Claire Cunningham is a world-renowned artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. She is an internationally acclaimed disabled artist who through the performative arts explores the disabled experience and societal values with a selection of works that are quite well known. In 2014 she presented her show ‘Give me a reason to live’ for the first time, drawing her inspiration from Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, one of the only to include beggars in the street and the disabled in medieval works. In her show ‘Guide Gods’ she explores the ways faith and religion view disabilities and the disabled. In 2016, she created the duet ‘The way you look (at me) tonight’ with the choreographer Jess Curtis. The show toured worldwide and was selected for a Tranzplatform in Germany.
To help her portray her experience living with her osteoporosis in abstract terms, distortions of her mobility aid, crutches, are common motifs in her work. This was absolutely the case in the show “Songs of the wayfarer”, which presented a mountain of crutches contained a mixture of aesthetics, song and dance. In this show, she aims to explore deep personal questions, often in a biographical way, by using contemporary theatre means. Claire is interested in featuring non-normative bodies in her work and highlights them often, as people with non-conventional bodies oftentimes feel disenfranchised by mainstream dance as those with bodies that differ from the norm are rarely featured. Claire holds the belief that it is important to be a well-rounded performer, so she often layers her performances with many different types of media, which in this case, was song, dance, performance, and videography. She does not want to be labelled as an actor or a singer or a dancer and presents her work as a combination of all of these instead.
This show was presented as part of the NEXT Festival, which aims to encourage people to cross the border between France and Belgium more often. We decided to interview Mathilde who worked on this show about her opinions on it and the festival altogether.
Interview with Mathilde Villeneuve (Buda Kunstencentrum)
What did you think of the show?
I worked on the show and did some of the programming behind it.
Had you seen it before?
No, i’ve seen part of the show but never the entire show. My first time seeing the show was yesterday and I really enjoyed it. I had seen it in a video, but it wasn’t the same experience. I didn’t really like the video but I felt that the show was much deeper. I felt Claire’s writing was very poetic. I liked the progression of the show, it came from a slow movement but it progressed more and more. I also enjoyed when she interacted with the public.
Is the situation from Belgium and France difficult to navigate with subtitles being in French and Dutch?
Yes, it is and it’s their mission to connect Belgium and France with it being a fragile point and every time there is a show, they put subtitles in both languages.
Do you think that people that do not understand English are losing something from the show?
This is always a big question. At first I thought yes but after working with this for years I learned no as the subtitles are of such high quality and in fact add something.
Had you seen any similar shows by disabled artists before?
I had seen another show by Claire Cunningham. It was a collective show with around five people on stage all with different disabilities and I found that immensely powerful. It was like a musical. I found her show quite funny. Claire was talking about disability and not trying to hide it but almost playing with it like in her show Songs of the Wayfarer.
Do you feel there is a universal message that can be drawn from the show?
I felt that universal is quite a big word, but I did feel people can learn from disabilities even if they are not. I feel it’s the aim of theater, to have representation and this is how you learn from somebody else. It can be used to move you, but it can also displace you.
Are you French or Belgian?
I’m French but I work in Belgium.
Do you think NEXT help connect Belgium and France?
Absolutely yes. Next festival helps those in France and Belgium see shows across the border by organising free buses to go from one theatre to another, one country to another so it helps a lot of people to go see the other countries. The organisers work together to include Belgium and French theaters and they really try to organise a tour of all the shows in France and Belgium. They work hard to connect the two.