Sarah Hopfinger

I am an artist and researcher, working at the intersections between live art, choreography, performance, disability, crip, chronic pain, ecology, and intergenerational collaboration.

I create collaborative, participatory and solo performances, often working with diverse collaborators including children and adults, trained and non-trained dancers, disabled and non-disabled performers, and nonhuman objects and materials. My work is underpinned by an exploration of crip politics and ecological thinking. I approach performance making as a method of embodying the interconnections across the human, nonhuman and wider social and ecological systems. I often make work from my lived experiences. I approach performance-making and practice-led research as a way to ask difficult questions and to be in the unknown and complexities of those questions. For me, the potential of performance is that it can - in creative process and productions themselves - be a way to practice alternative and more ethical ways of living and being in the world.

My performance and research work has been presented nationally and internationally with organisations such as Take Me Somewhere, Made in Scotland, Summerhall, Battersea Arts Centre, South London Gallery, The Place, The Roundhouse, Imaginate, Buzzcut, Artfart (Iceland), Earth Matters on Stage (USA) and Festival Quertiers Danses (Canada).

My current project Pain and I is a diversely accessible body of work that explores and celebrates the rich complexities of chronic pain experience. It is a bold, intimate and playful autobiographical exploration into the spectrum of chronic pain experience, featuring experimental dance, text framed as a love letter to my pain, and new classical music composition by Alicia Jane Tuner. Pain and I will tour Scotland in Spring 2024.


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Residencies