Eve Stainton - Impact Driver

Part of Take Me Somewhere Festival 

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.   

Impact Driver is interested in methodologies for constructing thriller-like suspense. How can suspense 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. It is 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 experiences, of which there are many, and what foregrounding these identities means to the white western Contemporary Dance canon.

ACCESS 
Live visual description available; please collect headsets from the box office. Subpacs will be available at the box office. 

AUDIENCE NOTES
The performance includes nudity, loud live sound and live welding. 
Recommended for ages 14+

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  Artist Care Person: Madinah Farhannah Thompson  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.

Image: Impact Driver, Photography by Anne Tetzlaff, Logo by BORA aka Pauline Canavesio, digitally collaged by Eve Stainton.