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FIELD WORK
Deadline: Fri 31 Oct
Field Work is an intensive residential workshop led by Marilyn Arsem & Anne Bean in Cumbria, UK.
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ALMANAC
Next: Sun 2 Nov
Almanac is a new regular performance platform taking place monthly in London.
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DO IT TOGETHER
Deadline: Weds 12 Nov
Open call for peer-to-peer professional development projects designed by artists for artists
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CEREMONY
A year-long programme cycle exploring performance in times of fragmentation.
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emilyn claid and Heidi Rustgaard, SKINNED, 2024. Future Ritual x Venice International Performance Art Week. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
emilyn claid
Letting Go of Things
an intensive workshop at Stanley Arts
17.03 - 21.03.2025
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.
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.
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
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
Letting Go of Things was presented as part of The Trembling Forest, a process of intergenerational queer exchange, led by emilyn claid and produced by Future Ritual.
Artist Index: emilyn claid
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.