Eve Stainton

About the research

During my residency with Fabric, I will begin research for a new large-scale group performance, exploring the manual labour of bricklaying. At the centre of the process is the construction and dismantling of a concrete wall, interested in how ideas of threat and masculinity are socially constructed, appearing immovable.  

The research will bring together a group of men whose experiences of masculinity are often marginalised — including working-class men, trans men, and men who have previously been incarcerated — alongside professional performers.  

I will explore what choreographic vocabularies emerge when people carry heavy weight together, mix and spread cement, apply force and submit, assemble something concrete and fixed, and take it apart again. Interested in how the profession of manual labour can be brought into a choreographic performance to learn about shared labour, resistance, care and social issues.  

About Eve Stainton

Eve Stainton is an artist and choreographer born in Manchester and living in London, UK. They create multi-disciplinary performances that involve movement practices, live manual labour, digital collage, and other invisible forces like drama and suspense. Their research is rooted in community, interested in how differently marginalised people experience and come into relationship with power structures and societal conventions. Often working with codes or tropes of gender, class and threat, their work stages clunky physical negotiations and reveals ‘behind the scenes’ mechanisms of working together to show a kind of reality that isn’t seamless. 

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Image by Jack Hogan