Craig McCorquodale
About Craig McCorquodale
Craig McCorquodale is an artist working in experimental performance, theatre and dance. He thinks of performance as a kind of combat sport — vivid, capricious, bound up in spectacle. This means a distinct belief that art allows people to transcend their everyday selves. That we can come into contact with the miraculous.
His work exists to challenge what theatre can be and how far the stage can go in presenting real life. It is non-narrative, image-based and conceptually rigorous. His enduring interest is collaborating with people who might never have done anything like this before, inviting unusual constituencies of people into the process and on to the stage. Craig names this as Social Sculpture: working with the experience people have of their own lives to create radical, vital and beautiful performance events.
In 2023, Craig premiered Walk With Me While I Remember You in Toronto, a one-to-one performance walk for city parks made with young people who have experienced the loss of a parent. This received a five star review by local press and will be re-made in different locations with new young people.
Also in 2023, Craig culminated a residency with Inverclyde Libraries, Commissioned by Inverclyde Culture Collective, with the presentation of Questions of Democracy. Playing with the relationship between language, power and public space, the work unfolded over a continuous 24 hour period as Craig installed 24 different pieces of text around Inverclyde - one each hour of the day. Words appeared in swimming pools, on billboards, in boats on the Clyde, on beaches, in shopping centres, churches, sheriff courts, hospitals, primary schools and on the backs of an over fifties men’s walking football team - collaborating with ninety local people to make this happen.
In 2024, Craig was selected as the inaugural Takeover Artist at Factory International's AVIVA Studios in Manchester to develop a new work at scale. His projects in development are being supported by Battersea Arts Centre, FABRIC, Tramway, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts and VIERNULVIER. In 2023, Craig was awarded the Jerwood Arts New Work Fund and in 2021, he was a recipient of the Jerwood Arts Live Work Fund. He has previously been Commissioned by Wunder der Prärie Festival at Zeitraumexit and Lyra.
Craig has worked with National Theatre of Scotland on the Thinking Space residency; Non-Optimum: When It's Safe To Do So; and Futureproof 2018.
He collaborates with 21Common, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Quarantine and Hydra Arts and in these contexts has toured to: Triennale Milano, VIERNULVIER, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Sydney Fringe, Taranaki Festival in New Zealand, Brighton Festival, Theater Neumarkt in Zürich, Freedom Festival Hull and Colchester Arts Centre.