, sound and audience interaction, the work strips the performance of love back to something true. It explores love, relationships and human connection with all the mess, beauty and contradiction that comes with being two different people trying to share one life.

The piece draws on real experience. Doris grew up in Estonia, one of the least religious countries in Europe. Brian grew up Catholic in the northwest of Ireland. The beliefs you absorb without knowing it, the family patterns you carry into every relationship, the scripts handed down by society, film, religion, and the people who raised you, these are the raw material. Not as confession, but as theatre.

The devising process is built on physical action, improvisation and genuine risk. Together Alone is currently in development and moving toward its first full production.