Queer Dance History
In June 2024, Pr. Dr. Eike Wittrock invited Claire to co-teach a workshop on Lesbian Dance History for the students of MUK University. Together, thex explored the complex legacy of queer femmes in the performing arts focusing specifically on their personal favourites: Loie Füller and Rosalia Chladek.
In April 2025, Claire will teach two courses at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne:
For the Master students, using her essay/zine/love letter “the fuller picture” as a starting point, Claire will introduce key texts and pivotal concepts that helped her look back at canonical dance history with a suspicious gaze. From crush to crash and back again, she will also share the emotional and theoretical roller-coaster she went on during her archival research, and offer strategies with which to unearth gossip, tell layered stories, and look for traces of resistance in the margins. Should you kill your darlings if they’re already dead? Or is there something to learn from obsolete lesbian drama? We will read together, speculate, and investigate which queer dramaturgies could support a perpetually complexified re-writing of histories.
For the Bachelor students Claire will share practices she gathered while working on her solo “LOIE (is a fire that cannot be extinguished)”. In this piece, Claire juxtaposed archival research with intimate storytelling to shine a light on systematic erasures within dance history. Looking through the prism of her encounters with legendary lesbian dancer Loïe Fuller, she questioned her performance lineage with care, critique, and suspicion, to unveil the straightened and white-washed legacy of modern dance. A blend of improvisation, poem writing and theory, her classes will explore a multitude of embodied archives. Somatic work becomes a portal towards remembering: from ballet ghosts to haunted legacies. We will question what is canonized, what is forgotten, and what is actively erased from mainstream dance history.
In July 2025, Claire and Eike will reunite to teach Queer Dance History 101 at Impulstanz Festival!
More info about that soon
