Forging Meaning: Eve Stainton on Welding, Queerness and Live Work

When artist and choreographer Eve Stainton talks about welding, they do it with the same precision and charge that runs through their stage work. “Welding is potent for me in so many ways,” they say, “its strong alchemical presence, its extreme theatricality, its capacity for danger, excitement, drama, power and thrill.” It’s the sort of language you might expect from a sculptor – but in Stainton’s world, molten metal and moving bodies belong to the same choreography.

This month, they bring Impact Driver to Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Warehouse: a multidisciplinary performance built on sound, fabrication and negotiation. It’s part of an international tour co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells, ICA, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne. Equal parts construction site and dance floor, the piece explores how suspense, collaboration and queerness might all be forged, literally, in the same heat.

Beginning with the spark

Asked where Impact Driver began, Stainton rewinds to the pandemic and a personal reckoning with their dance past. “I was reflecting on the kinds of performance projects and dance work I’d been involved with to date,” they recall, “tracing all the way back to being a recently graduated performer.”

That reflection revealed a gap. “I felt a strong desire to be part of a space where the movement language isn’t finding common ground through vocabularies of formal dance training,” they explain. “This coincided with me learning how to weld at London Sculpture Workshop.” The discovery of welding — both process and atmosphere — cracked open a new vocabulary. “I started to become curious about what manual labour, metal work, specifically welding could offer a performance context,” Stainton says.

The pull was immediate: the heat, the risk, the ritual. “The masculine energy found there and the natural theatricality and danger of the materials, I found all of this inspiring to bring to a performance with a group of performers who aren’t male assigned but have a relationship to masculinity.”

That curiosity became Impact Driver: an environment of steel frames and suspended garments, occupied by performers Tink Flaherty, Karima Francis, Wet Mess, Romeo Roxman Gatt, Charlotte Valentine and Stainton themself. As the piece unfolds, hooks are welded and linked into a chain; everything that happens — from movement to sound — has to be built live in front of us.

“An intimacy and a thrill through the liveness of this encounter… there’s a lot at stake.”

The sound of tension

Welding’s noise, Stainton realised, wasn’t something to hide beneath music but to fold into it. Collaborating with experimental musicians Leisha Thomas and Mica Levi, they developed a sound world that oscillates between distortion and intimacy. “Mica, Leisha and I get excited when not all the elements are on the same track pointing in the same emotional direction,” Stainton says. “New meanings can be made and something gets subverted.”

The soundscape became a structure for suspense – “an eeking out of time and setting up of expectations that may not be fulfilled,” as they put it. For Stainton, suspense isn’t only theatrical. “The idea of a state not having a fixed end-point,” they explain, “where the kind of suspense being activated is theatrical and thriller-like.” In performance, that translates to a chemistry between artists and audience, “an intimacy and a thrill through the liveness of this encounter… there’s a lot at stake.”

The long reheating

By the time Impact Driver reaches Fruitmarket, it will have lived several lives on the road. After a year-long pause between tour periods, Stainton calls this phase “a returning to” the work. “There are three new performers who are meeting the work for the first time,” they say, “which has kept things feeling fresh and brought new discoveries to the existing work and team.” Touring, they admit, is “a conundrum — how to be engaged live with the research every time, how to continue finding meanings through gestures you’ve done a million times.”

For Stainton, that problem is also the point. “The work being live is helpful for that,” they note. “The subtle shifts and changes that liveness offers helps me… It’s a privilege to still be invited to share the work, and to connect to the collaborators through different things changing in their lives.”

Stillness and slow revelation

Even in the heat of Impact Driver, stillness remains one of Stainton’s most powerful tools. In earlier works like The Joystick and The Reins, they used minimal motion to reveal social and emotional depth. “I became really interested in this idea of hyper zooming in in order to reveal something deeper that might not be apparent at surface level,” they say. “To give time to meaning arriving and reflection, slowing down the process of something being ‘understood’ as an end point.”

That reluctance to resolve meaning is political as much as aesthetic. “I find it creatively very satisfying to offer hints or codes to a story or symbolic references but not the full didactic narrative,” Stainton continues. “The viewer has to fill in blanks continuously and draw on their own ideas or projections… which ultimately reveals their own conditioned ideologies.” They connect that process to a broader critique of visibility: how identities are seen as “a threat in the public realm,” and how such ideas are “systemically built over a long period of time.”

Audiences as collaborators

Participation has long been part of Stainton’s work. They see it as a way to make spectators visible to themselves. “I’ve been interested in audience participation as a medium in itself for quite some time now,” they reflect. “An earlier work, Dykegeist (ICA, 2021), based its entire structure on individual people carrying out simple tasks with me in close proximity… making visible the absurdity of our collaborations, as well as the absurdity of stereotyping in general.”

That experiment developed further in The Joystick and The Reins, which examined how people become labelled as threats. “Audience members are invited to carry out specific tasks with specific objects that all have a relationship to the idea of ‘threat’,” Stainton explains. “There’s a moment where six audience members disappear into a side room for a rehearsal… who later appear carrying shield-like objects and perform a shield choreography informed by riot police formations.”

“I take the participation element very seriously… Everyone is in on the message, no-one is becoming the brunt of a joke.”

The collaboration is careful, never exploitative. “I take the participation element very seriously,” they say. “Everyone is in on the message, no-one is becoming the brunt of a joke. They are aware that they are representing things in order to examine or take a closer look.”

Garments, labour and queer texture

The welding motif extends to costume, where designer Ella Boucht reworks protective gear into detachable outfits that performers peel away as the welding ends – a gesture that plays with “stereotypes of masculinity and codes of expression.” Stainton sees such design choices as part of a broader search for “other queer textures.” “Feeling increasing discomfort around the idea of a singular queer aesthetic,” they explain, “I’ve started to open a space for other queer textures.”

This openness threads through their process. “Dance school trained me to be a vessel for a choreographer and to leave my personal life stuff at the door,” they say. “I’m dealing with the fundamental aspects of relating, how to negotiate in the face of adversity and connect through difference.” That negotiation happens not only between bodies but between disciplines: welding, sound, choreography, and the unplanned rhythms of a live event.

For Stainton, it’s in those relationships that performance finds its charge. “I believe in the transformative power of live work,” they say, “its dealings with live relationships, and live negotiation.”

Meaning under construction

Even after years of touring and reshaping, Impact Driver resists the idea of being finished. Stainton seems to thrive on the instability. They often talk about building performances that “set up expectations that may not be fulfilled,” and the work’s structure – chains accumulating, tasks negotiated, steel cooling – mirrors that refusal to settle. Each night’s outcome depends on what happens between the people in the room.

They describe that volatility not as risk but as truth. “I’m dealing with the fundamental aspects of relating,” they say, “how to negotiate in the face of adversity and connect through difference.” In Impact Driver, that negotiation becomes choreography, welding becomes dialogue, and suspense becomes a way of staying alive to possibility.

Asked what keeps them returning to the piece, Stainton doesn’t hesitate. “I get excited when something is felt from the work, but it isn’t didactic,” they say. “There’s space to create your own meaning as a viewer. That’s where the real chemistry is – in what’s still unmade.”

All Images: Anne Tetzlaff

Impact Driver tours to Fruitmarket Warehouse, Edinburgh, on 18 October 2025, before continuing to Cambridge Junction in November.
Co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells, ICA, Take Me Somewhere, Wysing Arts Centre and Dansehallerne.