Choreographer and artist Eve Stainton will perform their new solo work The Joystick and The Reins as part of Bold Tendencies’ 2025 Live Events programme. A slow-motion interrogation and artist’s reconstruction, the show is inspired by police and riot arrest imagery and 1980s Crime Watch episodes. An orchestra accompanies Eve’s performance with Ennio Morricone’s seminal film score for ‘The Thing’. The Joystick and The Reins is co-commissioned by Bold Tendencies, Dansehallerne (DK), Transform, Possession Performance + Automation and The Place and supported by Arts Council England.
Eve Stainton is an artist and choreographer born in Manchester and living in London. Their research is rooted in community, and interested in how differently marginalised people come into relationship with power structures and societal conventions.
The Joystick and The Reins explores who is deemed to be, and those who decide what constitutes a ‘threat’ within society, exploring how marginalised groups have been instrumentalised through systems of oppression and authoritarianism.
Cycling through hyper-emotional states of intensity, the scene and solo figure become a site for the audience’s own projections. This becomes a choreographic practice of distortion, referencing ideas of power, dominance, perpetrator, victim, threat and interpretation.
The Joystick and The Reins is influenced by Stainton’s in-depth examination into historical reenactments, police and riot arrest imagery, and 1980s Crime Watch episodes. Imagery and scenes are committed to a ‘memory bank’ that Stainton draws on throughout each performance. In their slowed-down approach to choreographed movement, Eve Stainton is examining what it means to reconstruct a theatrical scene that draws on truth, and how societal constructs keep people ‘at risk’ of incarceration and in a place of vulnerability.
Eve Stainton said: “Within the movement practice, I’m drawing from a proliferation of images that I’ve collected to form a kind of reference bank. I’m then allowing these images to cycle through me, almost like a warped overlapping playlist. These references range from the body language of a person being forcefully arrested, to how a suspect is depicted in early Crime Watch episodes, to an aggressive football fan, or someone recoiling in fear.”
“I’ve been completely mesmerised by how there can be multiple perspectives on the same event, and what part inherent bias plays when reconstructing an act of ‘truth’. For me, the extreme slow motion is a way of working unconventionally with time, a way to give magnitude to tiny details and to show something being revealed, as though zooming in with a microscope.”
The accompanying music from Ennio Morricone’s seminal score for the science fiction horror film‘The Thing’ (1982), was selected to create resonance with Stainton’s mutual exploration of societal suspicion, psychological horror, and the devastating potential of individual isolation.
Eve Stainton said: “For the Bold Tendencies performance of The Joystick and The Reins,I will be working with a few selected audience members who will be choreographed to engage with me during the performance by placing objects around me and part-dressing me in particular items. The audience will be actively making decisions about what they are seeing, as well as how I might be represented. I’ve been interested in audience participation for several years, as a mode of opening conversations around how everyone in society has the capacity to be complicit in constructing and upholding societal discriminations, as well as having the capacity to dismantle them.
To have the opportunity to work with Bold Tendencies in such a unique and unconventional space for performance and the opportunity to collaborate with an orchestra is incredible for my practice.”
Eve Stainton’s work includes an ICA commission and international touring show Dykegeist, part of the Horizon showcase, and an artwork commissioned by BUILDHOLLYWOOD ‘All About Love’ that appeared on 20 billboards around Manchester. Eve is currently touring their multidisciplinary performance work ‘Impact Driver’ with live welding in the UK and Europe.
The Joystick and The Reins will be performed at Bold Tendencies, Peckham, London on Friday 15and Saturday 16 August at 7.30pm. Ticket prices are from £12.50. For more information, visit boldtendencies.com/programme