If you leave me now…
Prof. Claire Cunningham & Angela Alves (Choreography, Dance, Care & Disability Arts)
English, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Starts: 6.1.2025, 10:30 - 11 h

Registration on Moodle starts 2.12.2024 / Anmeldung auf Moodle beginnt am 2.12.2024:
https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=2602
Moodle Enrollment Key / Einschreibeschlüssel: leave

• Is it rude/negative for an audience member to leave a performance?
• How does the design of performance spaces affect the potential to leave?
• How does performing arts training prepare us (or not) for the act of leaving?
• Are some people more able to leave than others? Do we care about this?
• What if we made performance that invited people to leave? What would this be?

With input from established Crip and disabled artists this lab will look at ways we can consider the act of leaving, and particularly what it means in performance contexts.

This project will be hosted by Prof Claire Cunningham and shaped by their practice in creating accessible spaces, the aesthetics of access and choreographies of care.

This lab invites students to consider the act of leaving – with particular focus around performance events and spaces. We will take time to look at our experiences and preconceptions (as audience and performer)and consider the social pressures and stigmas of leaving. We will undertake activities including conversations, reading, writing, moving (simple choreographic exercises that are open and accessible) and arranging spaces, with additional input from Crip/disabled artists and potentially visit some performance spaces to consider design. We may also look at how performance training could equip us better for audiences leaving. Other suggestions of actions/activities are welcome to shape the week and our time together.

We can also (based on desires of the group) open up the concept of “leaving“ to allow other experiences of this idea to shape our research, and allow for different proposals and directions to surface during the week. With a possible site visit one evening to see a show in Tanztage.
These sessions welcome people who have diverse physicalities, sensory modalities, use mobility tech and/or are neurodivergent.

Times: 11am – 4pm (with soft arrival 10.30-11am, and including breaks & lunch time)

Claire Cunningham is a performer and creator of multi-disciplinary performance whose work is often rooted in the study and use/misuse of her crutches and the exploration of the potential of her own specific physicality, with a conscious rejection of traditional dance techniques (developed for non-disabled bodies).  This runs alongside a deep interest in the lived experience of disability and its implications not only as a choreographer but also in terms of societal notions of knowledge, value, connection and interdependence.  A self-identifying disabled artist, in 2021 Claire was honoured for her Outstanding Artistic Development in dance at the German Dance Awards (Tanzpreis). Cunningham’s work combines multiple art forms and ranges from the intimate solo show ME (Mobile/Evolution) (2009), to the large ensemble work 12 made for Candoco Dance Company. In 2014 she created Give Me a Reason to Live, inspired by the work of Dutch medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch and the role of beggars/cripples in his work, and the full length show Guide Gods, looking at the perspectives of the major Faith traditions towards the issue of disability. In 2016 she created the duet The Way You Look (at me) Tonight with choreographer Jess Curtis.  The piece was selected for the 2018 Tanzplattform in Germany and nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award. In 2019 Claire premiered the ensemble piece Thank You Very Much at Manchester International Festival which went on to win CATS awards for Best Ensemble and Best Sound and Music, and will premiere a new solo work, Songs of the Wayfarer in November 2024.

Angela Alves is a choreographer and performer whose artistic practice is profoundly informed by the nature of her life as a chronically ill woman. Based on her interest in the emotional and neurobiological body in relation to its environment and biography, she develops performances and installations that question the societal perception of "healthy" and "sick" and attempt to redefine the notions of norm by empowering perspectives and expressions that emerge from the disability experience. From the position of invisible disability, she addresses the political dimensions of the unavailable, stressed and vulnerable body and explores its transformative potency in capitalist, ableist, patriarchal and classist societies. After premiering the solo performance "SOFT OFFER" at Tanztage Berlin in 2019, Alves explored various choreographic concepts of rest, cessation and pleasure both as a crip technique and a cultural practice of resistance. A longer time ago she studied dance at ArtEZ (NL) and dance studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Angela Alves has been an artistic collaborator in the "Choreography, Dance and Disability Arts" project since October 2023.