Claire Vivianne Sobottke (*1982, D/F) is based in Berlin and engages choreography, performance, dance, and music: she studied acting at the Universität der Künste Berlin and choreography at DAS Amsterdam. She installs her work in both theatre and museum contexts.

Claire conceives of her work as a site of resistance and undoing, where established norms of seeing and thinking about bodies can be unsettled and reimagined. She considers the body as a turbulent accumulation of concepts, collective and personal histories, traumata, memories, projections, identities, and magic. Dancing thus becomes a way to activate the body’s archive and make its inherent turbulence visible. Herein the voice acts as a political tool and poetic phenomenon. Claire is a self trained voclist and continuously explores diverse vocal techniques.

Her choreographic works include “a mort – A Choreographic Song Cycle for Three Voices” (2023, Sophiensaele Berlin), “Velvet” (2019, Tanz im August & Gropius Bau Berlin, 2020), and “strange songs” (2016, Sophiensaele). She often works in collaborative constellations with shared authorship In collaboration with Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl, and Hermann Heisig, she created “Gut Gemacht!” (2025, HAU Berlin; Schauspiel Leipzig), “FULL BODY FRONTAL” (2022, Mousonturm Frankfurt) with Fabrice Mazliah, and, “WE BODIES” (2019, Tanzhaus Zürich) with Michael Turinsky and Teresa Vittucci. Her curatorial work includes “SOFTSCORES” (2021, Pact Zollverein, Essen), “Songs for Love and Rage” (2018, Tanznacht Berlin), and “Amazonas” (2017, Sophiensaele Berlin).

Since 2015 she works closely with Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods. Claire regularly teaches at universities and festivals across Europe. In 2024/25, she was guest professor at Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft in Gießen.

As an actress for film and theatre, she has recently worked on “Estrany Riu” by Jaume Claret Muxart (Venice Biennale), “La Force Diagonale,” by Annik Leroy (FID Marseille), and in “Dark Spring”,directed by Yana Thönnes (Theater Neumarkt Zürich). She is co-founder of the Freelance Dance Ensemble and part of the collective Echo Beach.

She is on an Artistic Exchange Resedency at Bau in Amsterdam in July 2026.

Her work explores the feminist potential of transformation and otherness through relationships with the more-than-human, the grotesque, and the monstrous — destabilizing human-imposed hierarchies and the violent discourses that uphold categories such as alive/dead, animal/human, and man/woman.

This led her to hunting as the central focus of her research project Étude de Chasse (WT) — a choreographic and musical investigation into the history and practice of hunting. She approaches the hunt as a highly ritualized act of killing, asking what it reveals about power, domination, and the connections between the heroization of killing, the eroticization of the hunter, and patriarchal violence.