Eve stainton

The Joystick and The Reins

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.