Happily ever after

She may be a rising star in the Scottish dance scene but there was a time when Claire Cunningham wouldn't have called herself a dancer. "I had very traditional notions of what dance was, and thought that it was something I couldn't do. I had no interest in it whatsoever. But I was interested in aerial work and in my naivety I didn't consider that to be dance."

That was eight years ago, before Cunningham met the pioneering choreographer Jess Curtis, or trained with dancer and choreographer Bill Shannon (aka "The Crutchmaster"), or won a Creative Scotland Award which allowed her to develop her craft as a dancer using the crutches that have helped her walk since the age of 14. Cunningham, who was diagnosed with osteoporosis at an early age, had been spotted by Curtis while working with an aerial dance company in England, and was introduced by him to contact improvisation, a method of "learning to dance from a sensory stimulus" as opposed to following steps.

"It seemed a little bit hippy to me at first," she says, "but it did open my perception in a way that I'd never tuned into before." Curtis pointed out to Cunningham that she was using her crutches in a choreographic way, playing with their weight and balance. "It was changing that perspective for me, going, 'Actually these are skills, specific strengths that I've developed because I've used the crutches all this time.'"

She kept dancing, and the result was two successful solo shows (Evolution and Mobile), a name-check on the Cultural Leadership Programme's 2010 50 UK Women to Watch in the Cultural & Creative Sector, and now a collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland for her latest piece Ménage à Trois. Working with choreographer and video artist Gail Sneddon, the piece uses interactions between dance, video projections and puppetry to explore Cunningham's relationship with her crutches, and whether or not they get in the way of forming romantic bonds.

"It wasn't intended to be quite as biographical but it just evolved. There were a lot of things in there that I needed to work through. Simply put, it's about the question of who are we all looking for and why are we looking for that person and are we looking for the wrong person?" Sneddon was brought in initially as a choreography mentor, but later developed the show's multimedia side. As Cunningham puts it, "It was still about pulling the story out of my life and Gail did a lot of the teasing."

Both Cunningham and Sneddon are keen that Ménage à Trois is not just seen as addressing issues relating to disability, but that audiences find resonance in the themes of love and loneliness that affect everyone. "I think Ménage à Trois is on one level questioning for me: 'Does my impairment affect whether I am deemed attractive or not?' But that's simply my particular hangup, my issue. Everybody is asking that same question but for different reasons, though you always kind of feel it's just you."

Sneddon agrees. "All the things that go on in our minds, it's just the same for everybody. Hopefully it's a familiar place that people share, and that they can connect to." This notion was affirmed for them earlier this year when they took Ménage à Trois to an arts festival in Doha, Qatar, renaming it Three. "It was very interesting to see that it could work in that environment, where people's views about relationships are quite different," says Sneddon.

At the same time, Cunningham hopes that working with the profile that the National Theatre of Scotland brings will attract the right kind of attention to the show, and open up doors for other dancers with disabilities. While, there are already a number of talented disabled dancers working in the UK, taking that step requires bravery. "It's about choosing to take control of [your disability] and turn it around and explore it on your own terms. Part of that comes from seeing work by people with your experience. If people don't see an example of something, then they often don't consider it a possibility. To have such a high-profile platform hopefully will trigger that."