Associate Artist Jules Cunningham offers a tender exploration and disruption of normativity.

Pigeons and CROW are connected by the composers and performers Julius Eastman and Pauline Oliveros, who worked from the 1960s onwards. Each of their works 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 away 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 soundscore by JD Samson (Le Tigre) and design by Julie Verhoeven, Jules and Harry Alexander will perform alongside guest musicians, not to re-create what has been, but for what might be needed right now.

Pigeons, by contrast, is irritated by its own relentlessness – with extraordinary dancers including collaborators Harry Alexander and Yu-Chien Cheng dancing nonstop 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.

Pigeons is a Stanley Arts Queer Arts Commissions in collaboration with Raze Collective and part of This Is Croydon’s Queer Arts Development Strand. CROW and Pigeons are created in and amongst different communities moving together and drawing in South London with residencies at and support from Bethlem Gallery. Created with public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England

Co-presented by Sadler’s Wells and Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels

Header image description: A black and white image of three people at a street corner. One person stands against some railings, wearing laced-up boots, while the other two kneel down, looking at the boots.

Header image © Studio Long