Emilyn Claid and Heidi Rustgaard reflect on queering dance through the lens of their friendship and collaboration.

Emilyn Claid is a queer performer in her eighth decade. Emilyn is interest in the intersection of movement and theatre, and the combination of staged choreography with the playful uncertainty of improvised exchanges with her audience. In her recent work emilyn claid, UNTITLED, she embodies the fears of ageing with dark humour, shifting between hunter and creature, therapist and diva, cruising and crumbling, to tease perceptions of what’s real and what’s imagined.

Since 1999, Heidi Rustgaard has co directed H2DANCE with Hanna Gillgren and created work as a choreographer and designer and performer, working between UK, Norway and Sweden. Their work sits in between performance and dance and can be characterized as interdisciplinary, often taking a humorous approach to serious subject matters. In 2018 H2DANCE set up Fest en Fest, an international festival of expanded choreography that presents choreographic works in different formats in London. Fest en Fest was born out of dissatisfaction with dance’s focus on choreography as production. Instead, it values the social, the choreography of being together, and the artist.