Eve Stainton

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 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.

“Welding has a strong alchemical presence,” says Eve Stainton. Impact Driver combines the dangerous work of forging workpieces with the movement of bodies, staged somewhere between camp-looking cowboys and the pragmatic uniformism of industrial factory workers. Events are backed by anti-rock experimental soundscapes by Leisha Thomas and Mica Levi’s film scores and lo-fi punk.

The choreography feeds off methodologies for constructing thriller-like suspense – without delivering a traditional resolution. Borrowing the logic of a welding workshop, Stainton banks on activities that require live negotiation and decision making. Drawing from time-based notions of being “caught in the act” and “on tenterhooks,” they explore how suspense as a rumbling undercurrent has the potential to punctuate fixed identity constructions. Haunting, time-stretching, absurd.