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‘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