BIO

As a director and choreographer, Claire has worked with Red Tape Theatre, Interrobang Theatre Project, Walkabout Theater, Metal Shop Performance Lab, Rhinofest, Broken Nose Collective, and Chicago Theatre Marathon. She is the Grants Manager and an ensemble member with Red Tape Theatre and an Institutional Giving Consultant with Artistic Fundraising Group. Claire has participated in DirectorsLabChicago, Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation Observership Program, and Hangar Theatre's Directing Apprenticeship. She graduated from Vassar College and further trained at the Moscow Art Theater School.

As a person, Claire is not the loudest or most talkative person in the room, a first-time Auntie, a mover and creator, a loyal friend, a Chicagoan originally from California, and always a ballerina at heart. 

WHAT I MAKE

I am a director and choreographer who works fluidly across theatre, dance theatre, and performance art through devising practices and ensemble-based collaboration. From the premise that everything is constructed and can hold meaning, I examine the everyday, even the mundane, through a feminist lens to imagine new possibilities. My goal as a director is to create the playground of circumstances for the ensemble to experience the erotic (the feeling of being alive) in the process of creation and for the audience to experience it in the act of encountering the work. From there, I hope artists and audiences seek to adapt their own behavior and the structures of their lives to cultivate this feeling, which I think leads us toward liberation. To achieve this, I prioritize collaboration, inquiry, metaphor, ritual (transformative shared experience), and craft (repeated practice).

INSPIRED BY

Authenticity. Myths and spectacle. Visual art. Specificity and precision. My 96-year-old grandmother. Hand-me-downs. Choreographers (Pina Bausch, Jyri Kyllian, Ohad Narahin). Feminist artistic guides (adrienne maree brown, Anne Carson, Audre Lorde, Peggy Orenstein, Rebecca Solnit, Jeanette Winterson, Virginia Woolf, Jenny Odell, Suzan Lori-Parks, Sarah Ruhl). Walks and showers. More and more, children and families. The choice to do something else.

EXPLORING:

I’ve been calling it “Personal Book Club.” Maybe it’s also Personal Dramaturgy. In 2022, I’ve dived back into both experimental work, work that I’ve devised, and plays. These represent the spectrum of kinds of theater I want to work in. But my next goal is to direct a full-length play. 

As I say below, it is hard to give gifts to yourself. I feel a bit stuck in a moment of feeling like the only work I get to spearhead is devised work or otherwise I join onto someone else’s play. But I want to direct the play that I want. And yet, it is so hard to give myself the time to just sit and read and explore the plays I’m interested in. I have two specific plays I’d like to work on, but I really just want to give myself the structure, accountability, and permission to explore plays. This is the part of my practice I have not been able to devote attention to. 

So I want to read plays, research them, talk about them and articulate what is important about them to me. 

Ultimately, yes, then I want to pitch them to people, and I know that’s very much part of the traditional hustle. That will come when it comes. 

Not the same, but maybe related. I want to give myself the time to dance and choreograph again. I have a hunch this is part of my dramaturgical practice. But I also want to release the need for everything to have a point.