Words by Jo Leask.
I talked to emilyn claid about her new work The Trembling Forest, ahead of starting rehearsals and what it feels like to be directing a show again after 20 years. We discussed starting points, the development of ideas, the company and queer devising.
Starting points, ideas and inspirations for The Trembling Forest
connect with me here, embrace me there, enmeshed, becoming one, as the underground roots of a trembling forest (claid performance text, 2025)
The Trembling Forest was conceptualised after emilyn worked on a short piece by live art artist Martin O’Brien called Discharge, which was presented by Joseph Schofield/Future Ritual and the arts venue Ugly Duck. It was a ritualistic work about death, sickness and dying, with a text written by emilyn about ashes. Martin performing naked, covered himself in dry clay which fell off his body as he moved. The noise of the clay falling to the floor made them both feel that it would be great to have lots of naked bodies covered in clay, moving together with the noise of falling clay. They envisaged a multigenerational community of queer people, moving together ritualistically, evoking a perpetuating cycle of life and death. claid also talks about an arresting image she encountered when driving back to London one late afternoon and seeing the city from the brow of a hill. The hard, bluish, cloudless winter sky framed the jagged structures of buildings making her think about a vast cemetery. The misty, blue ghostly “long distance light” was an image and colour that she wanted to somehow replicate in a show.
Connecting to the ideas of interconnectedness and perpetuation, emilyn found another inspiration in the Pando tree, a quivering leafed Aspen located in Utah, which produces 47,000 stems that appear as a vast forest of individual trees but are connected by a single root system. The leaves of the enormous Pando tree constantly move which gives it a trembling effect. emilyn began to think of a forest of people trembling together, evoking metaphors of shock, cold, illness, ageing or anticipation, which inspired the title of the work. But importantly, interconnected through the roots. She also recognised the forest as symbolising longevity – the Pando tree has an estimated age of 80,000 years. Forests are places historically and culturally associated with rituals, ceremonies, decay and growth. They are places that offer shelter, invite us to enter, have adventures and get lost in.
With these ideas and imagery in mind, emilyn had the opportunity of working with four remarkable queer artists during her residency last year at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire: Azara, Eve Stainton, Ming and Orrow Bell. These artists, together with Martin O’Brien will work together in The Trembling Forest, alongside 20 bodies dressed in clay. The work has been commissioned by live art producer and artist Joseph Schofield, for his live art festival, Ceremony.
emilyn emphasises that the overarching theme of the work is hope and desolation as a queer performative practice, a community working/moving/being together in a place of dysphoria. She talks about “long time, timeless bodies involved in perpetual time, “deep, dark shimmering time, left over time, lost time”, all ideas, concepts and images that resonate with the ritualistic, the macabre, gothic and supernatural but also a vital, hedonistic life force. Central to the core of the devising is the idea and practice of queering normative structures, conventions, ideas, movements – and the process of unfixing dance technique, normative behaviour, attitudes and expectations.
Devising a live art ballet
Describing The Trembling Forest as a live art ballet, emilyn explains that she is drawing on her own history of ballet and live art. She clarifies how the performers are in the process of performing spontaneous live art practices, but that information from ballet provides the setting and structure. For example, the work is choreographically arranged in different scenes, but she will not be choreographing movement on the performers. Instead, the material will be created by the band of performers, all of whom will respond to the various stimuli that emilyn has provided through improvisation and their own unique processes. She tells me with nervous excitement that although she has seeded ideas and scenes as a structure, she cannot anticipate what will unfold during the short rehearsal process that happens two weeks before the show, with the volunteers/chorus/forest coming in the day before.
What she does tell me, is that the chorus, consisting of a group of performers from all ages and backgrounds, semi-naked and covered in clay, will “collectively create a metaphorical image of an interconnected forest dying”. The five performers will enter the forest and indulge in macabre scenarios that include a procession, a meal, a ritualistic game and an orgiastic dance, gradually becoming part of the forest. They will perform to an evocative sound score by Lottie Poulet which will include emilyn’s performance texts and the eery sound of clay falling from the bodies of the chorus. There will also be costumes and props, designed by Shanti Freed, which she describes as “Shakespeare meets Leigh Bowery”!
Her changing role as a director
Although emilyn has just spent two years of devising, performing and touring her own solo show Untitled and extracts, it has been over twenty years since she made a company work. She talks about how her whole approach to directing other people has totally changed, for example, she is no longer working in the dance world, where a director comes into the studio makes movement on highly trained dancers and tells them what to do. This particular process of queer devising for Trembling Forest is instead about stepping back and facilitating a space for a different performance ecology to unfold that nurtures a relational practice of doing, unravelling and letting go of expectations. This enables the performers to improvise freely and develop their own characters and relationships with each other as they fully embody the essence of The Trembling Forest, the living and dying, endings and beginnings, queering and destabilising, desires and hopes.
emilyn claid’s The Trembling Forest, “ a queer live art ballet” will be performed as part of Ceremony: a festival of performance, curated and presented by Future Ritual, on 23 -24 April at the Copeland Gallery, Peckham. Header image: Azara Meghie and Eve Stainton by Henri T.