A dance performance that credits two mountaineering consultants – now that’s intriguing. Claire Cunningham is dressed in hiking gear: backpack, flask, a transparent pouch for a map around her neck. Her journey only takes her around the small theatre, counting steps, scaling the seats of the auditorium, finding shelter in a mountain of peaks made of tangled crutches, but her ramble becomes a meditation on finding our way along life’s unexpected paths.
It’s a solo show, but Cunningham is not alone on stage. There’s her BSL interpreter, and members of the audience are invited to slouch on beanbags (all are relaxed performances, with accommodation for various access needs). We’re not to worry if our bodies – or our beanbags – make a noise, it’s all part of the landscape, she tells us in a sort of pre-expedition briefing. A person who uses crutches – as Cunningham does – expends twice as much energy as someone who doesn’t, she says, so there might be breaks. And when they come, she asks if we need to stretch, take a drink, bringing us back to our own bodies. The Scottish performer has an open, easy way of connecting, and reminds us that we’re on this trip together.
There are layers of subtle but clever ideas. In that map pouch, for example, is not topography, but a score: Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer. Before she was a leading figure in disability arts and dance, Cunningham was a classical singer, and she sings lines from the song cycle (to a more ambient backing, by Matthias Herrmann), her voice at once strong and vulnerable. Tempo markings from the score appear projected on the floor, turned into directions for living: “Without hurrying”, “Very strongly”, “Softly, to the end”.
Cunningham adds a pleasing, rhythmic text of her own, as she plants her crutches on the floor, a “four-legged creature” shifting its balance, navigating sometimes unwelcoming terrain. The movement sections aren’t as impactful as her singing and her speaking – where she reveals fragments of memories, of life and loss – but are somehow essential to the sense of roving and reverie; simply putting one foot, or one crutch, in front of the other, again and again, as we all must do. It’s a quiet but affecting piece.
At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 6 December. Then touring
