A unique Scottish performer is challenging prejudice by using here crutches as the central device in a career in modern dance

Published on Tuesday 9 March 2010 18:09

CLAIRE Cunningham was 14 when she was forced to use crutches for the first time – and she loathed them. Today, they are so much part of her identity she cannot imagine her life without them.

• Claire Cunningham in action near her Glasgow home. Picture: Robert Perry

For the past five years, Cunningham has been using her crutches to create what is, effectively, a new art form. In her two solo works – Evolution and Mobile – showcased at Made in Scotland for last year's Edinburgh Fringe – she experiments with movement, turning preconceptions of what dance and disability mean on their head and demonstrating how what society perceives as a limitation can be turned into a strength.

Now, just five years after she embarked on this unconventional path, the Glasgow-based performer is one of 50 people, five of them based in Scotland, to win a place on a Women to Watch list published today by the Cultural Leadership Programme, an initiative to promote leadership in the arts.

Just back from five weeks in the US, where she has been working with choreographer Jess Curtis on a new ensemble piece, she seems slightly taken aback to find herself on a roll of honour that includes names such as Sarah Munro, artistic manager at the Tramway. Still recovering from jetlag, she is caught up in her experience of Davis, the Californian city where Curtis's multi-disciplinary performance company Gravity has been working.

"It was the kind of place that made you understand how people could go crazy and on the rampage," she says. "It was just too perfect. You just kept feeling it must have a dark side."

If Cunningham has a dark side, she keeps it well-hidden; her animated, elfin features are as expressive in speech as her body is on the stage. But the 32-year-old from Kilmarnock is quick to acknowledge the emotional complexity of the journey she has made from a teenager in denial over her damaged legs, to a pioneer of both the disabled and non-disabled arts world.

"The clich people use – that the crutches are an extension of your body – I used to resent that because I really didn't ever feel it," she says. "But now I'm very much in a place where that feels true. I do have the sense that I feel right through to the end of them, and I have this capacity to be this very huge presence because of the additional length that they give my figure."

Born with osteoporosis and a condition that causes tightening of the tendons, Cunningham had been a tomboy nevertheless, always climbing trees and riding bikes up ramps. But when she hit puberty, her sudden growth and an explosion of hormones caused her shin bones to fracture repeatedly.

"I didn't have to do anything remarkable to make them fracture because when your leg gets put into plaster, the muscle wears away so there's no protection when it comes out, and then just walking on it makes it fracture again."

The move into using crutches began with her one and only actual leg break, and it took her a long time to accept it was forever. "When I was a teenager, I always expected to get off them. When I pictured what I'd be doing in a year's time, the crutches weren't there. I don't know when exactly that started to change."

Growing up in a musical family, she decided at an early age she wanted to sing. After studying music at Dublin and York universities, she joined Glasgow-based musical theatre company Sounds of Progress.

But after six and a half years of performing there, she developed an interest in aerial work and decided she'd like to strike out on her own. This might sound like a strange choice for a women whose legs are prone to fracture, but it was entirely logical: using crutches had given Cunningham increased upper body strength which she felt she could exploit on devices that would lift her off the ground.

She successfully auditioned to perform in a duet with a company called Blue Eyed Soul, which had commissioned Curtis as choreographer, and it was he who first recognised she had an instinct for dance.

Looking back, Cunningham can see it was always there: for years, she had been experimenting with her crutches without realising she was doing anything unusual.

"I have always done this thing where I use my crutches as a seat when I am waiting to cross the road or for a lift. And I used to lift my legs off the ground to see how long I could balance. I was beginning to create things that have been integrated into the style I've developed, but I wasn't aware of it at the time. I just assumed most people with crutches did the same thing," she says.

Cunningham was not the first person to use walking aids in dance. In the US, Bill Shannon – the Crutchmaster – had already pioneered a very physical form of movement seen in a recent Visa ad in which he dances his way through a shopping trip on crutches.

But although Cunningham had seen him perform and thought he was amazing, his work – which is heavily influenced by skateboarding and breakdancing – seemed quite alien to her. In the first of a series of coincidences, however, she returned to Scotland to find Shannon was holding workshops in South Lanarkshire. She pitched up for a few days, then won funding to work with him for six weeks in the US.

The experience fuelled her interest in what she could do to develop her own style. "I liked trying to push what I could do with the crutches in a conventional sense, but I also became interested in how I could place them in different arrangements with the body.

"I would wake up at 2am and wonder what would happen if I balanced on three crutches, or whatever."

It was one of these flashes of inspiration that led Cunningham to start creating her own work. One day, she came up with the notion of putting the crutches from ankle to ankle and it reminded her of how – when she was born – doctors put a bar between her legs to turn them out.

The result was the autobiographical work Evolution, which opens with this striking image. Earning her a nomination for best female performer at the Dublin Fringe Festival 2007, the piece also gave her family a deeper insight into her experiences and an understanding of the choices she had made. Evolution was soon followed by Mobile, which also garnered positive reviews.

Cunningham is used to people asking her if it is dangerous for her to perform, but in fact she has learned to move her body in such a way as to reduce risk. Indeed, one of the most astonishing aspects of Cunningham's experience is that dancing has led to her growing several centimetres as the build-up of muscle around the spine has allowed her to straighten up.

"I had grown up with the medical institutions kind of programming you as regards to what your body doesn't do," she says. "You grow up quite conditioned by that and it's quite a negative atmosphere to be subjected to."

Working with dancers, interested in finding ways to make her body function the way it was designed rather than trying to fit it into some sort of "normal" body model, was liberating.

Never a great one for planning, Cunningham is unsure what the future holds. She is performing Mobile and Evolution as a double bill in various venues across Europe this summer, and Curtis's new ensemble Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies may be performed in Berlin at the end of the year. Cunningham is also hopeful appearing on the Women to Watch list will allow her to connect with new audiences.

Whatever she does next, however, her crutches are likely to play a leading role. Indeed, she is currently working on a new piece in which she uses them as puppets, reflecting the idea of a real and shifting relationship.

"I have gone from viewing my crutches as cold hard objects to accepting that I am going where I am going, that I do what I do because of these objects," Cunningham says.

"They are part of my identity. But I also know that if you found another 14-year-old who used crutches they wouldn't go on to do what I have done, because it comes from who I am."

Five women to watch

THE Cultural Leadership Programme has launched its Women to Watch list after a study it commissioned showed men were two and a half times as likely as women to hold senior positions in the arts world.

"Not only did men outnumber women, but a lot of senior female leaders felt they wouldn't necessarily stay in that position, nor would they aspire to move further up – and that is a real issue for the sector," says Diane Morgan, project manager.

Having received 190 nominations, seven judges whittled them down to 50, including five Scots: Sarah Munro, artistic manager of the Tramway, Seonaid Daly, co-director of the Glasgow Film Festival, Roanne Dods, former founder director of Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Purni Morell, pictured, head of Studio at the National Theatre, and, of course, Cunningham.

All have a range of achievements under their belt: Daly secured a 25 per cent increase in the Glasgow Film Festival in 2008/2009, while Dods established Jerwood as an influential and significant funder of artists in the UK.

At the Tramway, and before that as director of the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh, Munro has been responsible for initiatives such as the One Mile project, a three-year programme of public engagement and participation. And Morell has won respect for nurturing unexpected projects both in Scotland and at the NT Studio, including Slope at Tramway and Interiors at the Lyric Hammersmith.

"The list is made up predominantly of mid-career women. Some are at artistic director level in regional organisations, and that's great, but we wanted to say to them: look, you have the potential to lead national organisations in the future," Morgan says.

All the women on the CLP list have been invited to form a networking group. As part of this, the CLP will stage events with inspirational speakers and encourage the women to mentor each other as their careers develop.