Sarah Hopfinger is a queer disabled performance-maker and dance artist based in Glasgow. Her practice is informed by Somatics, Authentic Movement, disability dance, ecological movement, body focusing, live art, her training in contemporary performance, and ideas around ‘cripping’ choreography.
She creates solo, collaborative and participatory choreographic performances, often working with diverse collaborators including children and adults, trained and non-trained dancers, disabled and non-disabled performers, artists from different disciplines, and materials/objects. She approaches choreography and performance-making as a methodology for asking questions in response to her lived experiences and wider issues, and as a practice of being in the unknown and complexities of those questions.
Sarah’s practice is underpinned by a crip politics that approaches disability as a valid and valuable lifeway. She uses the term ‘crip’ in a similar way to other disabled activist-artists: a political approach that embraces and celebrates disabled bodies as knowledgeable and skilful. She uses dance and performance to challenge narratives of disability as tragedy, dejection, and victim. Her artistic approach is also philosophically based in ecological thinking that acknowledges human’s unavoidable entanglements in nonhuman life (this was the focus of her practice-led PhD). Her intention is to practice a crip politics and ecological philosophy through how and what she creates.
Sarah’s award-winning and critically acclaimed performance work, such as Pain and I, has toured nationally and internationally, including: Made In Scotland, Dance Base, Summerhall, Tramway, The Place, Roundhouse, Battersea Arts Centre, ArtFart (Iceland), and Festival Quartier Danses (Canada).
As a researcher, she regularly publishes across ecological performance and disability dance.
On Eigg, Sarah will begin work on a new project about the connections between chronic pain and ecological pain.
