ABSTRACT
In this chapter, self-identifying disabled artist Claire Cunningham and long-term collaborator and dramaturg Luke Pell come together to discuss Claire’s practice over the past 20 years.
Taking the companionship of crutches – and their integrity to Claire’s distinct performance presence, dance vocabulary and choreographic language – as a starting point for this reflective conversation, they discuss the particular terminologies Cunningham has adopted to better understand and convey her unique relationship with her crutches alongside the ways in which care aesthetics – arising specifically from a lived experience of disability – could be considered present throughout her work.
As part of their continued dialogue; after a decade of making work together they go on to further consider some of the recurring themes – including an aesthetics access – in their ongoing explorations into choreographies of care, which have included the performance pieces Guide Gods, The Way You Look (at me) Tonight, Quanimacy, Thank You Very Much and most recently Songs of the Wayfarer. This leads to discussion of a framework they have developed to better articulate and share the way Cunningham makes work entitled The Choreography of Care.
Claire Cunningham is a choreographer, performer, singer and creator of multi-disciplinary performance based in Glasgow, Scotland. One of the UK’s most acclaimed and internationally renowned disabled artists, Cunningham’s work is rooted in the study of Crip and disabled experience, practices of care and questioning societal ideas of knowledge and value. From 2023 to 2028, she is Einstein Professor of Choreography, Dance and Disability Arts at the Inter-University Centre of Dance Berlin (HZT).
Maker and dramaturge, Luke Pell has been a long-term creative companion to an array of artists and arts organisations whose practices are, in some way, concerned with effecting embodied change in the ways people encounter, engage with and reconsider notions of death, dying and loss; crip and queer experience; touch, interdependence, community and care. Having collaborated with Cunningham, as dramaturge, since 2014, they currently accompany her as Research Associate in her professorship.
Here, as part of their continued dialogue, after a decade of making work together, they discuss some of the recurring themes in their ongoing explorations into choreographies of care, which have included the performance pieces Guide Gods, The Way You Look (at me) Tonight, Quanimacy, Thank You Very Much and most recently Songs of the Wayfarer.
