emilyn claid: Alongside
“Why did you want to be a Gestalt psychotherapist Emilyn? You’re a dance performer and choreographer. Why another profession?” Every time I’m asked this question, I get an opportunity to remind myself how these different worlds are enriched by one another. Following the UKAGP day A Day of Connection (2023), where we were encouraged to share information about ourselves, I thought I would like to write something about how my professions of dance and Gestalt connect through practice and research. In a sense the connections illustrate togetherness through a respect for separateness, for I am not, nor ever wanted to be, a dance therapist. For personal and professional reasons, it has been important for me to keep the two worlds alongside each other. They enrich each other, but not through a process of merging.
I write from my perspective as a white, British, queer, middle-class woman in her 8th decade and I’ll begin answering the question with a snippet of history. The 1970s was a radical decade in the UK for deconstructing the hierarchical traditions of arts practices, and dance was no exception. I had just crashed out of the conventional world of ballet, regaining my sense of agency by working collectively, engaging with somatic movement practices, feminism, and cathartic therapeutic practices such as Encounter groups and Re-evaluation Co-counselling. Gender, race and class politics, equality, and empowerment for marginalised people, were forefront concerns for the revolutionary dance movement. As a choreographer I developed a collaboratively devised methodology for making performance, inviting performers to take ownership of devising the material to be performed, in relation to each other. Material that I could then shape for audiences in my role as choreographer. This replaced the more conventional hierarchical methodology, whereby the choreographer, standing outside the work, directs performers as to what to do and how to do it.
By 2000 and a hundred choreographies later, embedded in academia as a professor, teaching and choreographing – I wanted to let go of my choreographic role even further, realising I had become more interested in supporting each performer’s creative process than I was in any final production. Consequently, I was searching for new tools to use in the studio to empower dancers and a Gestalt therapist friend mentioned the potential of ‘phenomenological enquiry’. I signed up for a ten-week evening course at the Gestalt Centre, thinking I might be able to transfer some therapeutic tools into choreographic process. I missed the 10th session because my partner’s waters broke and her son was born, but something had clicked, a different way of relating to others, so I signed up for the MSc in Gestalt at Metanoia. Five years later I found myself as a Gestalt therapist and a dance artist, two professions running in parallel but separately, alongside each other, with me in the middle, turning this way and that.
I had folded away dance and choreography during the Gestalt training, looked askance when tutors associated Gestalt with dance. My experiential history as a professional technically skilled dancer was deeply complex and far too wrapped up in pride and shame for me to make uncomplicated connections. I submerged myself into the Gestalt world of personal therapy, existential voids, intersubjectivity, relational I-thou, tools for diagnosis and treatment, phenomenological language, and theory, writing essays and gathering hours. I danced like crazy at Gestalt conference discos, but that was about it. I put aside my in-depth knowledge of somatic movement practices to learn the Gestalt way of slowing down, doing ‘bodywork’, knowing I would, for the most part, be working as a therapist with people who are not dancers and for whom awareness of a simple breath out, might be overwhelming.
Letting go of my skills and knowledge became a way of learning. I submitted to not knowing, to learning anew, experiencing how the Gestalt world functions, without comparison to dance. I knew Laura Perls had danced, I was aware that dance artist Anna Halprin hung out with Fritz Perls in the 1960s, and soon discovered how Ruella Frank was influenced by the somatic work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. Yet something about submission, letting go of what I knew, seemed important to me, to fully experience Gestalt methodologies and philosophies, before inviting a meeting with dance.
Maybe I have answered the initial question of why another profession. Now I want to share how they enrich each other. Inevitably, my practice as a dancer and choreographer sprang back into action once I had qualified and, aware of my resistance to merging, I began noticing how my practice of Gestalt could influence my work in dance and vice versa.
Most obvious is how improvisation, experiment, embodiment, spontaneity, reflection and the making and letting go of structures, familiar to me as a dancer and choreographer, support me as a therapist. In return, an embodied understanding of phenomenological enquiry has given me tools to empower performers: to describe rather than interpret, enquire rather than dictate, sense the impact rather than lead with expectations. Perhaps the most useful phenomenological transferable skill, influencing studio process, is to be curious about what a dancer thinks about how they move, rather than presuming I know. Unfixing the need to make the other the same as me. For instance, if I set an improvisation score, through which new material might emerge, phenomenological relational language gives me a practice of curiosity and inclusivity, to reflect with the dancers about such details as their energy, focus, what was impactful, what fell flat, where was the creative tension, all of which informs the performance.
Rather than continuing to list further interweaving influences, I am going to discuss them through a third and shared strand of practice, artistic research, which has culminated in two current projects.
The first of these is a book, FALLING through dance and life (Bloomsbury 2021). The core driver for writing was my growing awareness of how somatic movement work – based on the intentional process of moving bodily in gravity towards ground – can support existential, psychological falling into a void of nothingness¹. This link provided a founding paradox that threads through the book. Falling is dangerous, fearful, invites injury and death, and, falling as a somatic movement practice offers embodied and psychological support, a creative resource, for emotional and physical change. While falling, we are powerless subjects and agents of change, a dynamic distinction that enlivens discussions throughout the book².
Psychotherapist Laurence Hagan writes:
“I felt very moved in many places and could easily make the link to what the author was expressing, through my own worldview with no knowledge of dance whatsoever. Indeed I felt in a dialogue.”
Although published within the field of dance the book holds Gestalt philosophy at its heart, interwoven through three linked threads. One, a history of what movements of falling represent in dance performance, (which follows my life experience); two, somatic based falling tasks for readers; and thirdly, explorations of metaphorical falling as experienced through queering, ageing, laughter, and shame. This is a book that, in concept, content and structure undoes white western culture’s preoccupation with uprightness, supremacy and hierarchical binaries of identity.
The second project, that brings Gestalt and dance practices together is a solo performance, Untitled, that I am currently touring³. This is a return to performance after a 20-year gap. A return due, to a large extent, to new awareness of presence I’ve gained as a Gestalt therapist. My experience of presence as a performer has always been a process of moving between internal focus and the external expression, a sensed flow and tension between inside and outside. This gives me a quality of fully-being-here in performance. I also attempt to model this fluid sense of aliveness with clients. Gestalt practice has added a dimension to this - an understanding of presence as relational contact. In the past, performing had a quality of “look at me attempting excellence for you”. This is now replaced with the potential of connection with the audience. Excellence is not something I do on my own, it is relationally co-created. Excellence is a vibrant commitment to this moment between us, with love, care, laughter. Judgements of good or bad work are replaced by intersubjective response-ability. The audience and I, we share the space of making performance happen. This sense of relational presence has informed my work with clients, and it has been crucial to the making of my solo show Untitled, which draws on collaborations with other artists, personal stories of queering and ageing, performed with dance theatre, text and humour. I say solo, but of course there is no such thing⁴. I maybe the only performer on stage but my being here is the accumulation of a lifetime of intersubjective relationships, ‘I am because you are’⁵. Artistic creativity is rhizomic, not hierarchical, thrives through a horizontal network not vertical individuality. The iris flower pops up to display its colour but its manifesting power to rise and fall resides in the rhizome beneath.
An ‘aha’ moment for me during Gestalt training was to experience shame as shared, as a relational system (Orange 2008), rather than individualistic, something to be felt alone. In English language shame and failure, (and laughter) signify metaphorically as falling. If shame can be felt relationally, intersubjectively, then being with this falling becomes bearable, can be a creative source of change. Embracing failure becomes integral to the cycle of experience, through which new sensations might emerge. Trusting the fall into shame, turning towards it rather than away, supported rather than alone, sensations and directions emerge, that are not accessible when I defend myself stiffly and upwardly from shame. This way of being with shame and failure, as supported falling, impacts on my work with clients, becomes a central thread of the book and enlivens the performance through text and movement.
Perhaps I am being idealistic. I am continually tested by my privileged cultural background, by unfinished business and fixed patterns of resistance that walk alongside me, sometimes blocking relational paths, a depressing state where dancing through existential nothingness has minimal appeal. I’d like to end this writing with a text from the book, which I also speak in the show, and which illustrates for me, a constant learning. That the richness of creative endeavour happens when we support each other to let go of fixing things, to allow uncertainty, to fail and fall together.
“We are at a party. We’re coming to the end of a long night determined to continue dancing for a few more hours. The music drives on. Come close to me to enact this score. Clasp your hands around my shoulders, I’ll slide my arms around your back. Snuggle in and dance as one.
Rest your head on my shoulder. Give me your weight. Let your body yield. Can you do that? Can you allow me to take your weight? We’ll dance – let go, I’ll hold you.
This time, I’ll give my weight to you, rest on you. When you can’t hold me any longer, free your arms and let me fall. The ground is not so far away. Can you do that? Can you let me drop? …
Turn up the music, let’s meet again. Whatever impacts you, touches me. We are of each other with love and care. So hug, dance - and allow each other to gravity and ground. Let each other go.”
Footnotes
See the extensive writings of Mabel Ellsworth Todd (1937) and Thomas Hanna (1970) and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (2012).
One element of research was a series of workshops with dancers and (separately) with psychotherapists, many of which were co-led with Gestalt therapist Dr. Lynda Osbourne. See Claid, E & Osborne, L. (2014) ‘Falling a Creative Process’
https://theplace.org.uk/events/autumn-23-emilyn-claid-emilyn-claid-untitled
See Schneider, C. (2005) “Solo Solo Solo.” In After Criticism: New Responses to Contemporary Art, edited by Gavin Butt. London: Blackwell.
A translation of the south African concept of “Ubunti”, relating to humanness. See Claid, E. (2016) ‘I am because you are’, Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, Intellect, UK
emilyn claid (she/her)
Gestalt psychotherapist, supervisor, and dance artist.
London
e.claid@gmail.com
The UKAGP Day of Connection (London, 2023), encouraged me to share some thoughts about my life worlds as a dance artist and Gestalt psychotherapist, and the creative projects that materialise through relations between the two practices. One project is a book: FALLING through dance and life (Bloomsbury 2019) and the other is a solo dance performance, UNTITLED, which is currently touring the UK. For many years I have carefully attempted to keep these worlds separate, thinking that performance might overwhelm therapy clients. With this writing I am trusting my clients and my abilities as a queer woman in my 8th decade, to manage overwhelm, and share more of my artistic life within the context of psychotherapy.
