Maybe it’s inevitable by the age of 75 that you’ve lived a number of lives. ForEmilyn Claid, that’s meant the leap from ballet dancer in Toronto to the squats of grungy 1969 New York (via Martha Graham’s garden), to pioneering the New Dance scene in 1970s London, to artistic director, academic and psychotherapist (not to mention mother, grandmother), and then in her eighth decade, full circle to being a performer again.
It was after realising “I was leaving three-quarters of myself out” that Claid made 2022’s comeback solo showUntitled, appearing strong, sensual, funny and provocative, dressed in leather vest and a fur cloak. She put the work in to get back on stage at 72 (“A lot of press-ups and sit-ups”) but at the same time, she says, it was absolutely natural, like coming home. “Not being at home like a comfortable sofa,” she clarifies. “The excitement of knowing a whole world that’s familiar to me and yet is always constantly changing.”
The dance world has changed plenty in the six decades that Claid has been working. When she stopped performing in the late 90s, “it was hard as a woman, as a lesbian, to make lesbian work”. Now Claid is being embraced by a new generation of queer artists. I visit an east London studio to find her rehearsing a “young and feisty” group of performers (Azara Meghie,Eve Stainton, Adrienne Ming, Orrow Bell and co-director Martin O’Brien) for her new “live art ballet” The Trembling Forest. Claid is rangy and stylish, with cropped grey hair under a black cap. The group collaboratively work out a scene, veering from giggles to solemnity and back again. Later in the week, they’ll be joined by a bigger cast who are all going to be on stage covered in clay. We’ll come back to that.
It’s a long journey from Claid’s suburban childhood in Wimbledon. She wasn’t very good at ballet, she insists, yet she was good enough to be accepted into the NationalBalletof Canada after joining their Toronto school at 16. But she was too tall, always in the background, never going to get further. “It’s a tricky one, ballet, because you get so addicted and so stuck into this [quest for] perfection and getting it right,” she says. “When you fail at it – when I failed at it – the shame is terrible. It takes years to get over that. But then when you get over you think, Oh thank God! It’s incredibly stifling. And for women’s bodies, unless you’re born that way, I think it’s very difficult.”
She left for New York in 1969 with the aim of going to the Martha Graham school, turned up with no cash and her English accent, and offered to look after Graham’s garden in exchange for classes. “They thought, she’s English, she’s bound to know about gardens.” The planting of daffodils aside, this was scuzzy New York. “It was sex, drugs, dance, risky, wonderful,” says Claid. It was an introduction to many different worlds, discovering the gay scene and basement clubs with “naked men all dancing on LSD or whatever”. She was squatting in the East Village, or living in the apartment of any artist friend who was away. The kind of apartments with a bathtub in the kitchen and you’d put a table on top to eat dinner. “Tiny rooms with beaded curtains and cockroaches everywhere.” She was still a teenager. “But I always felt safe there.”
Claid worked with dancers from the Graham company. Nobody had any money but they all seemed to get by. “There were a lot of patrons, I did a lot of modelling for artists.” She got into some dangerous situations, she admits – “I guess it’s a sort of fancy kind of prostitution really, isn’t it?” – but says, “I was tough.” At one point her parents sent someone over to New York to find her. They did, living in a squat behind a house in the East Village. “Not a great situation,” she admits. “My parents must have been freaked out, but there was nothing they could do. I’d left home at 16, I was totally independent.”
By the time she came back to London a couple of years later, “I was pretty wrecked”, and suffering from osteoarthritis in her big toe joint. She’d been in pain since she was 11, but kept it hidden. She gave up dance and briefly became a secretary, but the call was too strong. Then Claid metJacky Lansley, Fergus Early and Maedée Duprès, who together founded the X6 Collective and the New Dance movement. There was a real sense of change, of undoing hierarchies, ripping up the rules, smashing ballet’s stranglehold, putting politics at the forefront (their 1977 work Bleeding Fairies blasted the image of the ethereal ballerina and other tropes). They found a home at Butler’s Wharf on the South Bank of the Thames, part of a wider experimental arts scene including Derek Jarman,sculptor Andrew Logan(who foundedAlternative Miss World) and theLondon Musicians Collective. They’d put on performances and festivals, all very DIY, no toilet in the building (“you had to go down to the river”), big warehouse doors open on the sixth floor with a sheer drop on the other side. People came and it was buzzing, but again there wasn’t any money. Most people were squatting and on the dole – that’s what was funding young artists then.
What did Claid’s work look like? “I was so angry!” Her whole face breaks into a brilliantly appealing grin and silent laughter stops her talking for a moment. “Big, clumsy feminists doing angry work! It was very autobiographical. I had eating disorders, there’s all sorts of things we were dealing with.” She would speak to the audience, she would dance, “image making” is the term she uses, which could equally describe the work she’s making now.
Some of the group went to perform in Lyon, “And I can remember the audience chucking food at us, telling us to get off. Lots of the work was radically, collaboratively devised. Collage rather than narrative. And of course that was not popular with audiences at the time.” As artistic director of Extemporary DanceTheatrefrom 1981 to 1990 she pushed radical work, but always tried to be entertaining, too. (Unlike, she says, the very abstract London Contemporary Dance Theatre who “put audiences off totally”.) Abandoning clear meaning and narrative is still fairly radical, I say. “I don’t ever want to give up on narrative,” she responds. “I just don’t want there to be only one narrative.” As a queer artist, Claid says she particularly embraces the idea of meaning not being fixed, singular or binary. Queerness, she says “is much more now about a movement rather than an identity; a constant process of unfixing normativity”.
She’s calling The Trembling Forest a “live art ballet” because like live art “the body’s creating the material in the moment of the performance” based on tasks or a score she gives the collaborators. But “ballet” because there is a frame and structure, six scenes. The clay-covered bodies will be the forest (Claid might be one of these, she hasn’t decided yet), and they’re in what she calls “long time,” death, essentially, so-named because “we’re going to be dead for a lot longer than we’re alive”. And into the forest come the living, a “motley crew of messy, scribbly, scrabbly bodies”. They know they’re heading towards “long time” and these are their last rituals. “There’s the meta-narrative of hope and desolation, living and dying,” says Claid. Will the audience be able to read that? “I don’t mind if they do or they don’t. It’s great if people see different things.”
In recent years Claid trained as a Gestalt psychotherapist and that’s influenced her choreography. The philosophy behind Gestalt is relational, we exist only in relation to each other. Claid talks about the narcissism of being a performer. “It’s all about, ‘How wonderful can I be for the audience?’” Now she’s more interested in “What am I going to share with the audience? What can we make together?” When she watches her dancers improvise, instead of thinking, “Which bits do I like?” She asks them: “Where did you feel most energised?” The result for us, the audience, she says, is that we see “something that is alive”.
In 2021, Claid combined her work in dance and psychotherapy in the book Falling ThroughDanceand Life, on surrendering to gravity, and in a more existential sense, accepting the void we’re all on our way to. She does physical work with her therapy clients, and sees unequivocally the changes in their lives and relationships as a result. “What we do with our bodies impacts on our minds.”
Career-wise, she’s faced the (metaphorical) fear of falling flat on her face. “I take it right back to ballet, the shame of failing”, Claid says, “and then recognising how that is actually a creative source rather than a dead-end.” She couldn’t – and wouldn’t want to – define what success means any more. In whose eyes? She quotes from a memorable decades-old review: “Emilyn Claid gets Dance Umbrella [festival] off to a bad start!” and breaks into another grinning laugh. Audiences weren’t ready for her then. Will they be ready now?
The Trembling Forest is at Copeland Gallery, London, aspart of Ceremony festival, 23-24 April, and at Tramway, Glasgow, 10 May, as part ofDance International Glasgow