Claire Cunningham moves through the theater space, with and without a staff/crutches, a wayfarer, as she simultaneously embarks on a metaphorical journey through life in Songs of the Wayfarer (14-16 November 2024, NO LIMITS Festival).
Ever since I started mentioning that I am going to Scotland in two weeks, I’ve been hearing again and again how beautiful the Highlands are and that I should absolutely go hiking there. I am not sure the December weather will prove best for this, but Claire Cunningham’s solo certainly awakened my wanderlust.
The excursion begins with the preparations. Or better said, a report on the weather forecast. In a raincoat and hiking boots, shouldering a backpack, crutches/hiking poles in hand, the Scottish artist sits in a chair in the first row of the audience and reads aloud what to expect: darkness, loud music, singing, and, finally, herself, who will be weaving her way through the audience. This is all demonstrated once as a dry run. The only thing not dry is the humor.
This brief prelude is a humorous and elegant solution for prefixing the piece with any (introductory) information, which the artist, who has held a Professorship for Choreography, Performance and Disability Arts1 since 2013, deems important for our mutual journey. A journey on foot, where steps measure space and time and the four corners of the room become the four ends of the world. The romantic significance of wandering as a symbol for life is not only heard in the excerpts of Gustav Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), which Cunningham sings with an incredibly moving voice.
The route, which the artist traverses through an insinuated landscape of mountains builts from crutches, projected map reliefs, and gravel fields, is frequently interrupted by bouts of dance. I look on in fascination at how Cunningham, as a “four-legged creature2”, shifts her body’s center of gravity from one foot, a prosthetically extended arm, to another. She follows the resulting momentum, playing with various angles between extremities and the floor.
These eventful passages are usually followed by moments of rest. A tent is quickly erected from crutches/hiking poles and rain jacket. The performer rests beneath it. We in the audience should remove a layer if we feel warm. An old hiking trick, which I take to heart. During the next break, during which Cunningham pours herself a cup of coffee in the uppermost row of seats and then passes out shortbread made with her grandmother’s recipe to everyone sitting around her, I dare to take a bite of an apple I had brought with me.
Her grandmother, Cunningham recounts, also learned to sing, and then fell silent forever following a personal loss. However, perhaps the wistful songs this evening are owed in large part to Cunningham’s grief over her late companion Jess3, who probably meant much more to her than just the guy who took care of the coffee during rehearsals. Both subtly and clearly articulated, Songs of the Wayfarer invited me to realize both the fragility and resilience of everyone’s life, not least of all my own.
English translation by Melissa Maldonado
1Disability Arts emerged as an artistic field from various disability rights movements. It merges the pursuit of questions of accessibility, criticism of ableism, not only in art, and artistic creation processes in which the experience of disability plays a role. 2Quote from the program. According to her own account, many of Claire Cunningham’s works are based on the use, or misuse, of her crutches. 3Jess Curtis (1961-2024) was a dancer, choreographer, and activist. Curtis and Cunningham, among others, developed the internationally acclaimed performance The Way You Look (At Me) Tonight (2016) together.
