A dance performance that believes two mountain consultants – now booked. Claire Cunningham is dressed in hiking gear: backpack, backpack, transparent paper bag around her neck. His journey only takes him around the small theater, counting the steps, climbing the seats in the auditorium, and sheltering in the mountain tops made of tangled clubs, but his wanderings become a meditation on finding a way through the unexpected paths of life.
It’s a solo show, but Cunningham isn’t alone on stage. There’s a BSL interpreter, and audience members are invited to slouch in beanbags (all performances are relaxed, with accommodation for various access needs). We don’t worry if our bodies, or our beans, sound, it’s all part of the brand, which tells in a kind of pre-campaign brevity. He who uses spindles — as Cunningham does — consumes twice as much energy as one who does not, he says, to break. And when they come, he asks if it is necessary to stretch out, take a drink, and returning us to our bodies. The Scotsman has an open, easy way to connect and reminds us that we are on this journey together.
They are subtle, but clever ideas. In that briefcase, for example, there is not a topography, but a score: Mahler’s Song of a Wayfarer. Before he was a leading figure in the arts and dances of the vices, Cunningham was a classical singer, and singing lines from the song cycle (for a more ambient favor, by Matthias Herrmann), his voice is at once strong and vulnerable. At the same time, the marks from the name appear on the floor, they are turned into directions for living: “Without haste”, “Softly, to the end”.
Cunningham adds his own sweet and rhythmic text as he fixes his truncheons on the floor, “creature quadrupeds” moving his balance, sometimes sailing uncomfortably. The moving sections are not as impactful as his song and speech – where he reveals fragments of memory, life and loss – but somehow they are essential to the pirate’s and reverent feeling; with one foot, or with the other, before the other, over and over again, as we must all do. But it is affecting the quiet part.