Clara Saito
Clara Saito

Performance and Visual Artist

About

Clara Saito is a performance and visual artist based in Amsterdam. Her work moves between different characters, including the drag king Kurt Dickriot, the rockstar of performance art Lady Dada, and Sadsato Claclown, the saddest clown in town. These personas evolve with each performance, shaped by Saito’s lived experiences and in response to the world around them.

Saito’s artistic practice is rooted in improvisation, transformation, and a refusal of fixed forms. Drawing from her plural cultural background, Brazilian, Swiss, and Japanese, as well as her long-standing involvement in Amsterdam’s queer and DIY scenes, she explores identity as a fluid process. Her performance philosophy embraces an embodied anarchism, where freedom, unpredictability and solidarity drive creation.

She is the initiator of Impro Drag, a playful and political space for drag and dance improvisation that bridges artistic practice and community gathering.

Since 2017, she has been part of Jakoozi, an artist-run space at the intersection of performance, visual art, and time-based media. She has performed with artists such as Michelle Moura (Venice Dance Biennale) and Florentina Holzinger (Impulstanz), while also presenting her own work in galleries, festivals, and underground venues across Europe and Brasil.

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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 film above

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…

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Selected Works

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

Sad Clown (2024)
Performance

Sad Clown (2024)

Performance (20 minutes) Sad Clown is an emotional excavation that bridges the absurd and the profound, using the timeless figure of the clown as a vessel for collective release. Inspired by Emmet Kelly’s iconic sad clown, with a drag-infused twist, Clara Saito’s clown is both a relic of tradition and a modern disruptor, blending theatricality with raw humanity. The makeup becomes a transformative mask, an emblem of exaggerated sorrow that transcends time, rooted in the haunting beauty of bygone vaudeville and the radical self-expression of drag. The performance unfolds as a dynamic interplay between structured spectacle and raw emotional exchange. Lip-syncing, an act both deeply performative and intensely personal, becomes a conduit for channeling grief, joy, and longing. These moments are juxtaposed with somatic practices that invite the audience into the clown’s world, breaking the fourth wall in cathartic communion. Together, audience and performer scream their sadness away, releasing a collective weight that words alone cannot carry. Grounded in the turbulence of our times, Sad Clown confronts the inescapable sadness brought by today’s crises, personal, political, and environmental. The clown’s struggle mirrors our own: how do we navigate grief, despair, and uncertainty in a way that propels us forward rather than paralyzing us? The piece invites us to sit with our sorrow, not to wallow but to witness and transform it into resilience and bring it to the streets! Through its reinterpretation of burlesque and the clown tradition, Sad Clown reclaims the stage as a space for vulnerability and rebellion. Moving between presence and detachment, humor and heartache, Clara Saito’s performance redefines what it means to laugh and cry in a world on fire. In Sad Clown, sadness isn’t just an emotion; it’s an energy. One that can be screamed, danced, and sung into a strange, hopeful freedom.

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
Impro Drag
Workshop

Impro Drag

Guided Improvisation — 2 hours The improvisation begins with an hour dedicated to transformation: a time to arrive, to socialize, and to listen inward to let a mood and a character emerge through clothing and make-up. A guided warm-up, inspired by the drama in telenovelas, then prepares the body and spirit, tuning attention and awakening sensation. Once we are ready, the space opens into one hour of dance improvisation in character, a living terrain of movement, presence, and play. Impro Drag is an invitation to explore how movement shifts when our sensation of self is altered. Through improvisation and encounters, we experiment with clothing and make-up as catalysts for transformation. Questions that can be embodied through the improvisation are : how does drag influence our movement qualities, our own perceptions of body and self and our connection with others ?

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