Artists’ Talk: Origins and Afterlives
A reflective discussion with emilyn claid & Martin O’Brien.
| Dates | Sat 6 Dec 2005 |
| Times | 4.00-5.30pm |
| Space | Lancaster Rooms, New Wing |
| Price | Pay What You Can |
Dance artist and choreographer emilyn claid, whose career began in the 1960s, joins performance artist Martin O’Brien for a conversation about the origins and afterlives of their work.
The two collaborators and friends will reflect on how their practices have developed, how their work continues to resonate today, and what it means for artistic practice to endure over time.
Communities
Biographies
emilyn claid
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 experimental collective X6 Dance Space in London, a pioneering organization for New Dance. In the 1980s she was artistic director of Extemporary Dance Theatre and in the 1990s choreographed for companies such as Phoenix and CandoCo.
Working between live art and dance as an independent artist, emilyn made and performed a series of iconic solos in the 1990s in which she found an authentic voice as a lesbian-queer artist. emilyn is also an emeritus professor and a Gestalt psychotherapist. She published ‘FALLING Through Dance and Life’, (Bloomsbury 2021), a book that re-thinks Western culture’s physical, metaphorical and psychological relationship to gravity. Since 2022 emilyn has been performing her solo show ‘Untitled’ and choreographed a live art performance ‘The Trembling Forest’, which premiered in April 2025 at Future Ritual’s CEREMONY festival.
Martin O’Brien
Martin O’Brien is an artist and zombie. He works across performance, writing and video art. His work uses long durational actions, short speculative texts and critical rants, and performance processes in order to explore death and dying, what it means to be born with a life shortening disease, and the philosophical implications of living longer than expected. He has shown work throughout the UK; Europe; USA; and Canada, and is well known for his solo performances and collaborations with the legendary LA artist and dominatrix Sheree Rose.
His most recent works were at Tate Britain in 2025, The Southbank Centre in 2024, the ICA (London) in 2021, and as Writer in Residence at Whitechapel Gallery in 2023. He is winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts 2022. Martin has cystic fibrosis and all of his work and writing draws upon this experience. In 2018, the book ‘Survival of the Sickest: The Art of Martin O’Brien’ was published by Live Art Development Agency. His work has been featured on BBC radio and Sky Arts television, and as a double page spread in The Guardian. He is currently Head of the Department of Drama at Queen Mary University of London.
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