To Be Me

Set to the poetry of the acclaimed spoken word artist and rapper Kate Tempest, To Be Me explores the themes of gender, identity and the changing body.

Based on the Greek myth of Tiresias - the blind prophet, born a man and transformed into a woman by the gods, Hera and Zeus - Tempest’s verse becomes the intricate accompaniment to a striking and uncompromising choreographic work exemplifying Cunningham’s and her dancers’ extraordinary technical ability.

Trained at the Rambert School, the award-winning dancer Julie Cunningham spent the bulk of her professional career working with Merce Cunningham in New York before returning to Britain to join the Michael Clark Company.

In September 2016, after becoming the first recipient of the Leverhulme Choreography Fellowship, Cunningham set up her own company with the aim of finding new movement vocabularies that strip away mannerism and pretense, and make no distinction between the sexes of the performers.

The work premiered in The Pit at the Barbican, London, March 2017.