Thinking Through Movement and Live Practices

Children & youth

Jan 9

Who: Bergen Kunsthall

What: Eve Stainton’s Dykegeist - Final part of the series Knowing We Won’t Have Each Other Forever.

Where: Bergen

Project period: 2023

Web: Bergen Kunsthall

Eve Stainton’s Dykegeist is the final part of Bergen Kunsthall’s series Knowing We Won’t Have Each Other Forever that takes queer realities and ideas of the ephemeral as its departure point.

Across four projects – Cruising Utopia, Echoic Choir by Stine Janvin & Ula Sickle, Tygapaw, Dykegeist by Eve Stainton - they explore the possibilities of alternative world-making, thinking through movement and live practices. The experiential, more sensory character of this art form, and its ephemerality, opens new contemporary perspectives on intersectionality.

The project plays around with temporalities, alter realities, producing new takes on the present as a means of coming together and finding ways of exercising freedom. A moving target, the ever-changing idea of queerness is hard to aim at. To move, to dance, to flounder is to shake off labels – challenging viewers’ expectations and pre-assumptions of the straight linear narratives – and reshaping the overall understanding of what is considered possible.

Dykegeist is a choreographic work from Manchester-born London-based artist and performance maker Eve Stainton—with a live sound world conceived by musician Mica Levi. Dykegeist unravels and complicates the archetypal narratives assigned to the lesbian predator creature. During the current of the evening, aesthetics will shift between a supernatural gothic thriller, a 90’s sci-fi spider lair, a haunted Manchester club scene, an abstract and warping horror-scape, a social situation to discuss threat/the phobic/ consent/ otherness, choreography and suspended encounters, gateways gravel grunge, emptiness and charged-ness.

Dykegeist unravels and complicates the archetypal narratives assigned to the lesbian predator creature - a patriarchal stereotype mobilised to continue the oppression of marginalised sexualities, to uphold white/cis/straightness. It includes words like butch, hungry, greedy, which in history have been reclaimed, self identified and empowering. This research informs the work that celebrates masc lesbian culture and with a focus on the gender non-conforming (GNC) lesbian experience. The performance is accompanied by a sound world composed by Mica Levi.