Artist Profile – Clare Cook

For nearly her entire life, Clare Cook has thrived on dancing, starting with performing in grocery stores at age 3. Today she has emerged not only as an accomplished professional dancer and choreographer, but also as a major contributor to developing the arts in Lafayette. 

Her choreographic work has appeared in contemporary dance, experimental and musical theaters, operas and film. She has presented work with the Acadiana Center for the Arts, worked with the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra and has been commissioned by the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, to name a few. 

Even though she’s always felt most like herself when dancing, becoming a dancer professionally was a dream that evolved for Cook. “My mother enjoyed dancing and exposed my sister and me to dance school very early,” she says. “That was a great gift in my life, because it stuck with me. Throughout high school I didn’t know a lot of professional dancers, so I didn’t realize it was something I was allowed to pursue. Once I started traveling and meeting dancers from different regions, that was a turning point in understanding what a career in dance could look like, and that it could be a legitimate career.”

After graduating from LSU, with a minor in dance, Cook headed to New York – like many artists before her – to find her life’s path. While she was attending New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, for her masters in Dance Performance and Choreography, she began working as a professional dancer and choreographer in many settings. She started her own company, Clare Cook Dance Theatre, in 2010, which provided a vehicle to create and produce original, collaborative dance theater productions. In doing so, Cook has performed throughout New York and worked alongside some of the city’s most accomplished choreographers.

After 10 years in New York, Cook, a Lafayette native along with her husband, was drawn back home by a desire to be with family. But there was another driving force to build and grow something creative. She’d always kept one eye on the Lafayette community while she lived away. “I was inspired by a bubbling up of young creatives who I was starting to see,” she recalls. “I wanted to reintegrate with a renewed sense of purpose and new energy. There wasn’t a professional dance community at the time, so I re-entered the community with eyes wide open knowing that I would have to create that community for others.”

But she created more than a dance community. She returned to Lafayette in 2016 and opened Basin Arts, a collaborative arts space in downtown that allows artists to come together. She enhanced the artistic identity of the community through dance and art classes, free visual arts programming like artist talks and “critique night” as well as other special events. 

She describes Basin Arts as a place she wants participants to focus on the process over the product.  “For the greater public to experience compelling, life-changing art, the artist has to have the space and support to create that kind of art,” she explains, her words as thoughtful and illuminating as the steps she choreographs. “Basin Arts prioritizes the artist to be able to do that. The public is not only seeing artists’ completed works, but is able to understand the work that goes into producing them. They should have that opportunity to see both sides.”

To further promote local artists, Cook established the program BARE walls, which coordinates the display of local art work at businesses. 

Basin Arts is also home to Cook’s dance company Basin Dance Collective, aimed at developing a professional platform for dancers in Lafayette. While Cook says dance is still a big part of her identity, more time is spent choreographing these days. Basin Dance Collective maintains a company of six dancers trained in classical and modern dance, who rehearse weekly. 

A member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, Cook enjoys the collaborative creative process and is often invited to engage with other visual artists and colleagues in New York. 

Among notable collaborations is SURFACE, a 2018 project where Cook went deeper than the surface with a collaboration of her choreography, body painting of seven dancers by artist Brittney Pelloquin, and abstract painting on stage by Dirk Guidry. 

PARADE was a dance, video and architectural collaboration commissioned by the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra.

In Sports Suites an entire evening of dances focused on sports. “It was a way of getting more people to experience modern and contemporary dance, since sports are something a lot of people love,” explains Cook. 

Her performances are rooted in the human experience, be it a story, a memory, a simple activity or a feeling. She puts people, energy and stories on a stage and crafts a story through movement.

As she describes it, “The process is kind of a collage that generates movements, writing and pulling images, sounds, sights and then working collaboratively with the dancers in their personal space. The music often comes last.”

Community outreach is a large part of Cook’s creative investment in Lafayette. For over two years, before the pandemic, she led weekly dance classes for cancer survivors at Miles Perret Cancer Services and worked with seniors, including Alzheimer’s and dementia patients – both of which she plans to restart. Through Basin Arts, she has facilitated movement workshops with organizations like Acadiana C.A.R.E.S. and Big Brothers-Big Sisters. She has created interactive dance and visual arts field trip experiences for area schools with students as young as Pre-K age.

It’s because of her work supporting artists in Acadiana that Cook was recipient of Acadiana Center for the Arts’ ArtSpark Award in 2016 and again in 2019. Her efforts have also brought the 38-year-old the ABC ICON Rising Star Award in 2017. 

Yet the most rewarding part of her job she says is, “I get to work through the lens of dance and with so many different people in so many different ways.” 

She looks forward to next spring when Basin Arts moves to its new location at Jefferson Boulevard and Pontiac Point. The larger building, once an historical church, will allow for the addition of an intimate theatre. As Cook continues to grow and collaborate with more artists in a larger space, we can’t wait to see what new possibilities open up for all different types of expression and movement.