Artist and performance maker Eve Stainton releases their new choreographic commission, Impact Driver. Featuring live welding, movement, and live sound, scored by Leisha Thomas and Mica Levi.
Co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Supported by Bergen Kunsthall and Wainsgate. Supported using public funding through Arts Council England. With thanks to Phyllida Barlow Studio for steel donation.
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 tenter hooks’, 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.
Credits:
Concept and Choreography: Eve Stainton
Performance: Tink Flaherty, Romeo Roxman Gatt, Imani Mason Jordan, Mica Levi, Eve Stainton & Leisha Thomas
Sound World: Leisha Thomas & Mica Levi
Producer: Michael Kitchin
Set Design and Fabrication: H S Design Studios
Production Manager: Helen Mugridge
Lighting Designer: Charlie Hope
Costume Designer: Ella Boucht
Welding Manager: Hester Moriarty Thompson
Dramaturgical Support: Liz Rosenfeld & Jamila Johnson-Small
Access Dramaturg and Embodied Writer: Kat Bailed
Artist Care Person: Seyi Adelekun and Madinah Farhannah Thompson
Audio Describers: SoundScribe
Artist Support Worker: Andrew Mitchelson
Choreographic Support: Florence Peake
3D Typography: Bora AKA Pauline Canavesio
Press:
>> The Wire magazine, print issue, 2023
>> The Art Newspaper, Marina Abramovic passes on the baton to a new Generation, Louisa Buck, 2023
>> Metal magazine, The Construction of Impact Driver, 2023
>> Dance Art Journal, Eve Stainton talks ‘Impact Driver’ art and welding, 2023
>> Review from Tramway, Eve Stainton’s Impact Driver: welding as queer practice, 2023
>> The Place podcast, Queer worlds, moving bodies, 2023
>> NTS radio, Mark Leckey and Tomi Rose mix, 2023