CROW / Pigeons

Sadler’s Wells Associate Artist Jules Cunningham offers a tender exploration and disruption of normativity with new works CROW and Pigeons.

"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” says Jules Cunningham.

CROW and Pigeons 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 Oliveros and Eastman that happened nearly fifty years ago in New York. Focused on what is needed now, collaborators consider a 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. Pigeons, by contrast, is non-stop dancing to Eastman’s Gay Guerilla, working with pigeon groupings and behaviour to explore ways of being alone and together, distraction and disruption.