It's All About ME

I caught up with Claire Cunningham in a café on Glasgow’s Southside. Having just returned from a series of workshops in Findhorn, she was delightfully energised by the intellectual and physical possibilities of dance, and more than willing to put across her lively opinions on the current state of so-called disability in performance. Charming and thoughtful, it become rapidly evident that ME is a double bill that has its roots in very personal experience, yet simultaneously questions social and aesthetic assumptions.

The title, she laughs, “Is just a really bad joke: it is two biographical pieces, so it is about me, but they are called Mobile and Evolution.” Never before paired, they come at Cunningham’s life from wildly different perspectives, even down to their technique. While Mobile is aerial, Evolution “is very much floor based.” Individually, they are powerful: together they comment on each other’s notions of physical ability and creativity.

“I have spent seventeen years on crutches and have an intricate knowledge of them.” It is this supposed limitation that actually determines the structure of Cunningham’s choreography. Her performance shows her “Gaining an ownership of my expertise with crutches,” and then transforming the expectations that the crutches bring. “I understand how they work. I like changing them to other things, using them for other purposes. As an object they have a huge amount of baggage, and I like re-adjusting that!”

Her style comes from her relationship with the crutches, demonstrating how they have given her a particular way of movement that allows her a freedom denied to more conventionally trained dancers. “I assumed that anyone who spent a long time on crutches would do the things I do - but apparently not – to see how far you can push things without falling over.”

Of course, even ballet imposes limitations on the body, and it is from these limitations that the artistry emerges. What ME does is to take “something that’s a perceived limitation and show how that creates virtuosity: not in the cliché of a blind person having a great sense of smell: it is a question of whether you choose to use it.” And while she eschews the idea that these are ‘issue’ works, the nature of ability and disability is infused through them.

By attacking this from two angles, ME comprehensively escapes the ghetto of ‘disabled dance’. The source for Mobile came from a decidedly aesthetic experience: “Another performer took me to an exhibition by Alexander Korda - the sculptor who invented mobiles - and it blew me away. He made a lot of mobiles that were thin line hanging off each other, all the balances hanging in strange places. It’s so beautifully engineered.”

Since she is fascinated by the unexpected weights and pressure of the crutches, this connected with her practice. “I’d been interested in using the crutches in an aerial context. From a simple point of view, the weight isn’t always where you expect in them. A huge part of what I do is about weight and balance. I can transfer my weight and centre around my body in a way that you can’t do without crutches, to find new possibilities. When I saw this exhibition, the two things clicked.”

Evolution, on the other hand, is a comment on her progress into dance. She remembers that, as a child, one of her earliest ambitions was to dance: “I locked the front room for a whole day trying to learn a Michael Jackson routine,” she chuckles. When she began her training many years later, however, she was surprised to learn what dance taught her about the connections within the body in a new, radical manner.

When she returned to dance as an adult, Cunningham was fascinated by the way the training revealed the spirals within the body, suggesting new ways to do even the simplest things, like standing up.

“I have never intended to make my own work, but the more I performed, the more I had ideas about what was possible.” After putting a few holes in the lampshade and the television, she began to work on Evolution. “There are two stories: the actual journey of beginning to dance and also learning to look at my body from a different way; and the story of the physical interventions in my life by doctors.” Having become accustomed to “doctors looking at my body from the point of view of what I can’t do,” she noticed the parallels with the ways that dancers would see her “but with a very different intention and touch. Dancers would be helping me warm up and go ‘wow! Your foot does this’ where doctors would be ‘your foot doesn’t do this’”.

The crutches represent the metal bars that have been a feature of her life, but “there is also the journey of learning how the spirals work”. This beautiful imagery echoes the lineal formality of Mobile, but transposes it to floor work: Laban influenced, and producing a very different atmosphere. Together, the two short pieces comment on each other and enhance their meaning: effectively, this combines them into a single, new work.