Claudia Kappenberg is Senior Lecturer in Dance and Visual Arts and lectures across the Visual Performing Arts area. Her subjects include movement research, performance, screen based practices, installation and critical theory.
Claudia trained in Modern Dance, Butoh and Movement Analysis and danced professionally in Europe and New Zealand before coming to London in 1991.
She completed an MA Fine Art/Film and Video at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 1998 and taught at Central Saint Martins and London Guildhall University until 2002. Since then she taught at the University of Brighton and is Course Leader of the MA Performance and Visual Practices.
As artist she draws on her background of dance as well as visual arts and film to create work which consists of minimal choreographies and examines patterns of the everyday. Shifting between play, ritual and the absurd, they create a sense of continuity and rhythm to provide a framework for small jumps, jolts and surprises.
The work is often developed for particular sites or reconfigured in their relocation to other sites and exhibited in the form of live interventions, gallery based performances, installations or in traditional performance venues.
The research consists of a practice-led investigation, which examines the relevance of the Bataillean concepts of uselessness, excess and non-productive expenditure for a contemporary visual and performance practice. The project proposes to investigate these terms through and against Catherine Clément’s concept of Syncope, her science of pauses and philosophy of rapture.
Through a combination of practice and theoretical enquiry the research project tests Clément’s proposition that art constitutes a vestige within Western culture, which can offer a space of experience to what she calls the ‘non-subject’.
The research project focuses on the body as the main medium, that is the body as image and as that which intervenes in the space of the everyday.
See also Claudia Kappenberg's staff pages.
