Future Ritual: CEREMONY ~ n:u and emilyn claid

About

“Turn your face towards the tombstone blues of left over time, forever, nowhere, nothing time, the crumbling perpetual of graveyards and ashes. Step lightly into long time, still time. Turn up the music and begin a slow dance. Welcome the pale grey, the shivering grey of a longed-for landscape, cold, silent, beautiful, like snow on hills under a darkening sky. Connect with me here, embrace me there, enmeshed, in a dance of twists and turns, like the underground roots of a trembling forest.”

The Trembling Forest is a live art ballet created by emilyn claid, in collaboration with Martin O’Brien. The work draws on the spontaneous physicality of live art practices together with the scenic, choreographic structures of balletic traditions. Encounters between this company are staged amidst a forest of queer people, each painted with clay, who crack, shiver, tremble and decay. The Trembling Forest evokes a macabre, surreal, grotesque and beautiful world, where life force and death drive intertwine. 

The Trembling Forest is co- commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Bourn, and Future Ritual. The project is supported by Arts Council England and Knotenpunkt.

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n:u is an atmosphere-maker interrogating intimacy, embodiment, and healing as pathways to liberation. They collaborate with companion-materials, artworkers, and cultural spaces to unearth transformative ways to experience change. n:u draws inspiration from natural and built environments, Black feminisms, and spiritual practices. Fundamentally their work is to re-invest in intuitive ways to experience freedom on molecular and infrastructural levels.