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.
A self-identified language nerd, Claire also 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). Recently, she joined Prolet.air studio in Vienna, a feministworking space for independent artists.
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 discovered a true passion for choreography and 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, and as persons living in this crushing system, work that is never paid but definitely feels like labour. Hers currently looks like this:
"As a cancer Sun Libra rising, Claire has been pre-conditioned by the stars to become a people-pleasing care bear since birth. She´s been known for remembering everyone´s birthdays, finding the exact book to inspire your research process and always responding to your emails in a timely manner.
In recent years, Claire has also witnessed hundreds of rehearsals and work in progress showings, proof-read and given feedback to dozens of funding applications, and helped colleagues to turn their wild ideas into concrete written concepts. 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.
Some of her greatest achievements to this day have been writing love letters to her grandma regularly since she was 6 years old, healing from an eating disorder, throwing outrageous surprise parties for her friends and teaching countless men how to find her clitoris for free.
In order to recover from an abusive relationship, Claire went to therapy, yoga classes, performed magic rituals and developed a mild yet tenacious habit of being in control of everything.
A life-long insomniac, she´s also been in a constant battle towards letting herself rest and unlearning capitalist expectations of productivity. One of her favourite non-working method is to watch copious amounts of trash TV while scrolling on Instagram: a highlight of her residency period at K3 was finishing the entire series of the real housewives of Beverly hills consisting of approximately 300 1 hour long episodes. "
