ME ME ME: Mobile Evolution @ G12

There's more to a pair of crutches than you might think. How about the fact that when you walk in them you have to pay constant attention to the ground to make sure that your footing is right? Or the myriad of different varieties, their relative merits and demerits, on which Claire enlightens with wry, conversational humour and wit.

The stage is decked with a hundred of them. They’re scattered all over the place. Claire manoeuvres into view at the back of the stage aided by two, trailing a third on one leg, a fourth and fifth adorning her neck. Now she’s moving on them, wielding all four limbs as though she were some mythical mechanical creature upon which nature had bestowed nine legs. She dances. She talks. She makes us laugh. She moves, the supplest, to mellow, hypnotic tones, and entrances us as she mounts a harness (made of crutches of course) to show us what an individual who has suffered osteoporosis her whole life, and has used aids to walk since in her teens, can do with her body given the presence of mind. She builds us a sculpture from them and we are invited to watch her at play with her creation. It dances around in circles, trailing so many decorations that hang down from it, reminiscent of the toys that dangle above the cots of children.

Claire Cunningham’s Mobile/Evolution, directed by Kally Lloyd-Jones, Linda Payne and Jess Simpson, and choreographed in association with Jess Curtis, won a Herald Angel Award following its successful run at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and it’s not hard to see why. Her website describes her act as ‘multi-disciplinary’ and that is well put, because the kind of talent which Claire exudes couples that spark of creative ingenuity which makes an artist, with the cultivation that could only have come with tireless hours of practice since her interest in aerial work and movement was kindled in 2005.