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 and will feature a live soundscore by JD Samson (Le Tigre), projection & design by Julie Verhoeven, with lighting by Joshie Harriette. Drawing on those experiments to move aside from meticulous, technical choreography, collaborators explore a spacious world of responsive ritual, symbolism and connected solitude, qualities associated with the crow. The choreographic score which centres listening and relating to each other/the environment, does not attempt to re-create what has been, but offer what might be needed right now.

Pigeons, by contrast, is irritated by its own relentlessness – with extraordinary dancers Harry, Nafisah, Yu-Chien, Jules and Matthias dancing nonstop to Eastman’s extraordinary 30-minute composition for four pianos, Gay Guerilla, from 1979, in costumes by Loe D’Arcy.

The performance will include:
– pre-show access and touch tour at 6:30pm – with visual descriptions, an opportunity to touch and hold parts of the costume and set, meet some of the performers, and to understand what will happen
– theatre opening for audience with the first part of CROW from 7:15pm
– CROW – a 25 minute duet with live music
– Interval of 20 minutes with video projection and removing set from CROW
– Pigeons – a 30 minute dance work for 5 dancers

Expected end time: 8:50pm

On Thursday there will be a short post-show talk hosted by Alistair Spalding beginning just before 9pm.

The space is relaxed:
Please feel free to move, stim, make noise, come and go as you need, and make yourself comfortable.

During CROW there are flickering images in the video projection.

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. Since 2024, Jules has been an Associate Artist at Sadler’s Wells.

Company Statement
We’ve been making these two works within a context of genocides, erosion of LGBTQIA+ and disability rights, UK race riots, escalating transphobia & oppression, increasing climate emergency, extreme male violence, cost of living crisis, out of control capitalism. JCC is in solidarity with those being killed, oppressed, tortured and erased including people of Palestine, DR Congo, Sudan, Lebanon, Ukraine and our trans and queer siblings.

We’ve continued to make, centring the creation of work within local communities and healthcare settings. Sessions support people to move, create, release, reflect and connect with each other. Being in community in places like Bethlem Gallery & Hospital and Stanley Arts has shaped CROW and Pigeons. We believe dancing and art making is resistance and access to arts activity is a social justice issue. Doing what we do helps us and others survive in the world and is profoundly political.

Working with arts institutions can be complex and force complicity with the actions of organisations. We have committed to being in ongoing dialogue with organisations, including Sadler’s Wells, about sponsors and funding. As many activists and artists have emphasised, it is not radical to advocate for basic human rights and how this commitment is inextricably interconnected to ethical working practices and funding for arts and culture.

None of us are free until all of us are free. Big love.

@juliecunninghamandcompany
linktr.ee/juliecunninghamandcompany
Do let us know what you thought today by writing down thoughts, drawing, chatting to us or emailing juliecunninghamcompany@gmail.com

Back to Julie Cunningham & Company – CROW / Pigeons