Thank You Very Much gets myths about the body all shook up

He had the songs and the voice, yes, but it was how he moved which caused teens to tremble and uptight adults to fear the end of civilisation.

Such were Presley’s gyrating powers, a newspaper warned FBI director J Edgar Hoover how he was “a definite danger to the security of the United States”.

In Thank You Very Much, the new show by Claire Cunningham, one of the most acclaimed disabled artist-performers in Europe, Presley’s moves are used to explore the myths we’ve build up around bodies and movement.

A Elvis fan from when she was an aspiring teenage singer, Cunningham rediscovered him as she became a choreographer in her 30s.

Claire Cunningham in the play. Photograph: Hugo Glendinning

“How he danced really upset a lot of people,” says the Glasgow-based dancer. “I became interested in that, how it was troubling to some people. There were certain qualities to the way he moved that I felt was quite relevant to the way disabled bodies move, the way that my body moves, and I wanted to explore that.”

Speaking from TanzHaus in Dusseldorf, where she’s been an artist in residence for the past three years, Cunningham explains how the show’s initial seed came when she and a group of colleagues, one of whom used a wheelchair, were trying to exit a building.

“We had to go round the back, use a big elevator and eventually got out through a side entrance,” she says. “We wondered how long would it take Elvis to ‘leave the building’ if he used a wheelchair. It was a silly first thought that made me look at him again, specifically how he moved and the correlations with how disabled bodies move.”

She adds: “There was this idea that his body was out of his control, that he was almost possessed by the movement. That’s sometimes a projection of how disabled bodies move and exist.”

Cunningham then immersed herself in the world of Elvis tribute artists, meeting and learning from those who specifically train to move just like him. The experience so fascinated the choreographer she hooked up tribute artists with fellow disabled performers Dan Daw, Tanja Erhart and Vicky Malin.

Thank You Very Much presents the stories of each relationship and the resonances the performers found with their own experiences.

“As disabled people, a lot of us from childhood have spent our lives trying to be like somebody else,” says Cunningham.

“That could be through techniques like physiotherapy and speech therapy, of trying to change how we move, of trying to move in a way we think other people might think is ‘better’ or more ‘acceptable’. Elvis was quite a fun and entertaining lens to look through the bigger question about whether we are trying to always obtain this mythological body that none of us have.”

Not even Elvis, of course, could live up to the myth, says Cunningham.

“There’s a wonderful quote from him that goes: ‘the human is one thing and the image is another, and it’s very hard to live up to an image’,” she says. “Even he couldn’t be the Elvis everyone wanted him to be.”

October 31 to November 3, The Couper Institute, Glasgow, Oct 31 to Nov 2 7.30pm, Nov 3 3pm, £15, £12 concs. Tel: 0141 221 0970.

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