In a show at the Flood Gallery this month, a provocative British-born artist turns dance into a visual art.

by Ursula Gullow  .  portrait by Anthony Bellemare

An overarching theme in Claire Elizabeth Barratt’s life is that she moves wherever dance takes her. About twice a year, the 43-year-old packs a stash of props and costumes into her car and heads out on a national tour. With her interdisciplinary performance company, Cilla Vee Life Arts, she stops in places like Birmingham or New York City or Toronto (though tightened border laws restricted her from entering Canada last summer), staying with fellow creative colleagues with whom she performs. “I don’t really make money,” she says, explaining that she basically barters her way around the country. “The interactions I have with different artists are so rich to me.”

In summer 2009, Barratt found herself living out of a storefront near Times Square for 12 days for Shrine, an installation that explored spirituality and ritual. The doors were open to the public, and it was air-conditioned, so many tourists wandered in as Barratt and others danced. She had them describe their worship rituals on cards, which they pinned to the walls. “They could choose to come inside and physically interact with the space,” she says. “As time progressed, the space became more saturated as this whole sort of spiritual experience.”

Barratt refers to pieces that involve audience interaction as “you projects.” Sometimes, installations turn into “you projects” unexpectedly. Last winter, during the Asheville Fringe Festival, Barratt was performing her Water Music piece in the bathroom of the Bebe Theatre. She played the cello dressed in a black vinyl dress and purple wig. “I’d turn on the tap, flush the toilet, gurgle and throw toilet paper around,” Barratt says. One woman, oblivious to Barratt’s commotion, came in to use the toilet and said, “Excuse me I need to use that,” Barratt recalls. “So I just stood up and carried on playing. She turned out to be more fringey than anybody there.”

Barratt is a trained dancer, but she prefers to call herself a “motion sculptor.“ It’s a term she came up with while working as a figure model in New York City art schools for five years starting in 2002. Shifting from one pose to the other, she discovered that the contemplative movement was similar to dance. “Organically, it just started happening in my performances,” she says. 

Improvisation is an element she’s been inviting into her art more and more. She has sought out Asheville’s experimental and electronic musicians, like guitarist Shane Perlowin, ambient musician Kima Moore and vocal artist Elisa Faires. “So many people are so brilliant with improvisation,” Barratt says. “They’re composing in the moment.”

Lately, she prefers to stage her work as installations rather than performances, allowing viewers to move around her, watch her and move on, similar to the way they might move around a sculpture at a museum. She is always combining art forms—incorporating video into her dance, dance into video, sculpture into dance, and so on. You might have caught Barratt last summer in Pritchard Park performing Splat, a piece in which her body became a canvas for paint. Last July, she staged Luna at the Flood Gallery in the River Arts District’s Phil Mechanic building with minimal lighting and glow-in-the-dark body powder. 

This month, Barratt offers another showing at the Phil Mechanic’s Flood Gallery. Her month-long exhibition is called Dance is the New Visual Art, and for it, Barratt installed video projectors and TVs that broadcast images of her “movement sculptures.” They accompany a larger sculpture made of paper. “The work that I’m doing is more about bringing movement into the context of visual art than it is about dance as theatre,” she says. 

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, (her father taught at a university there), Barratt did most of her growing up in Chester, England. She speaks with an accent she describes as “mutant.” After studying theater in London, she visited WNC and ended up taking part in the annual Cherokee Unto these Hills performance. She learned choreography there, and, after meeting the founders of Circle Modern Dance in Knoxville, Tennessee, joined up as that company’s co-director. Eventually, that connection, and her parents’ move to North Asheville, prompted her to put down roots. 

Because her dance is performed sans theater or stage, set design is critical. Barratt often creates them using found or inexpensive materials like cardboard, chicken wire, fabric or plastic Tupperware containers. A table someone throws out in the street? To Barratt, it’s a stage. Her repurposing of objects seems to exemplify her artful vagabond lifestyle. “It’s all just a big kind of trash heap that I can make into a beautiful sculptural form.” 

For more info on Cilla Vee Life Arts, check out cillavee.com. Barratt’s show at the Flood Gallery starts January 8.