Motivation for Moving

Petite in stature, with beautiful, delicate features, Scottish dance artist Suzi Cunningham is nonetheless a powerhouse performer: an endless shape shifter whose work ranges from eerie to strange, to poignant, or just absolutely hilarious. She's also a lovely, kind and inspiring person to be around. Fjord Review caught up with her as she returned from butoh camp in Morocco, and a recent residency in Kelburn to find out about her creative process, inspiration and future plans.

Suzi Cunningham. Photograph by KMVH

How would you best define your work? There are so many strands to what you do.

My work has so many strands as there are so many strands to life! Life is full of tragedy, comedy, ridiculousness, pain, joy, absurdity and struggles, so I think the diversity of my performance art reflects that, and it feels important to me that I have found a way to encompass all that in my practice (and perhaps seek a balance!). I don't like to label or define my work too much, I want it to be experienced without preconception or judgement, and hope that people have a relationship with it in their own way. There is of course a strong live and physical performance element to all my work, but I have also recently been exploring ideas of living installation and more interactive work, where people can explore, be present and connect in new ways, sensing within their bodies without feeling exposed. Basically, physical expression can be anything, so I don’t limit myself; some days I write, I sing, I draw, chisel at wood, I love to play, interact with my surroundings in detail, in a playful way. But at the root of all my work is connection, and perception, how I digest information that comes in, how I process the world and express my findings through my body. I hope that what people uncover from my sharings are universal themes, and that perhaps promote curiosity. Shouldn’t we all keep questioning what we perceive?

Suzi Cunningham. Photograph by KMVH

How was attending butoh Camp in Morocco, as opposed to doing butoh in Europe?

Researching and being in the desert was really incredible. Butoh is a dance of transformation. By moving from inner landscape and imagery, it can appear liquid, like stone, shape-shift and twist to reflect the perspective of other life forms and structures. I have spent 12 years training and dancing butoh, working in all environments, but mostly within European contexts (apart from one amazing intense month I was lucky enough to train in Japan with some early butoh pioneers), from black box spaces, studios, mountains, forests, cityscapes and playgrounds, but I had never experienced the desert, its incomparable vastness, quiet, softness but with such arid struggle for survival.

We did exercise that reflected our surroundings, like shifting the body as if made of grains of sand, rolling as tumble weed, falling down dunes and fighting against sandstorms. We practiced Body Weather (a physical practice first developed and named by Min Tanaka) working on techniques using gravity and natural kinetics, simple carrying of stones with intention. The work connected me back to the principles and foundations of butoh and motivation for moving (movement is driven by fundamental need). I felt very emotional when the camp ended as I realised I had reignited a strong motivation and re-opened a creative channel (something I had been struggling with over a year of physical difficulties and emotional strain).

Your work is incredibly visceral. Is it important to you that you leave audiences feeling excited and fired-up?

I read a quote recently that said “it’s not worth doing art unless it changes you in some way.” Although I believe that art doesn’t always have to be meaningful or good or understood, I do want people to be excited by what they see or feel; that it has the potential to change a perspective, to feel or see something they may never have encountered before. To be surprised, delighted, emotional. What I have uncovered in the making of a work, is that the process has changed me in some way, and so in sharing, I hope that people will feel that too. A physical and emotional commitment to what I do means the movement and intention goes beyond the body into space, and I believe the audience can feel that—an enlivened sense of space and connection between us, well I hope for that! I endeavour to make work where this happens, and I guess that’s why I get so nervous about sharing work because I invest and care so much about what people will feel when they see it. I hope they feel excited, moved, stirred, sad, it may vary; they may find it bewildering, strange, exciting, hilarious. The important thing is they feel something.

Suzi Cunningham's “Inhabitants.” Photograph by Asta Gudmundsdottir

Finally, what projects have you got coming up?

I have three very exciting and varied projects coming up. Firstly, the development of “Soup!” with MoonSlide (my partnership with the wonderful Alex McCabe) “Soup!” was inspired by the tastes and smells of our grandparents' cooking and a desire to bring people together around food. We aim to uncover the joy of collective cooking (the audience help make a soup recipe out of a box of a collection of bright and sometimes wonky funnily named vegetables during the show!) MoonSide aims are inclusivity, intergenerational with an emphasis on sensory fun and delicious silliness. We will be in Govanhill soon and developing the work over the summer before retouring our delightful first endeavor, the window cleaning duo, Buff and Sheen.

I also will be in residency in summer with Dance Base. “Inhabitants” which began through solo research in abandoned spaces and exploring displacement, unintentional rewilding, and reclamation in many forms. The work began with the support of City Moves, Aberdeen and I am excited to get time in the studio going back to the fundamentals of butoh, whilst also venturing into new technology, projection, sound and video with the fabulous creative force of Alex Auld-Smith (Microband and Doomscroller) and Tracey Wedderburn, who first captivated me with her realtime visual projective performance in the Voodoo Rooms.

I will also be at Hidden Door Festival in June, a new collaboration with Acolyte called “The Production Line of Dreams.” We are exploring the incredible and vast space of the defunct Paper Factory in the outskirts of Edinburgh, collecting sound recordings and taking inspiration from the factory machinery, with themes of AI, dream-stealers, cycles and mechanisms. This is a super exciting new thread for me working with this superb psychedelic band, and the evocative poetry of Iona Lee.

Lorna Irvine

Based in Glasgow, Lorna was delightfully corrupted by the work of Michael Clark in her early teens, and has never looked back. Passionate about dance, music, and theatre she writes regularly for the List, Across the Arts and Exeunt. She also wrote on dance, drama and whatever particular obsession she had that week for the Shimmy, the Skinny and TLG and has contributed to Mslexia, TYCI and the Vile Blog.

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