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Alex Quicho
Alex Quicho is the author of Small Gods (Zero Books, 2021), a book on the terror and transcendence of drone technology. She has written for the White Review, the New Inquiry, Wired, Vogue, Bookforum, and others, and worked with institutions including Singapore Art Museum, Power Station of Art (Shanghai), Julia Stoschek Collection (Berlin), Somerset House (London), Rennie Museum (Vancouver), and Nationalgalerie (Berlin). She is an associate lecturer in speculative futures at Central Saint Martins.

Articles Available Online


Without World

Essay

June 2023

Alex Quicho

Essay

June 2023

‘I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate...

Art Review

December 2020

End Times: Heather Phillipson’s ‘The End’

Alex Quicho

Art Review

December 2020

A huge swirl of whipped cream, garnished with a drone, a fly, and a maraschino cherry: so insistent that...

‘What’s the difference between a policeman’s baton and a conjuror’s wand? One’s for stunning cunts and one’s for cunning stunts’ – Anon   A very tall woman enters the floor What strikes me is her height, her rangy, exposed limbs and her mercurial grin, among a procession of other women in droopy baby-grows exposing flesh, but not the way men like it This troupe of female performers make entertainment from an altogether different proposition: a grotesqueness not normally associated with women The audience is called to attention around a makeshift stage that is just the floor – of a hospital canteen, a village hall, a field – and what follows is an absurdist’s dream    I wasn’t there but I imagine it through the material residue of photographs, flyers, newspaper cuttings and the immaterial traces of memories, feelings and stories – an archive not yet fleshed into a body, through which her body returns to me now   At over six foot, Jan Dungey was conspicuous – a performer, singer, community arts bastion and my late godmother Along with Iris Walton, she founded and performed in the all-female theatre troupe Cunning Stunts, whose aim was to ‘display the absurdity of male behaviour and to present women alone being funny and flouting the prevailing glamorous image of women as entertainers’, as they told The Leveller’s Lloyd Trott in 1980    Women alone or apart from men, women together being funny Cunning Stunts performed a heady combination of cabaret, slapstick, clowning and political theatre – ‘as women we were breaking boundaries’, surviving member Plume Tarrant explains by email The troupe shifted in formation and structure to include Plume, Gill Cappa, Erin Steel, Debbie Hall and Margo Random, but at its core was the double act of Iris Walton and Jan Dungey It was Iris who had trained in theatre She had run away to Paris at 15, where she was taught mime by the avant-garde actors Étienne Decroux and Jacques LeCoqs Small, wily and acrobatic, Iris flew across the stage, while a loping Jan stayed close to the ground Their physical distinctions were played up for comic

Contributor

July 2018

Alex Quicho

Contributor

July 2018

Alex Quicho is the author of Small Gods (Zero Books, 2021), a book on the terror and transcendence of...

Emily Pope, The Sitcom Show

Art Review

July 2018

Alex Quicho

Art Review

July 2018

Emily Pope’s five-part web series, The Sitcom Show, is a throwback to the chameleonic class-consciousness and wry pessimism-as-realism embodied by the vein of British pop culture...

READ NEXT

feature

March 2015

Plastic Words

Tom Overton

feature

March 2015

Plastic Words was a six-week series of thirteen events which described itself as ‘mining the contested space between contemporary...

fiction

October 2015

The Bird Thing

Julianne Pachico

fiction

October 2015

You are worried about the bird thing but that’s the last thing you want to think about right now,...

Interview

Issue No. 19

Interview with Álvaro Enrigue

Thomas Bunstead

Interview

Issue No. 19

Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican writer who lives and teaches in New York. A leading light in the Spanish-language...

 

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