Eve Stainton’s unhurried study of surveillance and suppression is brutally hypnotic.
The Joystick and The Reins is a new, mostly solo work from Mancunian performance artist Eve Stainton premiering at Bold Tendencies in Peckham. The arts centre’s unique architecture as a converted multi-storey car park provides the perfect location for a work that seeks to investigate authoritarianism and the construction of threat.
Stainton moves at an immensely slow pace. They melt between various anguished positions: pointing a finger derisively, pumping fists in the air like a football ultra, cowering into the floor. It’s deceptive in its simplicity, but demanding on the body. Each tremble and twitch grows wearier through the hour long meditation.
A heavy tension pervades the work with a live rendition of Ennio Morricone’s dread-filled score for the 1981 body horror classic The Thing, courtesy of the Sinfonia Smith Square. This union of leaden movement and eery music makes for a rather stifling and uncomfortable viewing experience — particularly during a clammy heatwave. Over the course of the hour Stainton is increasingly weighed down by urban detritus and objects of surveillance. An empty jerry can is attached to a conference phone wire belt around the waist. They carry around a tyre while a CCTV camera is duct-taped onto their wrist. The plants in the audience are totally pedestrian, almost humdrum in their manner, as they burden Stainton with more weight.
In a time when protest in Britain is becoming increasingly fraught — one only needs to see the Tory and Labour governments’ successive attempts to clamp down on ‘disruptive’ protest — The Joystick and The Reins feels hotly relevant. It is a work that finds itself in the wake of what has been a year of protest, with the rise of right-wing nationalist demonstrations across the UK and the arrest of hundreds of protestors in support of the now proscribed Palestine Action. London saw its largest ever demonstration in support of Trans rights only a month ago. The city’s deep ties to protest and government surveillance serves as a figurative and literal backdrop to the work; the towering skyline is in plain view from the building.
Inspired by Crime Watch episodes and footage from riots, Stainton’s breakdown from hooliganistic boogeyman to human puddle is a compelling, gruelling watch. What really draws us in is the atmosphere: the harsh edges of the concrete space in halogen lighting, the snarl of the trains passing through Peckham Rye, Morricone’s score blending with echoing speakers from the streets. The complicity of the bystander is especially interesting. Construction workers do odd jobs and stage hands direct each other on walkie talkies in plain view of the audience, all while Stainton continues to squirm like a tortured soul in limbo.
These slow-burn thrills contribute to the magnetism of The Joystick and The Reins. Stainton’s statuesque movement is store with a vulnerability and humanity that has us wishing for their torture to end, yet we find ourselves hypnotised by their suffering — you almost feel a little morally stained for being so hooked.