Falling Through Dance and Life - (Dance in Dialogue) by Emilyn Claid (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This is a book about falling as a means of reconfiguring our relationship with living and dying. Dancer, choreographer, educator and therapist Emilyn Claid draws inspiration from her personal and professional experiences to explore alternative approaches to being present in the world.

Contemporary movement based performers ground their practices in understanding the interplay of gravity and the body. Somatic intentional falling provides them a creative resource for developing both self and environmental support. The physical, metaphorical and psychological impact of these practices informs the theories and perspectives presented in this book.

As falling can be dangerous and painful, encouraging people to do so willingly might be considered a provocative premise. Western culture generally resists falling because it provokes fear and represents failure. Out of this tension a paradox emerges: falling, we are both powerless subjects and agents of change, a dynamic distinction that enlivens discussions throughout the writing.

Emilyn engages with different dance genres, live performance and therapeutic interactions to form her ideas and interlaces her arguments with issues of gender and race. She describes how surrender to gravity can transform our perceptions and facilitate ways of being that are relational and life enhancing. Woven throughout, autobiographical, poetic, philosophical, descriptive and theoretical voices combine to question the fixation of Western culture on uprightness and supremacy. A simple act of falling builds momentum through eclectic discussions, uncovering connections to shame, laughter, trauma, ageing and the thrill of release.

Review Quotes

"This book is significant because it creates the space for more diverse considerations of falling-a space to reflect on previous experiences while opening readers' eyes to possibilities yet to catch their attention." --Dance Chronicle

"Falls in the time of concurrent disasters are metaphors, material and the means whereby we recalibrate what it means to be alive. Emilyn Claid's immensely readable writing offers readers a vertiginous ride and an encounter with limits. Inviting moving off the page, her call to incorporate the experiential, the reflective and the psycho-somatic through revitalising our attention to how to fall freely, badly, carefully and madly invigorates dance and performance scholarship through sensuous and dynamic critical engagement. Emilyn's compelling kinesthetic story is woven through her history of dance's relationships with gravity, making this an illuminating and deeply moving biography of the fall." --Carol Brown, University of Melbourne, Australia

"This writing pulls us into a multitude of rewarding and revealing falls. Slowly, carefully, and somatically as we sink into Emilyn's unravelling of dance's conflicting histories of resisting and relinquishing to gravity, and vertiginously as we tumble between decades of memories that elaborate the politics and pleasures of collapse." --Martin Hargreaves, London Contemporary Dance School, UK

"Part historical account, part philosophical inquiry, part cultural critique, Falling through Dance and Life investigates falls both physical and metaphorical, intentional and accidental, humorous and tragic, to illustrate the significance of encounters with gravity along the lines of gender, race, sexuality, class, nationhood, and economics. Covering ground ranging from modern dance to circus to personal and national trauma, Claid provides an engaging account of the possibilities and enduring perils of falling." --Janet O'Shea, UCLA, USA

"This honest and thought-provoking book portrays Emilyn's lived experiences as a dancer, choreographer, academic and psychotherapist interweaving vivid descriptions of dance with moving personal experiences. The practical exercises which illumine her approach to falling are interspersed with themes including ageing and dying, diversity and inclusion and support and shame. We are encouraged to explore our embodied relationships and experiences of falling physically, psychologically and metaphorically as a resource for building resilience, living with uncertainty and as a source of vitality and presence." --Lynda Oborne, Psychotherapist UKCP

About the Author

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 X6 Dance Space in London. In the 1980s she was artistic director of Extemporary Dance Theatre and in the 1990s worked as an independent dance artist. Emilyn has made choreographies for companies such as Phoenix Dance Company and CandoCo Dance Company, and has led choreographic research projects in Auckland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Berlin, Helsinki and Beirut. In 1997 she was awarded a PhD and published a book, Yes? No! Maybe... (2006). Since 2003 Emilyn worked as a professor at Dartington College of Arts and at University of Roehampton. In 2020 she resigned from the arena of academia to continue her free-lance career as dance artist, educator and psychotherapist.