emilyn claid and Heidi Rustgaard, Skinned, 2024. CEREMONY [II], Future Ritual at Venice International Performance Art Week 2024. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

emilyn claid’s career stretches 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-queer artist. emilyn is also an emeritus professor and a Gestalt psychotherapist and 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.

Working between live art and dance theatre, emilyn returned to performing with her solo show ‘emilyn claid, UNTITLED’. Future Ritual has collaborated with emilyn to realise the following work, ‘The Trembling Forest’

> @emilynclaid
> The Guardian: ‘The audience chucked food at us!’ Emilyn Claid on angry shows, her ballet shame and gardening for Martha Graham