Emilyn Claid: Untitled

In this performance emilyn welcomes the fears of endings, teasing with what it means to bow out, the irony of living in an old body and what’s real and what’s imagined. Combining movement and theatre, staged choreography, and playful, improvised interactions, emilyn faces queering and ageing with dark humour, undercut with moments of pathos. As she transforms between hunter and creature, therapist and diva, cruising and crumbling, a collage of personal stories and self-directed choreography emerges, interwoven with devised material created collaboratively with Heidi Rustgaard, Florence Peake and Joseph Mercier.

emilyn claid has a fifty year career as a performer, stretching back to the 1960s when she was a ballet dancer with the National Ballet of Canada and the 1970s when she was co-founder of experimental collective X6 Dance Space in London, a pioneering organisation for New Dance. In the 1980s she was artistic director of Extemporary Dance Theatre and in the 1990s choreographed for companies such as Phoenix and CandoCo. Working as an independent dance artist emilyn made and performed a series of iconic solo works in which she found an authentic voice as a lesbian artist. emilyn is also an emeritus professor and a Gestalt psychotherapist and has recently published FALLING Through Dance and Life, (Bloomsbury 2021), a book about dance performance that re-thinks Western culture’s physical, metaphorical and psychological relationship to gravity.