Dykegeist by Eve Stainton
Stadsgårdsterminalen / Slussen
My Wild Flag presents Dykegeist, a new choreographic work from Manchester-born London- based artist Eve Stainton. With a sound world conceived and performed by musician Mica Levi.
Dykegeist is interested in unravelling and complicating the archetypal narratives assigned to the lesbian predator creature. During the live event, aesthetics shift between a supernatural gothic thriller, a 90’s sci-fi spider lair, a haunted Manchester club scene, an abstract horror-scape, gateways gravel grunge, a social situation to discuss threat/ the phobic/ consent, emptiness and charged-ness.
Stainton understands the audience as active and contributing to what will become the world of Dykegeist – in flux and dependent on what/ who is in the room. The audience is asked to transition through different modes of presence: participant, onlooker, listener, collaborator, consensual prey. Extra attention and care will be given to make it comfortable to decline any invitation offered.
This research has brought Stainton back into connection with Manchester’s club scene and their affinity with Speed Garage sounds, originating in African American soul and exploding in the North of England in the 90’s. These sounds, spaces, dances became formative to Stainton’s understanding of the power of the queer somatic encounter and subversive necessity.
Continuing their formal concerns with clashing and co-occurrence, Stainton has created new collage pieces and welded steel sculptures that load, charge and occupy the moment.
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, welded steel, and other invisible forces like waves/imagination/drama, often psychedelic and clashing. Stainton is interested in co-occurence as a way to unravel essentialist thinking, with intent to create more expansive understandings of the lesbian identity, non-gender/variance, and perceptions of the ‘real’.
“What if'' echoes in the old ferry terminal of Birka cruises (RIP!), now turned into a new culture point named Stadsgårdsterminalen. For MWF 2022 we ask ourselves “Can a dance and performance festival become a site for speculating alternative futures?” Through the now, though the then? Through togetherness and through choreographic experiments that can only render us into the unknown.
My Wild Flag is a festival and a choreography, inviting international guests to Stockholm showing performance arts, danceworks and social choreographies in new spaces for thinking. Come for some self-pleasure, erotic togetherness, imagination, intuition and alternative histories occupying space and time together.
My Wild Flag is initiated, organised and curated by Karina Sarkissova and Pontus Pettersson. Graphic design by Michael Fowler. Documentation by Vladyslav Kamensky. Technical crew: Em, Jonatan Winbo and Lumination of Sweden.
With support from Stockholm City Council of Culture, Swedish Arts Council and Nordic Culture Point. For 2022, MWF is collaborating with Danscentrum Stockholm, Dansens Hus, Kollektivet Livet and Lumination of Sweden.