About

Artist’s Statement

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Works Presented Nov. 2004 – Sep. 2015

photo by Olivia Droeshaut

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BIOGRAPHY:

Daniel Linehan’s choreographic work is intent on softly obscuring the line that separates dance from everything else. He approaches performance-making from the point of view of a curious amateur, testing various interactions between dance and non-dance forms, searching for unlikely conjunctions, juxtapositions, and parallels between texts, movements, images, songs, videos, and rhythms.

Linehan first studied dance in Seattle and then moved to New York in 2004. His work first came to public attention in 2004 with the solo Digested Noise, presented in Fresh Tracks at Dance Theater Workshop. In 2005 and 2006, he worked with a team of four other dancers to create The Sun Came and Human Content Pile. Linehan was a 2007-2008 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. In 2007, Linehan premiered the solo Not About Everything, which has since been presented in over 75 venues internationally.

In 2008, Linehan moved to Brussels where he completed the Research Cycle at P.A.R.T.S. His works created in Belgium include Montage for Three (2009), Being Together without any Voice (2010), Zombie Aporia (2011), Gaze is a Gap is a Ghost (2012), and The Karaoke Dialogues (2014).

Other recent projects include:

– Vita Activa, a week-long workshop for 40 unemployed people, and culminating in a final public performance, co-directed with Michael Helland.

– Doing While Doing, a lecture-demonstration in which Linehan dances excerpts from five of his choreographies while speaking about dance, literature, politics, and news events from six years ago.

– A No Can Make Space, a book created in collaboration with graphic designer Gerard Leysen (Afreux), which gathers and organizes the traces of Linehan’s ten years of choreographic practice. (available here)  (and listen to a conversation between Leysen and Linehan here)

– untitled duet, a work streamed live over the internet as part of the Performance Room Series at Tate Modern. (viewable here)

In Feb. 2015, Linehan premiered Un Sacre du Printemps at deSingel in Antwerp. This work for 13 dancers, recently graduated from P.A.R.T.S., borrows from Stravinsky’s famous score the principle of constantly beginning anew. In the absence of a predictable pattern, how do the dancers navigate the rapidly changing conditions?

In Nov. 2015, Linehan will premiere dbddbb at Opéra de Lille. In this work, the five dancers step and chant according to a coordinated pulse. They pass through a montage of shifting situations that sometimes resemble a protest march, a techno club, an ecstatic ritual and other modes of moving together in rhythmic time. Reveling in nonsense, dbddbb suggests that it might be necessary to invent a new language in order to move from this step to the next.

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Linehan was an Artiste Associé 2012-2014 at deSingel (Antwerpen, BE), New Wave Associate 2012- 2014 at Sadler’s Wells (London, UK) and is currently Artist-in-Residence at l’Opéra de Lille (FR) since January 2013.

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Extended Biography