Songs of the Wayfarer

I really love turning into this sort of four-legged creature. All the little places that you can wedge the crutch really right into a corner or into a crack. (...) I get so lost in that sort of play (…) when the ground really becomes (…) my companion.” – Claire Cunningham

What does it mean to wander? Inspired by Gustav Mahler’s ‘Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen’, Claire Cunningham traverse in this solo performance various landscapes – those of nature, stage, and emotional. Following her own ‘dramaturgy of traveling’, she navigates with her crutches over the uneven floor and leads us to the peaks and rest areas of a very personal journey. Songs of the Wayfarer weaves knowledge and practices of disabled bodies to a crip* choreography, which breaks with the normative conceptions of dance. A love song – to her disabled fellow travellers and her own crip expertise. The choreographer and pioneer of disability arts returns with this delicate work to her training as a classical singer and asks what it means to always keep going – and when the moment comes when we realise that it is time to turn back.

*Crip is a positive self-designation of disabled, chronically ill people and expresses the belongig to a cultural and political identity. 

Claire Cunningham is a choreographer and performer who develops multidisciplinary performances. She rejects dance traditions and body norms and develops her own movement technique based solely on the possibilities of her own body. In doing so, she uses and (purposefully) alienates her crutches as an extension of her dancing body. She always sees her art, which she consciously develops from her perspective as a disabled artist, as activism. Claire Cunningham has already been a guest at Festival Theaterformen several times, most recently in 2023 with her work Thank You Very Much.