Idle Women are planning a stadium for the future – a living stadium conceived, engineered and hand-built by and for women. Not a concrete monolith but a stadium to re-imagine environmental recovery and reciprocity, a self-sustaining ecosystem of women’s doing, creating, training, playing and manifesting a different world.
During and as part of the UEFA Women’s EURO 2022 football championship in July women from across the UK will gather in fields and underpasses to dance the stadium into existence at site specific women only raves.
Coordinated with community groups, older women, activists, musicians and DJs, Stadium for the Future will culminate in a sound piece which will broadcast until the stadium build is complete Stadium for the Future celebrates and makes place for all women along the canal networks that connect the #WEURO2022 locations – an underpass in Milton Keynes, Pennington Flash Nature reserve, beside the River Thames in Hounslow and a community sports centre in Brent. Amplifying women’s essential role in solving the social and environmental challenges we face as a global community.
In 1931 Emma Goldman wrote “Living My Life” in which she described an encounter with a young boy who referred to her dancing as unbefitting and dishonourable for someone promoting the anarchist Cause. Goldman stated,
“I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy.”
She then went on to say,
“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”
Emma Goldman 1869-1940
Free tickets for raves are available for events in:
Wigan & Leigh | 10 July | 2 – 6pm | (All women welcome) | Book Here
Hounslow | 13 July | 2 – 6pm | (This event is to celebrate older women. All women welcome) | Book Here
Milton Keynes | 17 July | 3 – 9pm | (This event is for, by, and to celebrate LGBTQIA+ women. Male allies are thanked for sitting this one out.) | Book Here
Brent | 29 July | 3 – 9pm | (All women welcome) | Book Here
About Idle Women
Anna Smith, Cis O’Boyle, Rachel Anderson, Caroline Teng, Jeanette Scott, Sophie Fishwick, Nadia Gilani, Xilhu Ayebaitari Ese, Naomi Jackson, Caterina Loriggio, Zeritha Brown, Jemima Sam-Russel, Fiona Boundy, Hattie Kongaunruan, Aretha George, Sonia Ferdousi, Georgina Bentley, Ashleigh Jones
This project is part of the arts and heritage programme celebrating the UEFA Women’s EURO 2022. The programme is made possible thanks to Lottery Players with funding through Arts Council England.
Idle Women is an arts, environment and social justice collaboration founded by artists in 2015
Their projects reach for something beyond the horizon, creating transformative spaces for women that can’t be cut, closed or taken away. Their first endeavour was to build and tour NB Selina Cooper with women living in a specialist domestic violence refuge. Touring this boat along the canals of the North West affirmed to them the extent to which women’s access and safety is always precarious and how fundamentally intertwined the roots of violence against women and the environment are.
They are building The Physic Garden which is situated alongside the canal on a permanent site owned by Idle Women and Humraaz Support Services in Nelson, Lancashire. This garden is the first of its kind hand-built by women, for women. The Physic Garden Network is a new digital project – a website rooted in the garden. Helen was a three year process of deconstruction and reconstruction with women in St Helens who wanted to tear the house apart and concluded with Power Tools – a DIY film series for youtube. Their forthcoming work Petrichor / A Case for Land is a performative argument generated by the gaps in broken concrete, voicing women’s rightful place to belong through the urgency of lost years. Idle Women is a collaboration with women from any and all walks of life. They work to their strengths because they know that transformation is a daily process, there are always other ways and beauty is complicated.
