Research
Performance
Since 2022 I have been performing emilyn claid UNTITLED, a solo show about queering and aging, which interlaces collaboratively devised imagery with humour, movement, and text. Being a psychotherapist and a dance theatre performer, I seek out a relational and intersubjective presence with audiences, that plays between humour, joy and grief.
Writing
Claid, E. (2019) FALLING through Dance and Life (London: Bloomsbury).
Dancers embrace gravity as a source of creative potential and change. Existential therapists and philosophers embrace death and dying as a source of creative potential and change. My book sets these practices of intentional falling against human resistance to falling, because of its association with danger, pain, death, fear, failure and shame. In my experience a paradox emerges out of this tension: falling, we can be powerless subjects and agents of change, a dynamic distinction that enlivens discussions throughout the book. I describe how an act of falling, as simple as breathing out, spreads outwards to uncover metaphorical and philosophical connections between falling and laughter, thrill, trauma, ageing and queering, disrupting the fixation of Western culture on individualism, uprightness and supremacy.
Workshops
Dates will be publicized on this site. Click titles to learn more of each workshop.
Through a Choreographic Lens
Date: September 18-22nd, 2024. IAAGT Conference, Veracruz, Mexico
https://iaagt.org/iaagt-biennial-conference/
This workshop draws parallels between choreography and Gestalt practice. Choreography expands outwards from making dances to ‘question, develop, rearrange … to enable forms of navigation in the world. If choreography can be understood as knowledge it becomes a way of approaching and conducting life’ (Spångberg 2017:367). This workshop introduces choreography as arrangements of objects, phenomenologically, in space and time, in ways that make ‘the whole greater than the sum of the parts’ (Burrows 2010: 40). The practice offers parallels with the ever-changing organisation of field, figure and ground familiar to Gestalt therapy. Reflecting on the ways we choreograph deepens knowledge of our cultural backgrounds, field/figure choices and intersubjective creativity, and suggests ways to re-imagine our relations with environments.
Body, Gravity, Ground
This workshop focuses on our physical relationship with gravity and the ground, to offer self and environmental support. Safely constructed movement tasks, drawn from somatic practices such as Release and Alexander techniques, form the core of the workshop. Working with gravity rather than against, participants experiment with moving towards and away from contact with the ground, noticing cognitive, emotional and physical narratives that emerge alongside. Group process, partner work, small and large group discussions interweave with physical tasks.
Letting Go of Things
Through playful relational tasks participants experience how to let go of habitual habits of movement and fixed interpretations of otherness. Letting go of the need to hold on to identity allows for new creative possibilities to emerge between us. Using somatic movement practices as a safe frame, we consider how letting go – physical, metaphorical and psychological – informs our living and being, undoing Western obsessions with supremacy, verticality and fixed identity. The workshop is open to people, across therapeutic and arts disciplines, who like making things with image and movement and are attentive to queer sensibilities.