ENDURANCE

“Jenni is not an athlete.

Jenni has not done enough training.

Jenni wants to perform a feat of endurance, live and in real time.

For you.

She really wants to be able to run up hills and mountains.

Since her mum is Bolivian, she’s banking on her DNA containing Inca genes, which means Jenni is going to be shit hot at running up mountains.

Naturally.”

ENDURANCE is a heart-racing blend of dance, theatre, and an attempt at a sports spectacle.

Jenni performs a feat of endurance live and in real-time. Using a heart rate monitor and tackling the tyranny of running apps head on, ENDURANCE examines safety, risk, and the ancestral histories we carry with us.

Exploring colonial legacies through the world of the Bolivian/Aymaran warrior Bartolina Sisa and modern-day women who are out-performing men at ultra marathon running, Jenni wants to know how we carry on when things get really hard?

Inspired by the world of endurance sports, and in a humorous and biting examination of health culture, ENDURANCE channels our fascination and the adulation placed at the feet of those who complete huge challenges in endurance sports. Interrogating bodies under pressure, the work uses integrated creative captions, and the modality of sports commentary to subvert how language and narration shape and erode personal stories and national histories.

Her interest in endurance sports sits in tension with a fascination with exhaustion and pushing ourselves to our limits. When we reward destroying ourselves, do we reinforce the systems of power and control we live in?

How do we find the inner resources and resilience to keep going when the odds are stacked against us?

ENDURANCE feels like a spectacle, with the sensation of speed and a racing heart.

“Running as choreography, running as metaphor, running as resistance, running as political act, running as punishment, and ultimately, running as transformation.”

Working with intergenerational stories; hers contains colonial legacies that date back to the European colonisation of the Americas. ENDURANCE was created through conversations with the geneticist Sandra Romero-Hidalgo (INMGEN, Mexico) about the ways our bodies contain and encode ancestral legacies.

Shortlisted for the prestigious Stückemarkt (Theatertreffen 2022), and playing to sold out audiences at HOME Mcr and Battersea Arts Centre; the work returned to HOME Mcr by popular demand, and was recently presented at Sheffield Crucible.

ENDURANCE has been selected for the Pitching Sessions at the International Weekend (Manchester International Festival) in July 2025.