“Unassuming” is defined as “modest, lacking in arrogance, pleasant, or polite,” – and all of those things are true about Claire Cunningham. She enters the performance stage and is immediately, for lack of a better word, nice. She is inviting. She is welcoming. With her lilting Scottish accent, she was a warm and knowing wit such that you feel she really means it when she says she wants you to be comfortable. Her pre-show chat is not a health-and-safety monologue or a risk assessment chore… it feels like an act of love… and of great patience. I (wrongly) assumed that because this work was being performed at the Lilian Baylis Studio it was exclusively a dance piece. Movement is fundamental to the work, in no doubt, but there is so much more to behold. Cunningham’s voice, as she sings with soaring notes and haunting resonance, from Gustav Mahler’s ‘Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen’ (‘Songs of a Wayfarer’) is glorious. And the effect is powerful as this gently-spoken, patient lady with two crutches and a backpack embarks on a journey of soaring vocals and physical summits… unassumingly.
What is magnificent about Cunningham’s work, is she never lectures but it’s impossible not to feel edified. She mentions, en passant, that it requires double the energy to walk on crutches as it does as a bi-ped. And without apology, every now and then she takes a break and has a snack or a cup of coffee as she ascends what are great heights by anyone’s stretch. Along the way, as wayfarers do, she’ll tell a story. Her coffee and shortbread biscuits have memories that spark their telling just as Proust’s Madeleine does. But this is not a reflection on the past, only insomuch as we carry those memories with us as we travel up or forward or down or take a well-deserved rest.
The stage includes a long white cascade of fabric that serves both as a glacier in the mountainous terrain and a wedding train – both at times threaten her to slip but she is sure-footed as well as disabled; qualities that we are reminded may coexist. It also acts as the projection screen for the operatic surtitles and the dialogue and as a lens onto the ground the wayfarer treads, as the eye cannot always look towards the peak. A great honeycomb of crutches sits stage left as part of the hillscape and by which magnificent shadows are cast – reminding us of the stark and frightening beauty and loneliness and fortitude encountered with any new journey but of course of the nature of this particular journey and its foundations.
Much of the press blurb about Songs of the Wayfarer uses terms like “reframing our vision of journey through a Crip lens” or “rooted in the study of disabled experience, practices of care and questioning societal ideas of knowledge and value” which might lead you to think that you are going to encounter a very lofty, self-important and probably pretentious and polemical work. That would be misconstrued. This is a beautiful 90-minute work of performance art filled with glorious melody and heart; it’s not a lecture, lament or rebuke. It’s emotionally engaging and mysteriously beautiful and sometimes funny. I can’t wait to see what Claire Cunningham does next.
Review by Mary Beer
Claire Cunningham, one of the UK’s most acclaimed and internationally renowned disabled artists presents the UK premiere of her new solo Songs of the Wayfarer, co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells.
In this new piece, Cunningham returns to the Lilian Baylis Studio to examine the act of journeying, drawing comparisons with the world of mountaineering and taking inspiration from Gustav Mahler’s ‘Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen’ (‘Songs of a Wayfarer’). In the work, Cunningham also re-engages with her past as a classical singer, by singing Mahler’s piece live to reframe our vision of journeying, craft, and outdoor encounter through a Crip* lens.
*Crip is a political and cultural identity embraced by some disabled individuals.
SONGS OF THE WAYFARER
Lilian Baylis Studio, EC1R 4TN
Wednesday 4 – Friday 6 December 2024
