Clara Saito
Clara Saito

Performance and Visual Artist

About

Clara Saito is a performance and visual artist based in Amsterdam. In her recent works she transitions between different characters, such as Sad Clown, the drag king persona Kurt Dickriot, a rockstar in performance arts called Lady Dada and/or a dog called Diva, amongst others. In each presentation, the personalities and moods of Saito’s characters evolve as they are deeply connected to current events and the artists authentic experiences.

Their entangled stories were theorized and brought closer together in an essay called Dissociative Performance: Anarchic Bodies and the Politics of Improvisation. Clara’s work, in combination with her life experiences and mixture of identities, form the base for her reflections on anarchism, practices of freedom and improvisation.

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Education

  • Dutch Art Institute - MFA

    Master in Art Praxis, Arnhem (NL)

  • School for New Dance Development (SNDO)

    Bachelor of Dance and Choreography, Amsterdam (NL)

  • Le Marchepied

    Dance Company for Emerging Dancers, Lausanne (CH)

About the Video

A PIECE OF DADA (2018)

In a city torn apart by a mad scramble for celebrity, Lady Dada seemingly has it all. The enigmatic performance artist lures her audience by ingesting vast amounts of money in her spectacular shows promising fame and unbound pleasure.
While the public is captivated by her special gift, she has no bigger fan than Madame Gram - a glamorous but unhinged opera tycoon who is hell-bent on convincing Dada to be the star of her ‘Popera’.

But Dada has a dirty secret. She doesn’t just eat the dollar bills - she shits them, too. Via the underground sewer system, her faeces are funding an avant-garde revolution that will topple the Opera regime once and for all. Or so she thinks…

Selected Works

Here are a selection of projects that I have worked on over the years.

Sad Clown (2023)
Performance

Sad Clown (2023)

Performance (20 minutes) In her previous performances, Clara Saito has used bodily expression to explore the issues of domination and liberation that infuse society. She uses her own body and those of the performers she regularly works with to translate feelings and attempt to deconstruct the effects of social and societal norms on our daily lives, particularly those of minorities. With Sad Clown, Clara Saito continues her exploration of the language of feelings through the body. Here, she takes a closer look at the issue of mental health through the figure of the clown, whose lightness, frivolity and whimsy we expect, disregarding the person embodying him. But what happens when these buried feelings resurface? How do you reconcile your public persona with your inner self? This performance addresses the problem of ambiguous feelings by replaying the codes of burlesque in a minor mode*.

Public Space (2023)
sh*d*ws (2022)
Performance

sh*d*ws (2022)

Performance, 40 minutes (…) if identities were no longer fixed… a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity sh*d*ws is about transforming, never becoming, dissociating, transiting identies, questionning genders, never fixing, it’s about entering the paranoia of the other’s perception of oneself but never fully believing it, playing dumb, escaping meaning, it is about who you are when you don’t belong, it is about who you are when you don’t have a country, it’s about who you are when your mother tongue fails, it’s about finding who you are when your father’s tongue has no more use, it’s about who you are when the folklore of your native land is not the same than any in your genealogical tree but it is still the first one you lived, it’s about multiple diagnosis, it’s about having symptoms of every mental illness, it is about multiplicity, it is about accumulation, it is about excess, it is about having ancestors in every continent, it is about what you are when claiming an identity automatically erases another part of yourself, it is to choose to not claim anything, it is about acceptance, it is about accepting that your ancestors disagree on their plans for you, it is about accepting that your community will always be the community of the displaced, it is accepting that we will never automatically understand each other and that it will always be through multiple encounters, multiple drunk nights, multiple mistakes that we will maybe get a glimpse of each other’s lives. with musician Rafa Barreto

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Selected Workshops

Here are a selection of workshops that I have worked on over the years.

Theater of Drag
Getting Tropical - Part 2
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