The Power Plant

Performing Film

We invite you to share an intimate encounter as dancer and choreographer Lin Snelling performs an improvised response to Shelagh Keeley’s Film Notebooks 1985–2017 at The Power Plant. This continues their collaboration of 45 years into the body as a locus for imagination and thought. Having presented past projects in Toronto, Montréal, Antwerp, Cyprus, Vancouver, and Edmonton, their latest collaboration was commissioned by MoMA Library and Archive. It formed another chapter of their decades-long research project, Performing Book.

Space is a script that all bodies move through and with. Snelling looks forward to performing with the saturated, intuitive and quiet spaces Keeley offers in her film notebooks.

Lin Snelling is a dancer whose artistic practice brings the qualities of improvisation into dance, theatre, writing, visual art, and somatic practice. She toured the world with Quebecois dance/theatre troupe Carbone 14 and worked with many improvisation ensembles. She teaches dance, experiential anatomy, and composition at the University of Alberta where she is also Coordinator of the MFA in Theatre Practice. Snelling’s work involves listening to the body and letting this hearing build a space that invites freedom into an endless adaptation of what dancing is and can become.

Her international 45 year performing career involves collaborations, improvisations, and scored dance performances. She teaches and creates situational dramaturgies and real time composition pedagogies for actors, dancers and workshops for communities. Snelling responded to Keeley’s site-specific wall drawing Notes on Obsolescence here at The Power Plant in 2014. Snelling’s recent performances are a new solo creation Before/AFter (2024) created as a HoT Artist through the Naked Theatre (Brussels), Joshua Tree as part of the BWDC Summer Season that toured to Bengaluru, India (2023) ENTRANCES (2022) with writer David Gagnon Walker and multimedia designer Tori Morrison from Strange Victory Performance, and Far Off and Personal (2020) a dance film with musician/composer Michael Reinhart.

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