14+ | 1hr

Artist and performance-maker Eve Stainton presents their choreographic touring work, Impact Driver, featuring welding, movement and live sound by Leisha Thomas and Mica Levi, and performed by Tink Flaherty, Imani Mason Jordan, Romeo Roxman Gatt and Eve Stainton.

Working with time-based notions of being ‘caught in the act’ and ‘on tenterhooks’, Stainton explores how suspense has the potential to punctuate lesbian and trans-masc identities; haunting, time-stretching, absurdist. 

Impact Driver is interested in methodologies for constructing thriller-like suspense and how it 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; foregrounding how scenes and objects take their shape and continue to move through meanings, atmospheres, garments, feelings and materials; generative and in tension. 

“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 practice 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. 

This project is generously supported by Kamila Serkebaeva.

About the artist

Eve Stainton is an artist interested in the politics of uncodeable queer presence and its intersections with race and class. They create multi-disciplinary performance worlds that hold movement practices, digital collage and welded steel, and other invisible forces like waves, imagination and drama. These forms work together to create live ecologies that are discordant, multi-layered and psychedelic. Stainton is interested in the production of conflicting states and textures to unravel essentialist thinking, with intent to create more expansive understandings of the lesbian identity, non-gender/variance and perceptions of the ‘real’.  

Presentations include: Commission Dykegeist (ICA, UK), Close Encounters (DK), Le Guess Who (NL), Horizon Showcase (UK), Bergen Kunsthall (NO), Tanzquartier Wien (AT), My Wild Flag (SE), Dampfzentrale (CH), Manchester Billboards commission (UK), PCS Prize exhibition (PT), Venice Biennale performance programme with Florence Peake (IT), Block Universe (UK), The Place (UK), Nottingham Contemporary (UK), Crac Occitanie (FR), Sadler’s Wells (UK), La Becque (SE), LCMF (UK), CCA Glasgow (UK), Tangente (CA). www.evestainton.com   

Concept and Choreography: Eve Stainton 
Performance: Eve Stainton, Tink Flaherty, Mica Levi, Imani Mason Jordan, Romeo Roxman Gatt & Leisha Thomas 
Sound World: Mica Levi & Leisha Thomas 
Producer: Michael Kitchin 
Set Design and Fabrication: H S Design Studios 
Production Manager: Helen Mugridge 
Welding Manager: Hester Moriarty Thompson 
Lighting Designer: Charlie Hope
Costume Designer: Ella Boucht 
Costume Assistant: Oline Bronee
Dramaturgical Support: Liz Rosenfeld & Jamila Johnson-Small 
Artist Care Person: Seyi Adelekun & Madinah Farhannah Thompson 
PR: Binita Walia 
Access Dramaturg: Kat Bailed 
Choreographic Support: Florence Peake 
3D Typography: Bora AKA Pauline Canavesio   

Co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Supported by Bergen Kunsthall and Wainsgate. Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. With thanks to Phyllida Barlow Studio for steel donation. 