emilyn claid. Image by Henri T.
emilyn claid
Letting Go Of Things
Intensive workshop
17th - 21st March 2025, London
Workshop tickets ~ £225 (£175 concession).
Letting go of things is offered as part of The Trembling Forest, a project of intergenerational queer exchange.
What do we need to let go of, to enliven our practices, to dissolve static postures and crumble notions of normativity? How can we use uncertainty as a life force?
The workshop considers how letting go - physical, metaphorical and psychological - informs living and relating, undoing Western obsessions with supremacy and individuality. The week includes somatic practices, movement, theatrical scores, live art and performance tasks, dialogue and discussion, working individually and relationally, one to one and in groups.
Moving fluidly between identities, ages and genders, we will play with defining, and letting go of, determined relational narratives, object possessions, material fixations and normative structures. The tasks encourage our ability to be with difference creatively, accepting the messiness of our human lives as necessary for adventure and change.
Western cultural norms teach us that standing ‘upright’ in the world, striving for upward-ness, is the way to a ‘good life’ - a life that is linear, patriarchal and capitalist. Standing upright, being ‘happy’, requires us to hold onto things, in our own bodies, and each other’s bodies.
We strive to keep ourselves and each other up because that makes us feel safe. We fix identity and interpret each other because safety comes with this, and uncertainty is precarious. Not being upright, falling out of normal, such as being queer, triggered fear for many of us - of failure, shame, dying, grief, emptiness, nothingness and loneliness.
Letting go of things is a workshop that undoes this history, not to fix something else in its place, but by suggesting supportive and embodied ways to imagine falling and failure as inspirational sources for change.
Western cultural norms teach us that standing ‘upright’ in the world, striving for upward-ness, is the way to a ‘good life’ - a life that is linear, patriarchal and capitalist. Standing upright, being ‘happy’, requires us to hold onto things, in our own bodies, and each other’s bodies.
We strive to keep ourselves and each other up because that makes us feel safe. We fix identity and interpret each other because safety comes with this, and uncertainty is precarious. Not being upright, falling out of normal, such as being queer, triggered fear for many of us - of failure, shame, dying, grief, emptiness, nothingness and loneliness.
Letting go of things is a workshop that undoes this history, not to fix something else in its place, but by suggesting supportive and embodied ways to imagine falling and failure as inspirational sources for change.
We will have fun, we might dance to music, we might cruise, discovering the seduction of our ambiguous presence, becoming not being. We might make a show that dissolves. I don’t know, I am not fixing, I am opening a space for us to play - for a week.
~ emilyn claid
![]()
Image by Henri T.
~ emilyn claid
Image by Henri T.
Participation
Who is this for?
The workshop is open to people, across disciplines of arts and therapy, who enjoy exploring movement and improvisation, individually and in relation, and who are attentive to queer sensibilities.You should be prepared to be physically active, which will include working with body gravity and working on the ground. The tasks might involve contact and touch.
Queer?
While ‘queer’ has complex underlying histories within homosexual and trans contexts, queer is also a term of action, giving attention to becoming, not being. Queer as a fluid process of unravelling fixed characteristics. Yet letting go and being with uncertainty is challenging, especially when we do not know where we might land, and simultaneously might not want to fix where we land. The workshop addresses this queer paradox by giving embodied attention to our bodies, in relation to gravity and ground.
Logistics
The venue is Stanley Arts (12 South Norwood Hill, London, SE25 6AB). The nearest station is South Norwood, served by the Overground (West Croydon) and National Rail Services.We will work every day from Monday 17th March to Friday 21st March. We will meet at 10:30am for an 11am start and be finished by 5pm each day. We will break for lunch everyday.
The workshop is offered in English.
Stanley Arts is wheelchair accessible and access information can be found online.
Care & Facilitation
Whilst theraputic practice is one aspect of emilyn’s work, this workshop should not be understood as a therapeutic process. The team commit to leading the process with artistic and human compassion but the facilitation of this workshop is not a mode of psychological or professional care. We will co-agree practices of accountability and care within the process, but we ask that you take ultimate responsibility for your own psychological wellbeing and for the ideas and experiences you bring into the room.Tickets
The five day workshop is priced at £225 (£175 concession). This is a subsidised price and all income goes towards the cost of putting the workshop on.A deposit of 25% (plus outsavvy booking fees) will be required to secure your place on the workshop, with the balance payable by February 17th.
We are accepting a maximum of 20 participants on a rolling basis. We anticipate interest in the workshop will be high, so please book soon to avoid disappointment.
> Book Here
Contact
If you have questions around the workshop, please be in touch with Future Ritual (producing@futureritual.co.uk) in the first instance.
Image by Henri T.emilyn claid
emilyn claid’s career stretches back to the 1960s when she was a ballet dancer with the Nationa Ballet of Canada and the 1970s when she was co-founder of experimental collective X6 Dance Space in London, a pioneering organization for New Dance. In the 1980s she was artistic director of Extemporary Dance Theatre and in the 1990s choreographed for companies such a Phoenix and CandoCo. Working between live art and dance as an independent artist, emilyn made and performed a series of iconic solos in the 1990s in which she found an authentic voice as a lesbian-queer artist. emilyn is also an emeritus professor and a Gestalt psychotherapist. She has recently published ‘FALLING Through Dance and Life’, (Bloomsbury 2021), a book that re-thinks Western culture’s physical, metaphorical and psychological relationship to gravity. In 2022 emilyn returned to performance making with the solo show ‘Untitled’ and is now embarking on a new live art project ‘The Trembling Forest’, with performances in April 2025.
Image by Cam Harle.