Claire is a femme choreographer, insomniac writer, and reality TV enthusiast currently based in Vienna, Austria. She likes to think of herself as a hostess, welcoming collaborators and audience members into kitsch landscapes where politics and poetics are gently interwoven. Between 2019 and 2022 she researched the concept of radical softness as choreographic strategy, embracing hypersensitivity as a method, a topic, and a portal through which to imagine (the) work. Currently she is exploring the archetype and working methods of a performance doula, a role imagined to disinvisibilize care work in the context of performance making. She's also working on a new piece, let's see where that goes.
Claire’s work with text spans from poetry to grant applications, at times flirting with performance criticism, stand-up comedy or feminist theory. Occasionally she works as a ghost writer, but mostly because of the spectral appeal of the job title. Claire teaches writing workshops, and is a contributing writer for several performance art publications, online and in print. She co-created the holiday poets society together with Ari Ban and Kenneth Constance Loe, a series of intimate gatherings where they read texts to friends and friends of friends.
Claire’s works have been showcased in several festivals in Austria and internationally such as March Hare Festival (IS) Dance Days Chania (GR) TanzHafen (AT) Imagetanz (AT) Tanzhochdrei (DE) Fluctoplasma (DE) and YUP (DE) and have been supported by Life Long Burning, Im_Flieger, Tanzzentrale Nuremberg, Wien Kultur, WUK, Brut Wien, Huggy Bears, NadaLokal and Tanzfabrik. In 2017 Claire was awarded the BKA Start Stipendium fur Musik und darstellende Kunst. In 2019 she received the Tanzquartier training scholarship allowing her to to keep developing as a mover and maker. In 2020 she joined the long list of Danceweb scholarship recipients. From August 2020 until April 2021 Claire was one of 3 artists in residence in K3/Kampnagel in Hamburg (DE). Since June 2023, she shares a working space with her dear friend Alix Eynaudi.
Claire studied contemporary dance and ballet at Lyon’s National Conservatory, and graduated from high school with a Dance and Music Techniques Diploma. At the age of 17 she was offered the chance to train at London Contemporary Dance School, and enrolled in the BA program. This is where she started making her own work. In 2012, she graduated from LCDS with a first class degree, and decided to pursue her choreographic research in Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, as a student of the International Choreographic Exchange program.
Recently, Claire has been writing care-work biographies in order to give value and visibility to the practices which are part of our work as free-lance artists yet rarely if ever ackowledged. This practice aims to profesionalize work that is never paid but is definitely (emotional-skilled-essential) labour. Those alternative biographies can look something like this:
"Claire Lefèvre is professional hand holder, prolific to-do-list-writer and passionate eye-roller. She is known for finding the exact book to inspire your research process, reminding her colleagues to take lunch breaks and always responding to emails in a timely manner. In recent years, Claire has witnessed hundreds of rehearsals and work in progress showings, proof-read and given feedback to dozens of funding applications, and produced a vast number of advertising posts on Instagram. She´s been known to respond to midnight phone calls from panicked co-workers trying to meet a deadline, as well as consoling rejected artists by sharing her own extensive collection of unsuccessful proposals, which she wrote on her days off. Some of her career highlights have been surviving 20+ years of dance training, calling out abusive curators at press conferences, and engaging in a regular practice of emailing institutions to let them know that the fee they are offering isn’t legal. She calls this technique "the mean-femme email" and it has proven to be highly effective.
As the child of a single mother, Claire has learned to put everyone else first from an early age, and has quickly understood that week-ends are not for resting but for doing laundry. She also benefitted from the experience of countless freelance artists before her, who modelled burn-outs with grace and glamour. Thankfully, special encounters with rest-advocating colleagues such as Alix Eynaudi and Angela Alves and constant reminders from her producer Sophie Schmeiser to take holidays, taught her some survival skills to make it through the forever emerging artist labyrinth. A life-long insomniac, she has been in a constant battle to let herself relax, and therefore developed countless non-working methods: some of her favourite practices are watching trash reality TV while scrolling on Instagram, staring at the ceiling, and writing “I’m on a break from xxx until xxx and therefore won’t be checking my emails in this timeframe” automatic response messages to her emails."
