artistic statement

My work as a dance artist is dancing. I understand performing as a very porous connection to perceiving our surroundings and translating/communicating this connection through all the shapes dancing allows.  It is an offer to meet an audience and sustain a relationship for a brief period of time.

 

My vision as a dance artist over the past twenty-five years has been constantly honing the musical, experiential, intuitive, technical, energetic, and anatomical intelligence the body offers by dancing.  My work as a choreographer, improviser, teacher and interpreter plays with and listens to the practical and paradoxical intelligence of the body.  Like following a musical score, this listening integrates the body with the place.  The place could be a theatre, a factory, a photograph, an intersection, a landscape, a drawing, a café, or a dance studio.   The body offers an intuitive frame that can spiral perspective, dynamic and dimension into something felt. I am touched by the resonance of how to move in a specific place.   This moment-to-moment relationship to place gives dancing a sense of impermanence that is tangible.  Touching this timing in the body can focus a personal and a universal sense of very ordinary magic and longing.  We all have a body from which to tell the time.

 

The workshops I teach explore the ways breath shapes our moving, speaking, singing, sounding, and silence. This sensory and imaginative learning allows the performer to filter elements of rhythm, anatomy, direction, force, fluidity and energy through the fully engaged and breathing body. Breath is movement and paying close attention to the fluid sensations of breath as it shapes our body and our imagination can give life to intimate resting as well as full blown elation. We develop abilities to make choices as creators and performers through working both individually and with partners and also through writing, talking and witnessing each other. In this spirit of exploration, relationship, and involvement the body is free to inspire itself towards its own clarity. There is a heightened awareness of being taken into the choices you are making either as dancer or choreographer, and these committed choices reveal their coherence in the moment; opening the gift of relationship and the momentum for dancing.

 

As I collaborate with artists in the fields of performance, visual, musical and written medias I feel the whole body’s ability to translate and touch a depth of wonder that generates understanding across many borders and through all language. 

 

Lin Snelling