The twin sisters bringing the tragic story of the 'Silent Twins' to the stage

Briana Brown-Tipley can recall the exact moment her life was no longer synchronous with her twin sister Hilary Brown-Istrefi. It's this moment that inspired the choreographer duo's work "Upstairs, In Our Bedroom," a multidisciplinary dance piece with virtual reality components that will be discussed as part of a Q&A at Toronto's Workman Arts' Rendezvous With Madness festival taking place on Oct. 28. The choreographer duo are still in the process of creating this performance which will open to the public in 2025. 

The Brown sisters' lives, like their faces, were virtually identical until Briana began to struggle with depression in her early 30s. It was then that her self-harm escalated resulting in hospitalization — the first time she felt truly cut off from her twin. 

"This is one part of our existence together that [Hilary] doesn't understand about me," Briana says. "So I'm in the process of trying to explain an experience that she didn't get to be a part of."

"Singletons" as Hilary fondly calls non-twin siblings might not understand how monumental it is to have your journey deviate from your twin. This is part of the codependency and innate connection that the twin sisters are trying to bring to the stage, as they focus on another set of twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons, also known as "the silent twins." 

The Gibbons sisters were one of the few curious cases of documented cryptophasia, a phenomenon where twins develop a language that only they can understand. The twin sisters were characterized by their selective mutism, refusing to talk to anyone but each other, occasionally making exceptions to communicate with their younger sister, who was not a part of their twin pairing. The Gibbons were often unjustly treated by their community as a freakish anomaly, and were eventually hospitalized for their selective mutism, with one twin, Jennifer dying while in care. 

It's not lost on Hilary and Briana that the Gibbons sisters were not only unjustly treated, but that their treatment was also informed by what it means to be a Black woman living with a mental illness in a Western society. 

"There's this narrative of I was mad and crazy and that the hospital saved me, and that's not the correct narrative," Briana says. "The hospital created trauma that continues in a different way. I think, especially being a Black woman, the trauma is already there from institutionalized racism, so I'm figuring out what my narrative is and trying to process it as a person — not as a performer." 

The sisters hesitate to label dance as expressive therapy, instead they use it as a storytelling platform to analyze the past and the present. Hilary and Briana grew up in Toronto, taking a mix of modern dance and ballet lessons from a young age and influenced by their mother's work teaching tap dancing. 

After briefly enrolling in a fine arts dance program at York University, they relocated to Quebec to attend the Montreal School of Contemporary Dance. They moved to New York in 2009 to audition for independent dance companies, before forming their current dance collective Same as Sister in 2013. Hilary is based in New York, while Briana is in Toronto, but both cities have woven themselves into the sisters' narrative. In 2022 the twin choreographers staged a performance informed by the 1980s AIDS crisis, "This is NOT a Remount" that was dedicated to the Canadian choreographer David Earle and his work. 

The twin sisters' creative process is rich and detailed ranging from reading the writings and diaries of the Gibbons sisters to using virtual reality headsets to recreate Briana's hospital experience in an attempt to thread together the hospitalizations of her and the Gibbons sisters. 

Much of the duo's intentions revolve around communicating the strength of the twin bond, and what it's like to be an individual who is part of a pairing. "There's a secrecy to twinship, an invisible mode of communication that's overemphasized," says Hilary. "Our goal is to have the audience understand even a small sliver of what it's like to be a twin in twinship." 

For now Hilary says that they are embracing an openness surrounding the creative process for the opening performance, which will be staged in New York and Toronto in 2025. "It's ambitious what we're trying to do with this piece, our goal is to tell a familiar story in an unfamiliar way.