In this lecture-performance, Claire Lefèvre juxtaposes archival research with intimate storytelling to shine a light on systematic erasures within dance history. Looking at her own embodied archive through the prism of her encounters with Loïe Fuller over the years, she oscillates between crush and crash. Questioning her performance lineage with care, critique, and suspicion, Claire unveils the straightened and white-washed legacy of modern dance. One anecdote at the time, she sheds layers of (her) choreographic history which have shaped the way she moves through the world and on a stage.

While they take a closer look at Sophie Utikal’s stage design, or on their way home, or whenever they wish to engage with this material, the audience is invited to learn more about the entanglements between modern dance, white queerness, and the colonial project through an accompanying publication. A gathering of footnotes, poems and reading recommendations, the text further situates Loïe Fuller’s flamboyant campiness within the electricity crazed colonial context in which she lived and worked.

Created in close collaboration with textile artist Sophie Utikal, video artist Maanila Santos De Moraes and sound designer Zosia Hołubowska this piece channels Loïe Fuller’s stagecraft and invites the audience on a nerdy and melodramatic trip through dance history.

Claire Lefèvre is a femme choreographer, insomniac writer, and reality TV connoisseur currently based in Vienna, Austria. In her stage works, she likes to think of herself as a hostess with the mostest, welcoming collaborators and audience members into kitsch landscapes where politics and poetics are gently interwoven. Claire’s work with text spans from poetry to grant applications, at times flirting with performance criticism, stand-up comedy or feminist theory. Occasionally she works as a ghost writer, but mostly because of the spectral appeal of the job title. Currently she is also developing her practice as a performance doula, a role imagined to disinvisibilize care work in the gestational process of performance making.