DIG 2025 | emilyn claid - The Trembling Forest: A Live Art Ballet (UK)

Part of Tramway's Dance International Glasgow festival, 9 - 24 May

Created by emilyn claid, in collaboration with Martin O’Brien, The Trembling Forest 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. 

'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 features performers including Martin O’Brien, Azara, Orrow Bell, Adrienne Ming, and Eve Stainton as well as a cast of 20 participants local to Glasgow.

Audience notes
Partial nudity
Themes of death

Recommended for ages 12+

ACCESS
Transcript available on request
Highly visual

CREDITS
The Trembling Forest is choreographed and directed by emilyn claid in collaboration with Martin O’Brien. 

Design by Shanti Freed
Sound design by Lottie Poulet
Lighting design by Rachel Shipp
Produced by Future Ritual

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