M/Y by Julie Cunningham & Company

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the current theatre, Sadler’s Wells commissioned three works from a new generation of UK-based dance-makers. We had the honour to work with Julie Cunningham & Company and developed costume and stage design in correspondence to their focus on gender identities. The seminal text of Monique Wittig’s 1973 novel ‘the Lesbian Body’ was the foundation and introduction used in the design and making process, as well as the organic and unreal sculptures of Eva Hesse.  The work was on show at Sadler’s Wells from 11th – 13th of October 2018.

Images: Reckonings, a Sadler’s Wells Production.
Photo: Johan Persson

“...the fluid spatial staging of Cunningham’s m/y and with Nell Catchpole’s engulfing interior soundscape. The work is a translation into choreographic form of Monique Wittig’s attempt in her novel, The Lesbian Body, to ‘create a new language that can function outside the dominant structures of patriarchal power’. It is not the cast of six women — Cunningham, Eleanor Perry, Hannah Burfield, Seira Winning, Sara Ruddock and Stephanie McMann — that suggests a lesbian discourse but the subtle structures that link them together, a fine weaving of almost abstract strands with sapphic overtones that creates a space in which no muscular, patriarchal figure would ever feel comfortable; the performers, dressed in Alexa Pollmann’s body suits with diaphanous outer layers, seem to relish this independence. It is a pleasure to watch the way Cunningham opens up the space with such intellectual rigour; it starts in muffled containment as if the cast is an operatic chorus in a prison cell and develops into a sense of lightness and emancipation that Catchpole’s score reaffirms in its trajectory from dark clouds of industrial effluence to the open air, from interior rumblings to serene silence.’’ 

(Writing about Dance, 2019)

Costume & Stage: Alexa Pollmann
Production Assistant: Farid Bin Karim