Artist and choreographer Eve Stainton presents their new choreographic performance, The Joystick and The Reins, accompanied by Ennio Morricone’s haunting score for The Thing (1982).
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 that never arrive at a fixed point, the solo figure and the scene itself become a site for the audience’s own projections. Referencing ideas of power, dominance, perpetrator, victim, threat and interpretation.
Influences for The Joystick and The Reins include historical reenactments, police and riot arrest imagery, and 1980s ‘Crime Watch’ episodes, examining what it means to reconstruct a theatrical scene that draws on truth, and how societal constructs keep people ‘at risk’ of incarceration in a place of vulnerability.
Morricone’s powerful music finds resonance with Stainton’s mutual exploration of societal suspicion, psychological horror, and the devastating potential of individual isolation.
PART OF IPAF 2026
The performance is part of IPAF 2026, Warehouse9’s international performance festival.
IPAF festival is a vital extension of the organisation’s dedicated work to support and present LGBTQIA+ artists and cultural practitioners.
IPAF is a dynamic meeting place that creates opportunities for artistic development, live performances, and facilitates spaces for dialogue and community.
This year, the festival is co-produced with Dansehallerne and presents genre-bending work in Copenhagen that actively engages with identity politics, sexual expressions, and body representations. IPAF is founded on the strong belief that dance and performance can offer new perspectives and understandings of reality, inspire collective imagination, and advocate for better and more just futures.
Audience members will be invited to participate in simple tasks during the performance; any invitation can be declined.
Warehouse9
Warehouse9 (WH9) is a multidisciplinary arts and performance organisation that supports the development and presentation of work and ideas by LGBTQIA+ artists and cultural practitioners. We’re an organisation that cultivates new thinking and community, and creates space for queer art year-round.
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, welded steel/live welding, 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, revealing ‘behind the scenes’ mechanisms of working together to show a kind of reality that isn’t seamless.
Notable presentations include: ICA (UK), Tramway (UK), Venice Biennale performance programme in collaboration with Florence Peake (IT), Dansehallerne (DK), Block Universe (UK), Dampfzentrale (CH), Donaufestival (AT), My Wild Flag (SE), Le Guess Who? (NL), Bergen Kunsthall (NO), Bozar (BE), Nottingham Contemporary (UK), Crac Occitanie (FR), LCMF (UK), CCA Glasgow (UK), Tangente (CA), Audra Festival (LT), Rouyn-Noranda Biennale (CA), The Mount Without (UK).
