Claire Cunningham

Claire Cunningham is a performer, activist, and creator of a critically-acclaimed body of multi-disciplinary performance from Glasgow, Scotland. She is considered an internationally recognized leader in the field of disability choreography and dance and one of the most celebrated contemporary practitioners of disability arts. 

Through her choreography, lectures, and teaching workshops, Cunningham makes dance an invitation to reflect on key ethical, political, and cultural questions. Her 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). Thereby, it takes a deep interest in the lived experience of disability, probing its implications not only as a choreographer but also in terms of our social and cultural conceptions of knowledge, value, connection, and interdependence.

Cunningham’s teaching method is unique and constitutes a seminal contribution to the field beyond any artistic or academic comparison: Inventing her own vocabulary for the movements of a disabled body and the style of dance and choreography she created, she has been pushing boundaries of the traditional dance education.

She is the first artist to receive an Einstein Strategic Professorship. Her work at the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) also involves the centre’s two supporting universities, the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin) and the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts (HfS Ernst Busch), with the aim of developing inter- and transdisciplinary projects whose inclusive approach can be shared by other artistic degree programmes.