Radical softness and care practices

Radical softness and care practices

Since 2019, Claire has been researching radical softness as a choreographic practice, as well as investigating the role of care work in the performance field. She has been sharing her research during workshops, panel discussions and research labs in institutions such as Tanzquartier (AT), K3/Kampnagel (DE), PAF (FR), Museumsquartier (AT) and The Playground Munich (DE). Depending on the format of the workshop and the specific needs and interests of the participants, Claire might approach topics such as

• An introduction to care work in the performance field: Who does it? Who doesn’t? The historical role of race, class and gender in care related practices.
• Writing care work biographies: On professionalizing emotional labour, queer femme expertise, and valuing soft skills.
• Freelance financial literacy: On surviving capitalist grind culture, writing funding applications and budgeting for pleasurable processes.
• Consensual choreographies: On audience interaction, honouring boundaries and learning when the body says no.
• Rest and recovery: On sustainable schedules, post-performance blues, and the importance of giving yourself a break.
• Horizontal feedback: On giving and receiving notes, regulating the nervous system and how to criticize with care.

In these workshops, Claire proposes that, by placing care at the centre of our artistic processes, we can move away from exploitative capitalist structures and towards interconnected and sustainable practices. This is an invitation to re-imagine production models from a queer feminist perspective: it is inspired by the work of crip and femme survivors such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasihna, radical Black mothers such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs and invokes queer care structures developed by the likes of Sophie Lewis and The Care Collective. Focusing on care work is not only necessary for the survival of performance artists, whose working condition are notoriously precarious, it is also a radical act of acknowledging the reproduction labour which is part of making performance art. By revaluing this work and integrating it at the core of our artistic practices, we move away from hetero-patriarchal and production driven models, and get closer to queer and inter-dependent methodologies, where “how we do things” is equally important as what we do in the first place. The workshops offer theoretical support, practical strategies and somatic exercises.