studio lang (c. 2024) is a collective created by twin sisters, Emma Lang and Allison Lang as a container to continue to expand on their artistic practice in interdisciplinary tandem. Together, they collaborate to experiment at the intersection of prose, embodied movement and performance art.
SILK OIL
forthcoming, 2026Created and Performed by studio lang, Duration: 40’
Silk Oil is a Performance-Installation in the round that blends sound and contemporary movement to engage audience in a sensorial narrative landscape. Recalling an unstable timeline and a past-present embodiment, droning sound and movement resonate in tandem, while a contemporary folk tale, built upon a tripartite being of spirit, creature and human fragments is realized. In their stable presence, audience remains human, maintaining the third fragmentary piece, while the two performers differentiate into spirit and creature states. Exhausting patterns of repetition and shifting through imaginitives, Silk Oil searches unified moments between audience, performer and other, elaborating on the artist duo's ongoing desire to declaw the concrete.
This work was conceptualized and researched while in residence at Morrow, Odd Meridian Arts (Vancouver, CA). Thank you to Odd Meridian Arts for the generous support through funds and space during our Impromptu Residency.
Silk Oil is a recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant for Research and Creation. We would like to acknowledge the support of Canada Council for the Arts for making this work possible.
SURVIVAL–LENGTH
2023Created and Performed by studio lang, Duration: 20’
In 2023, Emma and Allison premiered Survival-Length, a work created as part of Berlin’s 48H Stunden Neukölln Festival exploring the festivals proposed theme of Playground.
Survival-Length is a performance piece and an abstracted mental playground of the multiplicities and thresholds within the minds of twins, Allison and Emma Lang. Childhood play is mechanized by the artist duo to become superimposed onto the now, allowing the artists to playfully address the thesis of the piece: How do we cope with the plurality of an instant?
The artists contort themselves in a game of wild abstractions through contemporary dance movement, ecological metaphor, the swell of breath and voice to work as a team to open themselves up to real time negotiations between one another within the structural lanscape of the work.
“ How is your heart? This blood boils and cools at a humid hour.
Something about a hollowing that renders truth perceptible.
‘In my night I idolize the secret meaning of the world.’ My only ritual, the occurrence of sleep.
A bird, a bell, the sky opens.
In a vast night, a strangers kind, hooded eyes suggest there is still a porousness to exploit.
Suspended in that impersonal night a memory of three beating hearts in a single body governed by a secret never given a name.
I tried to tell another story but the sentiment was wont to persist in an attempt to edge closer to a soft spot on the otherwise unforgiving material.
Oftentimes I’ve found myself speaking in the non-language, it goes something like this: valence, patience, peri- peripheral governance. The humid hour, again, the humid hour, and an soaking wet heart.
This project made possible through the resources and support of 48 Stunden Neukölln Festival; Berlin, Germany
Contact
e.: studiolangcontact@gmail.com