Lin Snelling
Pronouns: she/her
Personal Website: https://vimeo.com/channels/1463320
Contact
Coordinator of MFA Theatre Practice, Faculty of Arts - Drama Dept
- snelling@ualberta.ca
Overview
Area of Study / Keywords
Dance research creation experiential anatomy improvisation somatics Ideokinesis
About
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 Coordinator of the MFA in Theatre Practice. Her performing includes over 50 improvised and scored dance performances (locally, nationally, internationally), teaching/creating situational dramaturgies and real time composition pedagogies for actors and dancers, and moderating, leading, and creating seminars/workshops for communities and graduate and undergraduate students. She has collaborated with Edmonton dance artists Gerry Morita, Amber Borotsik, Kate Stashko, Brian Webb, the Good Women Dance Collective and Montreal dance artists Tedi Tafel, Thea Patterson, Sarah Bild and Susanna Hood. She toured Rewriting Distance with dramaturg and longtime collaborator Guy Cools that has travelled to 7 countries, 14 cities with 48 participating artists and 105 performances. www.rewritingdistance.com
She recently performed in the Joshua Tree as part of the BWDC Summer Season that toured to Bengaluru, India. In 2019 she received a McCalla Professorship for a new collective creation, A Sounding Line. Other recent dance collaborations include Far Away and Personal, a dance film with musician/composer Michael Reinhart and ENTRANCES with writer David Gagnon Walker and multimedia designer Tori Morrison from Strange Victory Performance. Watch out for a new solo Before/AFter, created as a HoT Artist, through the Naked Theatre (Brussels) sometime soon. She received a SSHRC Insight Grant in 2025 for The amazing natural; rehearsing with the world, the body and knowledge making in improvisational dance.
Research
Other Research Contributions
2020 Notebook Dances A solo performance series called Notebook Dances: a 7-minute daily performance ritual during the first 3 months of COVID lockdown. These were dances improvised from individual notebooks, collected from 30 years of dancing, teaching and creating, and randomly chosen each day on camera. Invitations to view were sent through social media; if someone would like to view a notebook dance, they pick a number between 3-102 and I sent it to them the dance through a Vimeo link.
2019 A Sounding Line with support from a McCalla Professorship, A Sounding Line was created with an ensemble comprised of two graduate students and a cast of interdisciplinary performers from across Canada, including musician/composers, dancer/actors and artist/academics.Other Research Contributions/Writing
2020 Having to Write or Say Anything at All Paterson, T., Snelling, L. (2022).. Nivel Artistic Research in the Performing Arts., CARPA7. https://nivel.teak.fi/carpa7/having- to-write- or-say-anything-at-all/ Category: Research Article; Status: Published/ePublished; Refereed: Reviewed by reviewers and editorial
2014 Working backwards in Time: Rewriting Distance at “teach me (not!)” Symposium, Vienna. IDOCDE - International Documentation of Contemporary Dance Education. On- line journal http://www.idocde.net/idocs/1040
2014 Notes on Choreography and Drawing Shelagh Keeley Lin Snelling. Artist Book. Writing in response to Keeley’s visual art.
2013 The Body and the Contemporary Performer. All Stages. Alberta Theatre Magazine. Spring 2013 Issue. Pg. 11
2012 Dirty Dancing – Alternatives Journal. Five artists explain how they connect with nature to protect it. All Stages Magazine Vol.38 #3 Pg. 28
2009 Drawing Space. Artist book collaboration with Shelagh Keeley. Artist Book; designer Sarah Wu.
2009 Dance Composition: An Interrelated Arts Approach by Janice Pomer. Artist Highlight Interview with Lin Snelling. Human Kinetics. Pg. 58-62.
2005 Repeating Distance. Contact Quarterly Vol. 32 No. 1 Winter/Spring 2007 Place Issue. Pg. 33.
2001 Breathing Room Liberté. Danses. Volume #43, Number 4/2001. 2000 Studio 303. Catalogue segment.
1984 New Voices. A Celebration of Canadian Poetry. Mosaic Press. Edited by Clifton Whiten.
Pg. 99-104.
A Significant career research contribution (Performing)
Lin Snelling toured (1989-2002) and performed with Gilles Maheu’s company Carbone 14. She performed in Le Dortoir that toured North and South America, Europe and Australia for 4 years between 1989 and 1991. She performed in the internationally acclaimed filmed version. The company and collaborators received many awards for a cinematic/collage approach that influenced theatre of the 1980s.
In 1992 Carbone 14 received a Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards in Ottawa and an hommage from CINARS (Conference internationale des arts de la scène/International Performing Arts Conference) for its international successes. In 1995 the Conseil des Arts de la Communauté Urbaine de Montréal awarded the company a prize for 20 years of theatrical production, extraordinary contributions to Montréal theatrical life and international renown. The television adaptation of Le Dortoir won several prizes, including a New York Emmy for Best Performing Arts Program. It received at the 1992 International Festival of Audiovisual Programs at Cannes, France. Touring works that Snelling was part of include Le Dortoir, Le Café des aveugles (1992) La Forêt,(1994) Les Âmes mortes (1996) L'Hiver/Winterland,(1997) and Silences et cris(2001).
Courses
DRAMA 334A - Beginning Movement
Techniques in ballet and period style for the actor. Exploration of creative forms of movement and the physical self in characterization. Note: Restricted to BFA (Acting) students.
DRAMA 434A - Theatre Movement
Studies of, and projects in styles of movement and dance, both period and contemporary. Prerequisite: DRAMA 334. Note: Restricted to BFA (Acting) students.
DRAMA 534A - Advanced Movement
Instruction and projects for individual growth in movement expression. Prerequisite: DRAMA 438. Note: Restricted to BFA (Acting) students.
DRAMA 624 - Research Seminar IV
Selected topics in Theatre History and Theatrical Theory.