‘Eyes!’ is the shout, before protective masks are pulled down, tools are engaged and red-hot sparks begin to fly. This is welding staged live in Eve Stainton’s new work Impact Driver, performed at Glasgow’s Tramway on 26th October.A multi-disciplinary performance artist, Stainton was co-commissioned to create a new work by Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Impact Driver was first presented at the ICA in London in late September, and last week in Glasgow as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival – a performance festival in Glasgow from 13-28th October.
Impact Driver is an entrancing, multi-sensory work, infused with sex and suspense confidently straddling many different media, pulling together dance, theatre, live art and musical performance. Most strikingly, Stainton and their co-performers weld live to open the piece, the rising smoke, smell of metal and clanging sounds of industry making the act a theatrical one and also serving as a reminder that you’re witnessing a real-life ‘alchemical’ process, as Stainton describes it. Welding is not normally visible to the outsider, it’s a practice confined to the spaces of manufacturing, meaning that to witness it live feels otherworldly. Stainton’s presentation of welding alongside dance is transformative; solid is turned to liquid and back again, and we are transported into a new alternative landscape as the real and the performed become intertwined.
The thrill and literal heat of welding also serve to establish the overwhelming erotic atmosphere of Impact Driver: one by one, the performers emerge full of swagger from the “workshop” clutching a welded steel hook, before tenderly cooling their tool in a water bath with a fizz of steam. Welding is sex, and what follows is post-coital. Thinking of welding as a dangerous, precise and energetically charged act, it finds strong parallels in sexual S&M practices. The performers are clad in imaginatively alternative workwear: cowboy boots; a jacket with gloves attached like feathers up the sleeves; trousers akin to assless chaps. These costumes, in exaggerating methods of protection and exposure, read as quasi-bondage outfits. The heightened drama of the hazardous welding is accompanied by slow, lilting dance movements where the performers come together in embraces and tangles of limbs. At one point, the four welders knit their bodies together into a chain and slowly roll as one. There is tenderness here too to match the thrills.
If this is sex, it’s queer sex. Impact Driver is equally charged with a powerful feeling of queerness. The evocation of S&M practices, married with gentle entanglements, offers a non-normative experience of sexuality. The dancers are all transmasculine lesbians and, with their hyper-masculine workwear costumes and swagger, here perform a certain essence of this identity. The work in straddling different conventions of performance, combining ‘real’ acts of industry with contemporary dance, is queer in form too - Stainton’s interest in welding came from responding to, what they perceived as, a dominant aesthetic associated with recent queer performance practice: pastel colours and softness. In asking themselves ‘What if your physicality doesn’t relate to softness?’, Stainton turned to metal, which, being hard and brittle, ‘represented another kind of queerness’. The creation of this alternate landscape inhabited by these transgressive welders is memorably unique.
Impact Driver feels distinct from trends in queer performance practice in another way too. Nando Messias’ TransMission: Sissy TV, also performed in Take Me Somewhere, follows Messias as they rummage through their archive of clothes and costumes, each piece activating a memory of a previous performance of theirs. There is some good storytelling, but the work is flattened by verging into being didactic: the emphasis is on telling not showing, whereas Stainton’s work is powerful in exploring a queer existence without explicitly saying as such, the result being that the work’s meaning evades singular definition (an arguably queerer approach to meaning-making itself).
The “welder” character Stainton has constructed reads as a distinct trans, queer identity. In addition to the invocation of alternative sexual practices, the welding also brings a notable reference to class identity into play. With a history in the working-class communities of Northern England, welding as an activity invokes a certain experience of class and labour. In intersection with their queerness, Stainton’s “welder” is an exploration of an identity that is frequently sidelined in queer discourse and representation: the working-class transmasculine lesbian. Furthermore, the paralleling of manual labour and queer pleasure offers an effective representation of gender identity as work (or assignment), as famously theorised by Judith Butler. The emphasis on manual work also subtly nods to the hand being an erotically charged body part in lesbian sexuality.
Through constructing characters, an alternate landscape, and engagement with all the senses, Stainton makes a gesamtkunstwerk: a total spectacle. With its thrumming electric guitar and moody atmosphere, Impact Driver finds similarity in the gesamtkunstwerks of performance artist Anne Imhof. Famed for their model performers and hyper-cool aesthetic, Imhof’s works are vulnerable to accusations of reproducing the spectacle culture that they arguably seek to critique. One could argue that Impact Driver risks being experienced as a sensory-overloading spectacle too, without offering much substance beyond the sizzle of sex. However, it’s the unique and convincing exploration of queerness that undercuts this and retains the work’s strength: I’ve never seen welding like it.
Impact Driver is set to return to London next year.
‘Eyes!’ is the shout, before protective masks are pulled down, tools are engaged and red-hot sparks begin to fly. This is welding staged live in Eve Stainton’s new work Impact Driver, performed at Glasgow’s Tramway on 26th October.A multi-disciplinary performance artist, Stainton was co-commissioned to create a new work by Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Impact Driver was first presented at the ICA in London in late September, and last week in Glasgow as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival – a performance festival in Glasgow from 13-28th October.
Impact Driver is an entrancing, multi-sensory work, infused with sex and suspense confidently straddling many different media, pulling together dance, theatre, live art and musical performance. Most strikingly, Stainton and their co-performers weld live to open the piece, the rising smoke, smell of metal and clanging sounds of industry making the act a theatrical one and also serving as a reminder that you’re witnessing a real-life ‘alchemical’ process, as Stainton describes it. Welding is not normally visible to the outsider, it’s a practice confined to the spaces of manufacturing, meaning that to witness it live feels otherworldly. Stainton’s presentation of welding alongside dance is transformative; solid is turned to liquid and back again, and we are transported into a new alternative landscape as the real and the performed become intertwined.
The thrill and literal heat of welding also serve to establish the overwhelming erotic atmosphere of Impact Driver: one by one, the performers emerge full of swagger from the “workshop” clutching a welded steel hook, before tenderly cooling their tool in a water bath with a fizz of steam. Welding is sex, and what follows is post-coital. Thinking of welding as a dangerous, precise and energetically charged act, it finds strong parallels in sexual S&M practices. The performers are clad in imaginatively alternative workwear: cowboy boots; a jacket with gloves attached like feathers up the sleeves; trousers akin to assless chaps. These costumes, in exaggerating methods of protection and exposure, read as quasi-bondage outfits. The heightened drama of the hazardous welding is accompanied by slow, lilting dance movements where the performers come together in embraces and tangles of limbs. At one point, the four welders knit their bodies together into a chain and slowly roll as one. There is tenderness here too to match the thrills.
If this is sex, it’s queer sex. Impact Driver is equally charged with a powerful feeling of queerness. The evocation of S&M practices, married with gentle entanglements, offers a non-normative experience of sexuality. The dancers are all transmasculine lesbians and, with their hyper-masculine workwear costumes and swagger, here perform a certain essence of this identity. The work in straddling different conventions of performance, combining ‘real’ acts of industry with contemporary dance, is queer in form too - Stainton’s interest in welding came from responding to, what they perceived as, a dominant aesthetic associated with recent queer performance practice: pastel colours and softness. In asking themselves ‘What if your physicality doesn’t relate to softness?’, Stainton turned to metal, which, being hard and brittle, ‘represented another kind of queerness’. The creation of this alternate landscape inhabited by these transgressive welders is memorably unique.
Impact Driver feels distinct from trends in queer performance practice in another way too. Nando Messias’ TransMission: Sissy TV, also performed in Take Me Somewhere, follows Messias as they rummage through their archive of clothes and costumes, each piece activating a memory of a previous performance of theirs. There is some good storytelling, but the work is flattened by verging into being didactic: the emphasis is on telling not showing, whereas Stainton’s work is powerful in exploring a queer existence without explicitly saying as such, the result being that the work’s meaning evades singular definition (an arguably queerer approach to meaning-making itself).
The “welder” character Stainton has constructed reads as a distinct trans, queer identity. In addition to the invocation of alternative sexual practices, the welding also brings a notable reference to class identity into play. With a history in the working-class communities of Northern England, welding as an activity invokes a certain experience of class and labour. In intersection with their queerness, Stainton’s “welder” is an exploration of an identity that is frequently sidelined in queer discourse and representation: the working-class transmasculine lesbian. Furthermore, the paralleling of manual labour and queer pleasure offers an effective representation of gender identity as work (or assignment), as famously theorised by Judith Butler. The emphasis on manual work also subtly nods to the hand being an erotically charged body part in lesbian sexuality.
Through constructing characters, an alternate landscape, and engagement with all the senses, Stainton makes a gesamtkunstwerk: a total spectacle. With its thrumming electric guitar and moody atmosphere, Impact Driver finds similarity in the gesamtkunstwerks of performance artist Anne Imhof. Famed for their model performers and hyper-cool aesthetic, Imhof’s works are vulnerable to accusations of reproducing the spectacle culture that they arguably seek to critique. One could argue that Impact Driver risks being experienced as a sensory-overloading spectacle too, without offering much substance beyond the sizzle of sex. However, it’s the unique and convincing exploration of queerness that undercuts this and retains the work’s strength: I’ve never seen welding like it.
Impact Driver is set to return to London next year.
‘Eyes!’ is the shout, before protective masks are pulled down, tools are engaged and red-hot sparks begin to fly. This is welding staged live in Eve Stainton’s new work Impact Driver, performed at Glasgow’s Tramway on 26th October.A multi-disciplinary performance artist, Stainton was co-commissioned to create a new work by Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Impact Driver was first presented at the ICA in London in late September, and last week in Glasgow as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival – a performance festival in Glasgow from 13-28th October.
Impact Driver is an entrancing, multi-sensory work, infused with sex and suspense confidently straddling many different media, pulling together dance, theatre, live art and musical performance. Most strikingly, Stainton and their co-performers weld live to open the piece, the rising smoke, smell of metal and clanging sounds of industry making the act a theatrical one and also serving as a reminder that you’re witnessing a real-life ‘alchemical’ process, as Stainton describes it. Welding is not normally visible to the outsider, it’s a practice confined to the spaces of manufacturing, meaning that to witness it live feels otherworldly. Stainton’s presentation of welding alongside dance is transformative; solid is turned to liquid and back again, and we are transported into a new alternative landscape as the real and the performed become intertwined.
The thrill and literal heat of welding also serve to establish the overwhelming erotic atmosphere of Impact Driver: one by one, the performers emerge full of swagger from the “workshop” clutching a welded steel hook, before tenderly cooling their tool in a water bath with a fizz of steam. Welding is sex, and what follows is post-coital. Thinking of welding as a dangerous, precise and energetically charged act, it finds strong parallels in sexual S&M practices. The performers are clad in imaginatively alternative workwear: cowboy boots; a jacket with gloves attached like feathers up the sleeves; trousers akin to assless chaps. These costumes, in exaggerating methods of protection and exposure, read as quasi-bondage outfits. The heightened drama of the hazardous welding is accompanied by slow, lilting dance movements where the performers come together in embraces and tangles of limbs. At one point, the four welders knit their bodies together into a chain and slowly roll as one. There is tenderness here too to match the thrills.
If this is sex, it’s queer sex. Impact Driver is equally charged with a powerful feeling of queerness. The evocation of S&M practices, married with gentle entanglements, offers a non-normative experience of sexuality. The dancers are all transmasculine lesbians and, with their hyper-masculine workwear costumes and swagger, here perform a certain essence of this identity. The work in straddling different conventions of performance, combining ‘real’ acts of industry with contemporary dance, is queer in form too - Stainton’s interest in welding came from responding to, what they perceived as, a dominant aesthetic associated with recent queer performance practice: pastel colours and softness. In asking themselves ‘What if your physicality doesn’t relate to softness?’, Stainton turned to metal, which, being hard and brittle, ‘represented another kind of queerness’. The creation of this alternate landscape inhabited by these transgressive welders is memorably unique.
Impact Driver feels distinct from trends in queer performance practice in another way too. Nando Messias’ TransMission: Sissy TV, also performed in Take Me Somewhere, follows Messias as they rummage through their archive of clothes and costumes, each piece activating a memory of a previous performance of theirs. There is some good storytelling, but the work is flattened by verging into being didactic: the emphasis is on telling not showing, whereas Stainton’s work is powerful in exploring a queer existence without explicitly saying as such, the result being that the work’s meaning evades singular definition (an arguably queerer approach to meaning-making itself).
The “welder” character Stainton has constructed reads as a distinct trans, queer identity. In addition to the invocation of alternative sexual practices, the welding also brings a notable reference to class identity into play. With a history in the working-class communities of Northern England, welding as an activity invokes a certain experience of class and labour. In intersection with their queerness, Stainton’s “welder” is an exploration of an identity that is frequently sidelined in queer discourse and representation: the working-class transmasculine lesbian. Furthermore, the paralleling of manual labour and queer pleasure offers an effective representation of gender identity as work (or assignment), as famously theorised by Judith Butler. The emphasis on manual work also subtly nods to the hand being an erotically charged body part in lesbian sexuality.
Through constructing characters, an alternate landscape, and engagement with all the senses, Stainton makes a gesamtkunstwerk: a total spectacle. With its thrumming electric guitar and moody atmosphere, Impact Driver finds similarity in the gesamtkunstwerks of performance artist Anne Imhof. Famed for their model performers and hyper-cool aesthetic, Imhof’s works are vulnerable to accusations of reproducing the spectacle culture that they arguably seek to critique. One could argue that Impact Driver risks being experienced as a sensory-overloading spectacle too, without offering much substance beyond the sizzle of sex. However, it’s the unique and convincing exploration of queerness that undercuts this and retains the work’s strength: I’ve never seen welding like it.
Impact Driver is set to return to London next year.
‘Eyes!’ is the shout, before protective masks are pulled down, tools are engaged and red-hot sparks begin to fly. This is welding staged live in Eve Stainton’s new work Impact Driver, performed at Glasgow’s Tramway on 26th October.A multi-disciplinary performance artist, Stainton was co-commissioned to create a new work by Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Impact Driver was first presented at the ICA in London in late September, and last week in Glasgow as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival – a performance festival in Glasgow from 13-28th October.
Impact Driver is an entrancing, multi-sensory work, infused with sex and suspense confidently straddling many different media, pulling together dance, theatre, live art and musical performance. Most strikingly, Stainton and their co-performers weld live to open the piece, the rising smoke, smell of metal and clanging sounds of industry making the act a theatrical one and also serving as a reminder that you’re witnessing a real-life ‘alchemical’ process, as Stainton describes it. Welding is not normally visible to the outsider, it’s a practice confined to the spaces of manufacturing, meaning that to witness it live feels otherworldly. Stainton’s presentation of welding alongside dance is transformative; solid is turned to liquid and back again, and we are transported into a new alternative landscape as the real and the performed become intertwined.
The thrill and literal heat of welding also serve to establish the overwhelming erotic atmosphere of Impact Driver: one by one, the performers emerge full of swagger from the “workshop” clutching a welded steel hook, before tenderly cooling their tool in a water bath with a fizz of steam. Welding is sex, and what follows is post-coital. Thinking of welding as a dangerous, precise and energetically charged act, it finds strong parallels in sexual S&M practices. The performers are clad in imaginatively alternative workwear: cowboy boots; a jacket with gloves attached like feathers up the sleeves; trousers akin to assless chaps. These costumes, in exaggerating methods of protection and exposure, read as quasi-bondage outfits. The heightened drama of the hazardous welding is accompanied by slow, lilting dance movements where the performers come together in embraces and tangles of limbs. At one point, the four welders knit their bodies together into a chain and slowly roll as one. There is tenderness here too to match the thrills.
If this is sex, it’s queer sex. Impact Driver is equally charged with a powerful feeling of queerness. The evocation of S&M practices, married with gentle entanglements, offers a non-normative experience of sexuality. The dancers are all transmasculine lesbians and, with their hyper-masculine workwear costumes and swagger, here perform a certain essence of this identity. The work in straddling different conventions of performance, combining ‘real’ acts of industry with contemporary dance, is queer in form too - Stainton’s interest in welding came from responding to, what they perceived as, a dominant aesthetic associated with recent queer performance practice: pastel colours and softness. In asking themselves ‘What if your physicality doesn’t relate to softness?’, Stainton turned to metal, which, being hard and brittle, ‘represented another kind of queerness’. The creation of this alternate landscape inhabited by these transgressive welders is memorably unique.
Impact Driver feels distinct from trends in queer performance practice in another way too. Nando Messias’ TransMission: Sissy TV, also performed in Take Me Somewhere, follows Messias as they rummage through their archive of clothes and costumes, each piece activating a memory of a previous performance of theirs. There is some good storytelling, but the work is flattened by verging into being didactic: the emphasis is on telling not showing, whereas Stainton’s work is powerful in exploring a queer existence without explicitly saying as such, the result being that the work’s meaning evades singular definition (an arguably queerer approach to meaning-making itself).
The “welder” character Stainton has constructed reads as a distinct trans, queer identity. In addition to the invocation of alternative sexual practices, the welding also brings a notable reference to class identity into play. With a history in the working-class communities of Northern England, welding as an activity invokes a certain experience of class and labour. In intersection with their queerness, Stainton’s “welder” is an exploration of an identity that is frequently sidelined in queer discourse and representation: the working-class transmasculine lesbian. Furthermore, the paralleling of manual labour and queer pleasure offers an effective representation of gender identity as work (or assignment), as famously theorised by Judith Butler. The emphasis on manual work also subtly nods to the hand being an erotically charged body part in lesbian sexuality.
Through constructing characters, an alternate landscape, and engagement with all the senses, Stainton makes a gesamtkunstwerk: a total spectacle. With its thrumming electric guitar and moody atmosphere, Impact Driver finds similarity in the gesamtkunstwerks of performance artist Anne Imhof. Famed for their model performers and hyper-cool aesthetic, Imhof’s works are vulnerable to accusations of reproducing the spectacle culture that they arguably seek to critique. One could argue that Impact Driver risks being experienced as a sensory-overloading spectacle too, without offering much substance beyond the sizzle of sex. However, it’s the unique and convincing exploration of queerness that undercuts this and retains the work’s strength: I’ve never seen welding like it.
Impact Driver is set to return to London next year.
‘Eyes!’ is the shout, before protective masks are pulled down, tools are engaged and red-hot sparks begin to fly. This is welding staged live in Eve Stainton’s new work Impact Driver, performed at Glasgow’s Tramway on 26th October.A multi-disciplinary performance artist, Stainton was co-commissioned to create a new work by Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Impact Driver was first presented at the ICA in London in late September, and last week in Glasgow as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival – a performance festival in Glasgow from 13-28th October.
Impact Driver is an entrancing, multi-sensory work, infused with sex and suspense confidently straddling many different media, pulling together dance, theatre, live art and musical performance. Most strikingly, Stainton and their co-performers weld live to open the piece, the rising smoke, smell of metal and clanging sounds of industry making the act a theatrical one and also serving as a reminder that you’re witnessing a real-life ‘alchemical’ process, as Stainton describes it. Welding is not normally visible to the outsider, it’s a practice confined to the spaces of manufacturing, meaning that to witness it live feels otherworldly. Stainton’s presentation of welding alongside dance is transformative; solid is turned to liquid and back again, and we are transported into a new alternative landscape as the real and the performed become intertwined.
The thrill and literal heat of welding also serve to establish the overwhelming erotic atmosphere of Impact Driver: one by one, the performers emerge full of swagger from the “workshop” clutching a welded steel hook, before tenderly cooling their tool in a water bath with a fizz of steam. Welding is sex, and what follows is post-coital. Thinking of welding as a dangerous, precise and energetically charged act, it finds strong parallels in sexual S&M practices. The performers are clad in imaginatively alternative workwear: cowboy boots; a jacket with gloves attached like feathers up the sleeves; trousers akin to assless chaps. These costumes, in exaggerating methods of protection and exposure, read as quasi-bondage outfits. The heightened drama of the hazardous welding is accompanied by slow, lilting dance movements where the performers come together in embraces and tangles of limbs. At one point, the four welders knit their bodies together into a chain and slowly roll as one. There is tenderness here too to match the thrills.
If this is sex, it’s queer sex. Impact Driver is equally charged with a powerful feeling of queerness. The evocation of S&M practices, married with gentle entanglements, offers a non-normative experience of sexuality. The dancers are all transmasculine lesbians and, with their hyper-masculine workwear costumes and swagger, here perform a certain essence of this identity. The work in straddling different conventions of performance, combining ‘real’ acts of industry with contemporary dance, is queer in form too - Stainton’s interest in welding came from responding to, what they perceived as, a dominant aesthetic associated with recent queer performance practice: pastel colours and softness. In asking themselves ‘What if your physicality doesn’t relate to softness?’, Stainton turned to metal, which, being hard and brittle, ‘represented another kind of queerness’. The creation of this alternate landscape inhabited by these transgressive welders is memorably unique.
Impact Driver feels distinct from trends in queer performance practice in another way too. Nando Messias’ TransMission: Sissy TV, also performed in Take Me Somewhere, follows Messias as they rummage through their archive of clothes and costumes, each piece activating a memory of a previous performance of theirs. There is some good storytelling, but the work is flattened by verging into being didactic: the emphasis is on telling not showing, whereas Stainton’s work is powerful in exploring a queer existence without explicitly saying as such, the result being that the work’s meaning evades singular definition (an arguably queerer approach to meaning-making itself).
The “welder” character Stainton has constructed reads as a distinct trans, queer identity. In addition to the invocation of alternative sexual practices, the welding also brings a notable reference to class identity into play. With a history in the working-class communities of Northern England, welding as an activity invokes a certain experience of class and labour. In intersection with their queerness, Stainton’s “welder” is an exploration of an identity that is frequently sidelined in queer discourse and representation: the working-class transmasculine lesbian. Furthermore, the paralleling of manual labour and queer pleasure offers an effective representation of gender identity as work (or assignment), as famously theorised by Judith Butler. The emphasis on manual work also subtly nods to the hand being an erotically charged body part in lesbian sexuality.
Through constructing characters, an alternate landscape, and engagement with all the senses, Stainton makes a gesamtkunstwerk: a total spectacle. With its thrumming electric guitar and moody atmosphere, Impact Driver finds similarity in the gesamtkunstwerks of performance artist Anne Imhof. Famed for their model performers and hyper-cool aesthetic, Imhof’s works are vulnerable to accusations of reproducing the spectacle culture that they arguably seek to critique. One could argue that Impact Driver risks being experienced as a sensory-overloading spectacle too, without offering much substance beyond the sizzle of sex. However, it’s the unique and convincing exploration of queerness that undercuts this and retains the work’s strength: I’ve never seen welding like it.
Impact Driver is set to return to London next year.
‘Eyes!’ is the shout, before protective masks are pulled down, tools are engaged and red-hot sparks begin to fly. This is welding staged live in Eve Stainton’s new work Impact Driver, performed at Glasgow’s Tramway on 26th October.A multi-disciplinary performance artist, Stainton was co-commissioned to create a new work by Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Impact Driver was first presented at the ICA in London in late September, and last week in Glasgow as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival – a performance festival in Glasgow from 13-28th October.
Impact Driver is an entrancing, multi-sensory work, infused with sex and suspense confidently straddling many different media, pulling together dance, theatre, live art and musical performance. Most strikingly, Stainton and their co-performers weld live to open the piece, the rising smoke, smell of metal and clanging sounds of industry making the act a theatrical one and also serving as a reminder that you’re witnessing a real-life ‘alchemical’ process, as Stainton describes it. Welding is not normally visible to the outsider, it’s a practice confined to the spaces of manufacturing, meaning that to witness it live feels otherworldly. Stainton’s presentation of welding alongside dance is transformative; solid is turned to liquid and back again, and we are transported into a new alternative landscape as the real and the performed become intertwined.
The thrill and literal heat of welding also serve to establish the overwhelming erotic atmosphere of Impact Driver: one by one, the performers emerge full of swagger from the “workshop” clutching a welded steel hook, before tenderly cooling their tool in a water bath with a fizz of steam. Welding is sex, and what follows is post-coital. Thinking of welding as a dangerous, precise and energetically charged act, it finds strong parallels in sexual S&M practices. The performers are clad in imaginatively alternative workwear: cowboy boots; a jacket with gloves attached like feathers up the sleeves; trousers akin to assless chaps. These costumes, in exaggerating methods of protection and exposure, read as quasi-bondage outfits. The heightened drama of the hazardous welding is accompanied by slow, lilting dance movements where the performers come together in embraces and tangles of limbs. At one point, the four welders knit their bodies together into a chain and slowly roll as one. There is tenderness here too to match the thrills.
If this is sex, it’s queer sex. Impact Driver is equally charged with a powerful feeling of queerness. The evocation of S&M practices, married with gentle entanglements, offers a non-normative experience of sexuality. The dancers are all transmasculine lesbians and, with their hyper-masculine workwear costumes and swagger, here perform a certain essence of this identity. The work in straddling different conventions of performance, combining ‘real’ acts of industry with contemporary dance, is queer in form too - Stainton’s interest in welding came from responding to, what they perceived as, a dominant aesthetic associated with recent queer performance practice: pastel colours and softness. In asking themselves ‘What if your physicality doesn’t relate to softness?’, Stainton turned to metal, which, being hard and brittle, ‘represented another kind of queerness’. The creation of this alternate landscape inhabited by these transgressive welders is memorably unique.
Impact Driver feels distinct from trends in queer performance practice in another way too. Nando Messias’ TransMission: Sissy TV, also performed in Take Me Somewhere, follows Messias as they rummage through their archive of clothes and costumes, each piece activating a memory of a previous performance of theirs. There is some good storytelling, but the work is flattened by verging into being didactic: the emphasis is on telling not showing, whereas Stainton’s work is powerful in exploring a queer existence without explicitly saying as such, the result being that the work’s meaning evades singular definition (an arguably queerer approach to meaning-making itself).
The “welder” character Stainton has constructed reads as a distinct trans, queer identity. In addition to the invocation of alternative sexual practices, the welding also brings a notable reference to class identity into play. With a history in the working-class communities of Northern England, welding as an activity invokes a certain experience of class and labour. In intersection with their queerness, Stainton’s “welder” is an exploration of an identity that is frequently sidelined in queer discourse and representation: the working-class transmasculine lesbian. Furthermore, the paralleling of manual labour and queer pleasure offers an effective representation of gender identity as work (or assignment), as famously theorised by Judith Butler. The emphasis on manual work also subtly nods to the hand being an erotically charged body part in lesbian sexuality.
Through constructing characters, an alternate landscape, and engagement with all the senses, Stainton makes a gesamtkunstwerk: a total spectacle. With its thrumming electric guitar and moody atmosphere, Impact Driver finds similarity in the gesamtkunstwerks of performance artist Anne Imhof. Famed for their model performers and hyper-cool aesthetic, Imhof’s works are vulnerable to accusations of reproducing the spectacle culture that they arguably seek to critique. One could argue that Impact Driver risks being experienced as a sensory-overloading spectacle too, without offering much substance beyond the sizzle of sex. However, it’s the unique and convincing exploration of queerness that undercuts this and retains the work’s strength: I’ve never seen welding like it.
Impact Driver is set to return to London next year.
‘Eyes!’ is the shout, before protective masks are pulled down, tools are engaged and red-hot sparks begin to fly. This is welding staged live in Eve Stainton’s new work Impact Driver, performed at Glasgow’s Tramway on 26th October.A multi-disciplinary performance artist, Stainton was co-commissioned to create a new work by Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Impact Driver was first presented at the ICA in London in late September, and last week in Glasgow as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival – a performance festival in Glasgow from 13-28th October.
Impact Driver is an entrancing, multi-sensory work, infused with sex and suspense confidently straddling many different media, pulling together dance, theatre, live art and musical performance. Most strikingly, Stainton and their co-performers weld live to open the piece, the rising smoke, smell of metal and clanging sounds of industry making the act a theatrical one and also serving as a reminder that you’re witnessing a real-life ‘alchemical’ process, as Stainton describes it. Welding is not normally visible to the outsider, it’s a practice confined to the spaces of manufacturing, meaning that to witness it live feels otherworldly. Stainton’s presentation of welding alongside dance is transformative; solid is turned to liquid and back again, and we are transported into a new alternative landscape as the real and the performed become intertwined.
The thrill and literal heat of welding also serve to establish the overwhelming erotic atmosphere of Impact Driver: one by one, the performers emerge full of swagger from the “workshop” clutching a welded steel hook, before tenderly cooling their tool in a water bath with a fizz of steam. Welding is sex, and what follows is post-coital. Thinking of welding as a dangerous, precise and energetically charged act, it finds strong parallels in sexual S&M practices. The performers are clad in imaginatively alternative workwear: cowboy boots; a jacket with gloves attached like feathers up the sleeves; trousers akin to assless chaps. These costumes, in exaggerating methods of protection and exposure, read as quasi-bondage outfits. The heightened drama of the hazardous welding is accompanied by slow, lilting dance movements where the performers come together in embraces and tangles of limbs. At one point, the four welders knit their bodies together into a chain and slowly roll as one. There is tenderness here too to match the thrills.
If this is sex, it’s queer sex. Impact Driver is equally charged with a powerful feeling of queerness. The evocation of S&M practices, married with gentle entanglements, offers a non-normative experience of sexuality. The dancers are all transmasculine lesbians and, with their hyper-masculine workwear costumes and swagger, here perform a certain essence of this identity. The work in straddling different conventions of performance, combining ‘real’ acts of industry with contemporary dance, is queer in form too - Stainton’s interest in welding came from responding to, what they perceived as, a dominant aesthetic associated with recent queer performance practice: pastel colours and softness. In asking themselves ‘What if your physicality doesn’t relate to softness?’, Stainton turned to metal, which, being hard and brittle, ‘represented another kind of queerness’. The creation of this alternate landscape inhabited by these transgressive welders is memorably unique.
Impact Driver feels distinct from trends in queer performance practice in another way too. Nando Messias’ TransMission: Sissy TV, also performed in Take Me Somewhere, follows Messias as they rummage through their archive of clothes and costumes, each piece activating a memory of a previous performance of theirs. There is some good storytelling, but the work is flattened by verging into being didactic: the emphasis is on telling not showing, whereas Stainton’s work is powerful in exploring a queer existence without explicitly saying as such, the result being that the work’s meaning evades singular definition (an arguably queerer approach to meaning-making itself).
The “welder” character Stainton has constructed reads as a distinct trans, queer identity. In addition to the invocation of alternative sexual practices, the welding also brings a notable reference to class identity into play. With a history in the working-class communities of Northern England, welding as an activity invokes a certain experience of class and labour. In intersection with their queerness, Stainton’s “welder” is an exploration of an identity that is frequently sidelined in queer discourse and representation: the working-class transmasculine lesbian. Furthermore, the paralleling of manual labour and queer pleasure offers an effective representation of gender identity as work (or assignment), as famously theorised by Judith Butler. The emphasis on manual work also subtly nods to the hand being an erotically charged body part in lesbian sexuality.
Through constructing characters, an alternate landscape, and engagement with all the senses, Stainton makes a gesamtkunstwerk: a total spectacle. With its thrumming electric guitar and moody atmosphere, Impact Driver finds similarity in the gesamtkunstwerks of performance artist Anne Imhof. Famed for their model performers and hyper-cool aesthetic, Imhof’s works are vulnerable to accusations of reproducing the spectacle culture that they arguably seek to critique. One could argue that Impact Driver risks being experienced as a sensory-overloading spectacle too, without offering much substance beyond the sizzle of sex. However, it’s the unique and convincing exploration of queerness that undercuts this and retains the work’s strength: I’ve never seen welding like it.
Impact Driver is set to return to London next year.
‘Eyes!’ is the shout, before protective masks are pulled down, tools are engaged and red-hot sparks begin to fly. This is welding staged live in Eve Stainton’s new work Impact Driver, performed at Glasgow’s Tramway on 26th October.A multi-disciplinary performance artist, Stainton was co-commissioned to create a new work by Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Impact Driver was first presented at the ICA in London in late September, and last week in Glasgow as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival – a performance festival in Glasgow from 13-28th October.
Impact Driver is an entrancing, multi-sensory work, infused with sex and suspense confidently straddling many different media, pulling together dance, theatre, live art and musical performance. Most strikingly, Stainton and their co-performers weld live to open the piece, the rising smoke, smell of metal and clanging sounds of industry making the act a theatrical one and also serving as a reminder that you’re witnessing a real-life ‘alchemical’ process, as Stainton describes it. Welding is not normally visible to the outsider, it’s a practice confined to the spaces of manufacturing, meaning that to witness it live feels otherworldly. Stainton’s presentation of welding alongside dance is transformative; solid is turned to liquid and back again, and we are transported into a new alternative landscape as the real and the performed become intertwined.
The thrill and literal heat of welding also serve to establish the overwhelming erotic atmosphere of Impact Driver: one by one, the performers emerge full of swagger from the “workshop” clutching a welded steel hook, before tenderly cooling their tool in a water bath with a fizz of steam. Welding is sex, and what follows is post-coital. Thinking of welding as a dangerous, precise and energetically charged act, it finds strong parallels in sexual S&M practices. The performers are clad in imaginatively alternative workwear: cowboy boots; a jacket with gloves attached like feathers up the sleeves; trousers akin to assless chaps. These costumes, in exaggerating methods of protection and exposure, read as quasi-bondage outfits. The heightened drama of the hazardous welding is accompanied by slow, lilting dance movements where the performers come together in embraces and tangles of limbs. At one point, the four welders knit their bodies together into a chain and slowly roll as one. There is tenderness here too to match the thrills.
If this is sex, it’s queer sex. Impact Driver is equally charged with a powerful feeling of queerness. The evocation of S&M practices, married with gentle entanglements, offers a non-normative experience of sexuality. The dancers are all transmasculine lesbians and, with their hyper-masculine workwear costumes and swagger, here perform a certain essence of this identity. The work in straddling different conventions of performance, combining ‘real’ acts of industry with contemporary dance, is queer in form too - Stainton’s interest in welding came from responding to, what they perceived as, a dominant aesthetic associated with recent queer performance practice: pastel colours and softness. In asking themselves ‘What if your physicality doesn’t relate to softness?’, Stainton turned to metal, which, being hard and brittle, ‘represented another kind of queerness’. The creation of this alternate landscape inhabited by these transgressive welders is memorably unique.
Impact Driver feels distinct from trends in queer performance practice in another way too. Nando Messias’ TransMission: Sissy TV, also performed in Take Me Somewhere, follows Messias as they rummage through their archive of clothes and costumes, each piece activating a memory of a previous performance of theirs. There is some good storytelling, but the work is flattened by verging into being didactic: the emphasis is on telling not showing, whereas Stainton’s work is powerful in exploring a queer existence without explicitly saying as such, the result being that the work’s meaning evades singular definition (an arguably queerer approach to meaning-making itself).
The “welder” character Stainton has constructed reads as a distinct trans, queer identity. In addition to the invocation of alternative sexual practices, the welding also brings a notable reference to class identity into play. With a history in the working-class communities of Northern England, welding as an activity invokes a certain experience of class and labour. In intersection with their queerness, Stainton’s “welder” is an exploration of an identity that is frequently sidelined in queer discourse and representation: the working-class transmasculine lesbian. Furthermore, the paralleling of manual labour and queer pleasure offers an effective representation of gender identity as work (or assignment), as famously theorised by Judith Butler. The emphasis on manual work also subtly nods to the hand being an erotically charged body part in lesbian sexuality.
Through constructing characters, an alternate landscape, and engagement with all the senses, Stainton makes a gesamtkunstwerk: a total spectacle. With its thrumming electric guitar and moody atmosphere, Impact Driver finds similarity in the gesamtkunstwerks of performance artist Anne Imhof. Famed for their model performers and hyper-cool aesthetic, Imhof’s works are vulnerable to accusations of reproducing the spectacle culture that they arguably seek to critique. One could argue that Impact Driver risks being experienced as a sensory-overloading spectacle too, without offering much substance beyond the sizzle of sex. However, it’s the unique and convincing exploration of queerness that undercuts this and retains the work’s strength: I’ve never seen welding like it.
Impact Driver is set to return to London next year.
‘Eyes!’ is the shout, before protective masks are pulled down, tools are engaged and red-hot sparks begin to fly. This is welding staged live in Eve Stainton’s new work Impact Driver, performed at Glasgow’s Tramway on 26th October.A multi-disciplinary performance artist, Stainton was co-commissioned to create a new work by Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Impact Driver was first presented at the ICA in London in late September, and last week in Glasgow as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival – a performance festival in Glasgow from 13-28th October.
Impact Driver is an entrancing, multi-sensory work, infused with sex and suspense confidently straddling many different media, pulling together dance, theatre, live art and musical performance. Most strikingly, Stainton and their co-performers weld live to open the piece, the rising smoke, smell of metal and clanging sounds of industry making the act a theatrical one and also serving as a reminder that you’re witnessing a real-life ‘alchemical’ process, as Stainton describes it. Welding is not normally visible to the outsider, it’s a practice confined to the spaces of manufacturing, meaning that to witness it live feels otherworldly. Stainton’s presentation of welding alongside dance is transformative; solid is turned to liquid and back again, and we are transported into a new alternative landscape as the real and the performed become intertwined.
The thrill and literal heat of welding also serve to establish the overwhelming erotic atmosphere of Impact Driver: one by one, the performers emerge full of swagger from the “workshop” clutching a welded steel hook, before tenderly cooling their tool in a water bath with a fizz of steam. Welding is sex, and what follows is post-coital. Thinking of welding as a dangerous, precise and energetically charged act, it finds strong parallels in sexual S&M practices. The performers are clad in imaginatively alternative workwear: cowboy boots; a jacket with gloves attached like feathers up the sleeves; trousers akin to assless chaps. These costumes, in exaggerating methods of protection and exposure, read as quasi-bondage outfits. The heightened drama of the hazardous welding is accompanied by slow, lilting dance movements where the performers come together in embraces and tangles of limbs. At one point, the four welders knit their bodies together into a chain and slowly roll as one. There is tenderness here too to match the thrills.
If this is sex, it’s queer sex. Impact Driver is equally charged with a powerful feeling of queerness. The evocation of S&M practices, married with gentle entanglements, offers a non-normative experience of sexuality. The dancers are all transmasculine lesbians and, with their hyper-masculine workwear costumes and swagger, here perform a certain essence of this identity. The work in straddling different conventions of performance, combining ‘real’ acts of industry with contemporary dance, is queer in form too - Stainton’s interest in welding came from responding to, what they perceived as, a dominant aesthetic associated with recent queer performance practice: pastel colours and softness. In asking themselves ‘What if your physicality doesn’t relate to softness?’, Stainton turned to metal, which, being hard and brittle, ‘represented another kind of queerness’. The creation of this alternate landscape inhabited by these transgressive welders is memorably unique.
Impact Driver feels distinct from trends in queer performance practice in another way too. Nando Messias’ TransMission: Sissy TV, also performed in Take Me Somewhere, follows Messias as they rummage through their archive of clothes and costumes, each piece activating a memory of a previous performance of theirs. There is some good storytelling, but the work is flattened by verging into being didactic: the emphasis is on telling not showing, whereas Stainton’s work is powerful in exploring a queer existence without explicitly saying as such, the result being that the work’s meaning evades singular definition (an arguably queerer approach to meaning-making itself).
The “welder” character Stainton has constructed reads as a distinct trans, queer identity. In addition to the invocation of alternative sexual practices, the welding also brings a notable reference to class identity into play. With a history in the working-class communities of Northern England, welding as an activity invokes a certain experience of class and labour. In intersection with their queerness, Stainton’s “welder” is an exploration of an identity that is frequently sidelined in queer discourse and representation: the working-class transmasculine lesbian. Furthermore, the paralleling of manual labour and queer pleasure offers an effective representation of gender identity as work (or assignment), as famously theorised by Judith Butler. The emphasis on manual work also subtly nods to the hand being an erotically charged body part in lesbian sexuality.
Through constructing characters, an alternate landscape, and engagement with all the senses, Stainton makes a gesamtkunstwerk: a total spectacle. With its thrumming electric guitar and moody atmosphere, Impact Driver finds similarity in the gesamtkunstwerks of performance artist Anne Imhof. Famed for their model performers and hyper-cool aesthetic, Imhof’s works are vulnerable to accusations of reproducing the spectacle culture that they arguably seek to critique. One could argue that Impact Driver risks being experienced as a sensory-overloading spectacle too, without offering much substance beyond the sizzle of sex. However, it’s the unique and convincing exploration of queerness that undercuts this and retains the work’s strength: I’ve never seen welding like it.
Impact Driver is set to return to London next year.
‘Eyes!’ is the shout, before protective masks are pulled down, tools are engaged and red-hot sparks begin to fly. This is welding staged live in Eve Stainton’s new work Impact Driver, performed at Glasgow’s Tramway on 26th October.A multi-disciplinary performance artist, Stainton was co-commissioned to create a new work by Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Impact Driver was first presented at the ICA in London in late September, and last week in Glasgow as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival – a performance festival in Glasgow from 13-28th October.
Impact Driver is an entrancing, multi-sensory work, infused with sex and suspense confidently straddling many different media, pulling together dance, theatre, live art and musical performance. Most strikingly, Stainton and their co-performers weld live to open the piece, the rising smoke, smell of metal and clanging sounds of industry making the act a theatrical one and also serving as a reminder that you’re witnessing a real-life ‘alchemical’ process, as Stainton describes it. Welding is not normally visible to the outsider, it’s a practice confined to the spaces of manufacturing, meaning that to witness it live feels otherworldly. Stainton’s presentation of welding alongside dance is transformative; solid is turned to liquid and back again, and we are transported into a new alternative landscape as the real and the performed become intertwined.
The thrill and literal heat of welding also serve to establish the overwhelming erotic atmosphere of Impact Driver: one by one, the performers emerge full of swagger from the “workshop” clutching a welded steel hook, before tenderly cooling their tool in a water bath with a fizz of steam. Welding is sex, and what follows is post-coital. Thinking of welding as a dangerous, precise and energetically charged act, it finds strong parallels in sexual S&M practices. The performers are clad in imaginatively alternative workwear: cowboy boots; a jacket with gloves attached like feathers up the sleeves; trousers akin to assless chaps. These costumes, in exaggerating methods of protection and exposure, read as quasi-bondage outfits. The heightened drama of the hazardous welding is accompanied by slow, lilting dance movements where the performers come together in embraces and tangles of limbs. At one point, the four welders knit their bodies together into a chain and slowly roll as one. There is tenderness here too to match the thrills.
If this is sex, it’s queer sex. Impact Driver is equally charged with a powerful feeling of queerness. The evocation of S&M practices, married with gentle entanglements, offers a non-normative experience of sexuality. The dancers are all transmasculine lesbians and, with their hyper-masculine workwear costumes and swagger, here perform a certain essence of this identity. The work in straddling different conventions of performance, combining ‘real’ acts of industry with contemporary dance, is queer in form too - Stainton’s interest in welding came from responding to, what they perceived as, a dominant aesthetic associated with recent queer performance practice: pastel colours and softness. In asking themselves ‘What if your physicality doesn’t relate to softness?’, Stainton turned to metal, which, being hard and brittle, ‘represented another kind of queerness’. The creation of this alternate landscape inhabited by these transgressive welders is memorably unique.
Impact Driver feels distinct from trends in queer performance practice in another way too. Nando Messias’ TransMission: Sissy TV, also performed in Take Me Somewhere, follows Messias as they rummage through their archive of clothes and costumes, each piece activating a memory of a previous performance of theirs. There is some good storytelling, but the work is flattened by verging into being didactic: the emphasis is on telling not showing, whereas Stainton’s work is powerful in exploring a queer existence without explicitly saying as such, the result being that the work’s meaning evades singular definition (an arguably queerer approach to meaning-making itself).
The “welder” character Stainton has constructed reads as a distinct trans, queer identity. In addition to the invocation of alternative sexual practices, the welding also brings a notable reference to class identity into play. With a history in the working-class communities of Northern England, welding as an activity invokes a certain experience of class and labour. In intersection with their queerness, Stainton’s “welder” is an exploration of an identity that is frequently sidelined in queer discourse and representation: the working-class transmasculine lesbian. Furthermore, the paralleling of manual labour and queer pleasure offers an effective representation of gender identity as work (or assignment), as famously theorised by Judith Butler. The emphasis on manual work also subtly nods to the hand being an erotically charged body part in lesbian sexuality.
Through constructing characters, an alternate landscape, and engagement with all the senses, Stainton makes a gesamtkunstwerk: a total spectacle. With its thrumming electric guitar and moody atmosphere, Impact Driver finds similarity in the gesamtkunstwerks of performance artist Anne Imhof. Famed for their model performers and hyper-cool aesthetic, Imhof’s works are vulnerable to accusations of reproducing the spectacle culture that they arguably seek to critique. One could argue that Impact Driver risks being experienced as a sensory-overloading spectacle too, without offering much substance beyond the sizzle of sex. However, it’s the unique and convincing exploration of queerness that undercuts this and retains the work’s strength: I’ve never seen welding like it.
Impact Driver is set to return to London next year.
‘Eyes!’ is the shout, before protective masks are pulled down, tools are engaged and red-hot sparks begin to fly. This is welding staged live in Eve Stainton’s new work Impact Driver, performed at Glasgow’s Tramway on 26th October.A multi-disciplinary performance artist, Stainton was co-commissioned to create a new work by Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Impact Driver was first presented at the ICA in London in late September, and last week in Glasgow as part of Take Me Somewhere Festival – a performance festival in Glasgow from 13-28th October.
Impact Driver is an entrancing, multi-sensory work, infused with sex and suspense confidently straddling many different media, pulling together dance, theatre, live art and musical performance. Most strikingly, Stainton and their co-performers weld live to open the piece, the rising smoke, smell of metal and clanging sounds of industry making the act a theatrical one and also serving as a reminder that you’re witnessing a real-life ‘alchemical’ process, as Stainton describes it. Welding is not normally visible to the outsider, it’s a practice confined to the spaces of manufacturing, meaning that to witness it live feels otherworldly. Stainton’s presentation of welding alongside dance is transformative; solid is turned to liquid and back again, and we are transported into a new alternative landscape as the real and the performed become intertwined.
The thrill and literal heat of welding also serve to establish the overwhelming erotic atmosphere of Impact Driver: one by one, the performers emerge full of swagger from the “workshop” clutching a welded steel hook, before tenderly cooling their tool in a water bath with a fizz of steam. Welding is sex, and what follows is post-coital. Thinking of welding as a dangerous, precise and energetically charged act, it finds strong parallels in sexual S&M practices. The performers are clad in imaginatively alternative workwear: cowboy boots; a jacket with gloves attached like feathers up the sleeves; trousers akin to assless chaps. These costumes, in exaggerating methods of protection and exposure, read as quasi-bondage outfits. The heightened drama of the hazardous welding is accompanied by slow, lilting dance movements where the performers come together in embraces and tangles of limbs. At one point, the four welders knit their bodies together into a chain and slowly roll as one. There is tenderness here too to match the thrills.
If this is sex, it’s queer sex. Impact Driver is equally charged with a powerful feeling of queerness. The evocation of S&M practices, married with gentle entanglements, offers a non-normative experience of sexuality. The dancers are all transmasculine lesbians and, with their hyper-masculine workwear costumes and swagger, here perform a certain essence of this identity. The work in straddling different conventions of performance, combining ‘real’ acts of industry with contemporary dance, is queer in form too - Stainton’s interest in welding came from responding to, what they perceived as, a dominant aesthetic associated with recent queer performance practice: pastel colours and softness. In asking themselves ‘What if your physicality doesn’t relate to softness?’, Stainton turned to metal, which, being hard and brittle, ‘represented another kind of queerness’. The creation of this alternate landscape inhabited by these transgressive welders is memorably unique.
Impact Driver feels distinct from trends in queer performance practice in another way too. Nando Messias’ TransMission: Sissy TV, also performed in Take Me Somewhere, follows Messias as they rummage through their archive of clothes and costumes, each piece activating a memory of a previous performance of theirs. There is some good storytelling, but the work is flattened by verging into being didactic: the emphasis is on telling not showing, whereas Stainton’s work is powerful in exploring a queer existence without explicitly saying as such, the result being that the work’s meaning evades singular definition (an arguably queerer approach to meaning-making itself).
The “welder” character Stainton has constructed reads as a distinct trans, queer identity. In addition to the invocation of alternative sexual practices, the welding also brings a notable reference to class identity into play. With a history in the working-class communities of Northern England, welding as an activity invokes a certain experience of class and labour. In intersection with their queerness, Stainton’s “welder” is an exploration of an identity that is frequently sidelined in queer discourse and representation: the working-class transmasculine lesbian. Furthermore, the paralleling of manual labour and queer pleasure offers an effective representation of gender identity as work (or assignment), as famously theorised by Judith Butler. The emphasis on manual work also subtly nods to the hand being an erotically charged body part in lesbian sexuality.
Through constructing characters, an alternate landscape, and engagement with all the senses, Stainton makes a gesamtkunstwerk: a total spectacle. With its thrumming electric guitar and moody atmosphere, Impact Driver finds similarity in the gesamtkunstwerks of performance artist Anne Imhof. Famed for their model performers and hyper-cool aesthetic, Imhof’s works are vulnerable to accusations of reproducing the spectacle culture that they arguably seek to critique. One could argue that Impact Driver risks being experienced as a sensory-overloading spectacle too, without offering much substance beyond the sizzle of sex. However, it’s the unique and convincing exploration of queerness that undercuts this and retains the work’s strength: I’ve never seen welding like it.
Impact Driver is set to return to London next year.
