If you leave me now…
Prof. Claire Cunningham & Juli Reinartz (Choreography, Dance, Care & Disability Arts)
English, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Starts: 5.1.2026, 10 h (soft arrival until 10:30 h)
Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT), Studio 11

Registration on Moodle starts 1.12.2025 / Anmeldung auf Moodle beginnt am 1.12.2025:
https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/enrol/instances.php?id=2967
Moodle Enrollment Key / Einschreibeschlüssel: leave

This week, hosted by Claire Cunningham with artist/choreographer Juli Reinartz, explores the act of leaving in performances.
Key questions include:

• When do/would you leave?
• What does it mean to exit – a performance, a space, choreographic material, a narrative, a system?
• How could we hold space for the unfinished, interrupted and absent?
• What if we made performance that invited people (audience or performers) to leave? How does this shape content, form, duration, venue, design?
• How could leaving be a mutual act of care?

Drawing on crip and disabled artists’ work, Claire and Juli will explore leaving through the lens of access aesthetics and choreographies of care, considering how accessible design shapes performance and audience experience with reference to space and time.

The lab invites participants to reflect on personal and collective experiences of leaving—as audiences and performers—while examining the social pressures and stigmas around it. Activities may include conversation, reading, writing, accessible movement, spatial arrangements, and visits to performance spaces. Participants might also experiment with “practicing leaving” or “being left.”

The concept of leaving may expand according to the group’s interests. Sessions welcome people with diverse physicalities, sensory modalities, mobility technologies, and neurodivergence. Everyone may rest, move, speak, and engage at their own pace. Sessions are led in Scottish English.

We aim to draw on concepts of crip time and access in our work and will therefore start at 10:00 with a soft arrival/ settling in the space before we kick off with a check in at 10:30. We want to create a relaxed space with accessible seating options and consider together access needs when planning the week in regards to time, energy and resources available.

Claire Cunningham is a performer and creator of multi-disciplinary performances, based in Glasgow.  One of the UK’s most acclaimed and internationally renowned disabled artists, her work is rooted in the study of Crip & disabled experience, practices of care and questioning societal ideas of knowledge and value. She is the Einstein Professor of “Choreography, Dance and Disability Arts “at the Inter-University Centre for Dance in Berlin and in 2024 she premiered her new solo work, Songs of the Wayfarer.

Juli Reinartz is a choreographer and artistic researcher exploring crip time as a choreographic strategy and question to collective experience at the Theater Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. Her endocrinologically turbulent body increasingly shapes her perception of time and forms the core of her research. Alongside her research, Juli co-directs the project Making a Difference in Berlin, which supports and crips artists in artistic leadership positions and fosters anti-ableist working conditions.