ABOUT
Biography
Claire Pearl (elle / she - they) is a contemporary dance creator and performer from Tiohtiá:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montréal. She is fascinated by the transformative effects of imagination and language in performance; states of presence, detailed physical textures and lived realities. Attracted by diverse experiences of the "real", she finds answers in the raw, in the flesh and, above all, in friction. Claire collaborates closely with the performers she works with, creating intimate, personal movement structures that reflect the co-thinking of these partnerships. She recently presented a solo in collaboration with singer Lydia Beaulière at Lots of Love Party | FTA, Ego et cheval : acte 2 at Art Souterrain (co-created with Léonie Bélanger, 2022), Archives of Youth (2022) in France, and Sink Your Teeth into the Void (2022) in Austria.
As a performer, Claire has worked with Sarah Dell'Ava, Morgane Guillou, the performance collective La Brigade and in co-created works with Léonie Bélanger.
Claire is a graduate in choreography from the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD) and the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), where she obtained a Bachelor's degree in dance and choreography.
Artistic intent
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approach
My work and interests lie at the crossroads of dance and performance, with an emphasis on working with the imaginary. I'm intrigued by the poetic intersection between sensitive bodies in movement and the images they evoke.
More generally, I try to create universes in which the perception of time and presence is changeable, and in which we are not limited or chained to the conventional codes we know and live by. As I create, and search for different forms of truth - often gray - in art, I find myself drawn to exploring my own inner frictions. It is, for me, the sensory dissonance created by the superimposition of themes, physical materials or even composition, that can deflect our relationship to reality and open us up to other ways of being. In this sense, I weave together creative process with the different realities of the performers.
My creative approach involves a tension between the real and the fictional, soliciting a dialogue between words, images, sounds, movements, states of mind and intuition. Poetic language, in particular, radiates distinctly into the imaginations and bodies of each individual. In my creations, the blending of these mediums, and the interdisciplinary approach, enables me to think - with and in - more complex, three-dimensional and multi-sensory worlds of possibility.
Recently, I've been working with memory as a means of entering the swampy zones between "reality", fiction and science fiction, and as a way of playing with non-linear temporalities.
