Excerpts from CROW / Pigeons
Please note, this event is included in the Undisciplined Festival Pass. For just £35 you gain access to all Undisciplined events taking place at The Dance Space, a £10 saving compared to buying each ticket individually. There are only 50 Undisciplined Festival Passes available.
Following a residency week at South East Dance, Julie Cunningham & Company offer an insight into new works, Pigeons and CROW.
“Marginalised people find a way to keep moving and living, as pigeons and crows do within the urban environment. They carve lives around the exclusion and hostile environment. In these two works we relate to outsiders and invisibility - applicable universally, felt painfully and personally.” Jules
Pigeons and CROW are connected by the composers and performers Julius Eastman and Pauline Oliveros, who worked from the 1960s onwards. Each of their work touched on themes of queerness, and they experienced marginalisation based on race, sexuality and mental illness.
CROW is a reimagining of a performance between Pauline Oliveros and Julius Eastman that happened nearly fifty years ago in New York. Drawing on those experiments to move aside from meticulous, technical choreography, Jules and collaborators explore a more spacious world of responsive ritual, symbolism and connected solitude, qualities associated with the crow. With a sound score by JD Samson (Le Tigre) and design by Julie Verhoeven, Jules and Harry perform, not to re-create what has been, but for what might be needed right now.
Pigeons, by contrast, is irritated by its own relentlessness - the company, dance non-stop to Eastman’s extraordinary 30-minute composition, Gay Guerilla, from 1979. Working with pigeon groupings and behaviour, the dancers explore ways of being alone and together, disruption and distraction.
Stay on for artist talk My Mother Tongue is not my Lover Tongue with Fearghus Ó Conchúir, who will host a conversation about body, language and environment from a queer perspective. Featuring Jules Cunningham and Dam Van Huynh. This event is included in the Undisciplined Festival pass.
Inclusivity and accessibility show information
Relaxed performance.
Pre-show access drop-in.
Suitable for all ages.
About Jules Cunningham
Jules (they/them), originally from Liverpool, worked as an award-winning dancer for 20+ years with Merce Cunningham Dance Company and Michael Clark Company.
Jules founded Julie Cunningham & Company in 2017, to create and present work that combines clarity of form with an interest in gender identity and the body. Jules uses movement language that draws on their technical dance training, expanding and queering it collaboratively, working between sound, text, visual art.
Creative work is informed by solo and collaborative movement exploration, queerness, lived experience of mental illness, disability and exclusion based on Jules’ working-class background and non-binary identity.