Claire Cunnigham

Claire Cunningham is a Glasgow-based Scottish performer and choreographer. Her multidisciplinary choregraphic practice has been developed from the use and subversion of her crutches, which she considers as extensions of the body. Her work, which lies at the intersection of dance, performance, and research, explores practices of care and the political and cultural dimensions of crip identity, while challenging the norms of virtuosity and the conventions of contemporary dance. She is a professor of choreography, dance, and disability arts at the HZT in Berlin. 

Claire Cunningham will share methods and scores central to her work, opening up dialogues about where her choreographic practice based on attending/attention and perception, and practices learned from normative-bodied/ally artists, meets with concepts of Crip politics — such as Crip time — and the phenomenology/lived experience of disability. Through talking, moving, waiting, watching and listening, we will engage in tasks looking at: attending to our own attention; the connection between movement and language; communication and consent; and the potential to gain ownership (or re-ownership) over our bodies and for new modes of noticing, moving and improvising. The workshop will use structured improvisation and allows everyone to engage at their own chosen levels of energy, pace and scale of movement.