Artist and performance maker Eve Stainton presents their choreographic touring work, Impact Driver. Featuring live welding, movement, and live sound scored by Leisha Thomas and Mica Levi. Performed by Tink Flaherty, Karima Francis, Wet Mess, Romeo Roxman Gatt, Charlotte Valentine and Eve Stainton.
Impact Driver is interested in methodologies for constructing thriller-like suspense. How suspense can be sustained as the main event, in the absence of a climax or traditional resolution. Borrowing the logic from a welding workshop, Stainton foregrounds activities that require live negotiation and decision making; making visible how scenes and objects take their shape, and continue to move through meanings. Atmospheres, garments, feelings and materials, generative and in tension.
Working with time-based notions of being ‘caught in the act’ and ‘on tenterhooks’, Stainton explores how suspense as a rumbling undercurrent has the potential to punctuate lesbian and trans-masc identities. Haunting, time stretching, absurdist.
‘Welding is potent for me in so many ways- its strong alchemical presence, its extreme theatricality, its capacity for danger/excitement/drama/power/thrill, its sensuality, its brashness.’ – Eve Stainton
Featuring an ensemble from different creative backgrounds who don’t usually work in the field of dance, this research continues Stainton’s work in celebrating the gender non-conforming lesbian and trans-masc experience, of which there are many, and what foregrounding these identities means to the white western Contemporary Dance canon.
REVIEWS
“…blasted conventions around dance, performance and gender in a stunning aural and sensory assault. At times menacing, at times tender and funny, while also redolent with risk, suspense, danger and total sexiness, in this astonishing gesamtkunstwerk, the boundary-busting essence of Marina Abramović’s pioneering early performance work lives on” Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper.
“Stainton’s presentation of welding alongside dance is transformative; solid is turned to liquid and back again, and we are transported into a new alternative landscape as the real and the performed become intertwined…Through constructing characters, an alternate landscape, and engagement with all the senses, Stainton makes a gesamtkunstwerk: a total spectacle.” Sam Kan
EVE STAINTON
Eve Stainton is an artist and choreographer born in Manchester and living in London, UK. They create multi-disciplinary performances that involve movement practices, welded steel/live welding, digital collage, and other invisible forces like drama and suspense. Their research is rooted in community, interested in how differently marginalised people experience and come into relationship with power structures and societal conventions. Often working with codes or tropes of gender, class and threat, their work stages clunky physical negotiations and reveals ‘behind the scenes’ mechanisms of working together to show a kind of reality that isn’t seamless.
In 2023 Eve was nominated for the Premio Cunha e Silva Art Prize at Galeria Municipal do Porto (PT). Features include The Wire mag, PW Magazine, The Art Newspaper, Metal, AQNB, FACT Mag, Dazed Beauty, Twin Magazine, Art in America, This is Tomorrow. Work for other artists include Anthea Hamilton, Tai Shani, Last Yearz Interesting Negro, Sonia Boyce, Malik Nashad Sharpe, Holly Blakey, Goldfrapp, Compagnie ECO international tour, Vivienne Westwood, Claire Barrow, Art School, Molly Goddard, walking for London/Shanghai/Paris Fashion Weeks
www.evestainton.com
CONTENT WARNINGS
– This performance contains partial nudity, haze, eye level strobe, moments of black out, loud live sound and live welding.
– Welding creates a smell that can be detected in the space.
– Welding curtains are used during the performance, which allow you to safely watch the welding with no additional eye protection.
– A limited number of ear defenders will be available; if you have your own, please bring them.
– This performance includes very loud noises. The music, industrial sounds layered with guitars is loud and interspersed with welding sounds and metals scraping.
AGE LIMIT
14+ (partial nudity)
More Info: dansehallerne.dk
Photo: Brian Hartley
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