The Potential of the End(ing): Anticipated Nostalgia in To the Dogs by Lone Twin

The following article examines the functions and the effects of the process of setting an ending. The performance To the Dogs by the English performance duo Lone Twin stages its end(ing) by interlinking two phenomena which have often been separated in theatre criticism: the theatrical event - seen as something happening in the present-and narrative - considered as something belonging to the past.1 In To the Dogs the event is narrativized by the performers as it goes along, providing it with endings on the level of rhetoric, content and time structure. In this process the performance is transformed into a myth, in which the event is anticipated as a closed story, even though it is still about to happen. This future-poetics of the end(ing), in which a collective event, paradoxically, is being charged in advance with nostalgia, illustrates the affective force of a (narrative) ending as performance. It does so not only in a negative, restrictive sense of closing the event as story, but also in a positive, enabling sense: To the Dogs raises the question of how far the discourse about an event regarded as unique and inaccessible implies a narrative quality. The process of setting a future ending is revealed as being more than a generator of narrative closure; this essay aims to perform the fact that it is also an enabling moment of opening the seemingly closed event as myth into a time afterwards.