Biographie
In his choreographies, Daniel Linehan has developed a long-standing interest in exploring how thoughts and ideas in the mental realm inform the actions of bodies in the physical arena, and vice versa. He works by placing bits of narrative, emotional, textual, visual, and physical information together in time, and meaning emerges from the flow among the different types of information being presented. Linehan created choreographic work in New York for four years, and re-located to Brussels in September 2008 to study in the Research Cycle at P.A.R.T.S. The first dance that Linehan performed in New York was Digested Noise, a solo that was presented by Dance Theater Workshop in November 2004. In Digested Noise Linehan creates a sense of the abrupt, irrational jump-cuts that occur in human thought as part of daily experience. During 2005, Linehan developed The Sun Came, a work in which five dancers struggle with the sense of being highly constricted by limited options and very few choices for movement. Part of this dance occurs amidst a barrage of monotonously chanted words—originally taken from news reports and fictional tales—that have been spliced together in such a way that they have been stripped of their context and seem to lose all meaning. Human limitation seems to take on a haunting presence, as the dancers struggle to create meaning in midst of a pervading sense of alienation. The Sun Came was presented by Triskelion Arts in Brooklyn in January 2006. In 2006 Linehan worked on the project Human Content Pile, with four other dancers. This work ignites ideas about what happens when the ordinary and the everyday come into conflict with the desire for impossible ideals. This project was presented by The Kitchen in Dance and Process in December 2006. Linehan’s next project, the solo Not About Everything, is an actual attempt to remain clear-sighted and lucid amid the literal physiological disorientation that accompanies 30 minutes of relentlessly spinning around in circles. Not About Everything premiered in November 2007 at Dance Theater Workshop. Linehan began attending the Research Cycle at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels in September 2008. While at P.A.R.T.S., he created two new performances. The first, Montage for Three, is a duet that examines the language of a Choreography-of-Images. The source material for the choreography is taken entirely from photographs and movie stills, which is projected in “unison” with the movement of the two dancers. This kind of process raises a series of questions: How does the live body relate to the mechanical/re-produced/dead body? Does the photographed image have an inherent quality of nostalgia or sentimentality or even an obituary-like quality? And how are these morbid qualities transformed when the image is appropriated by live performing bodies? Montage for Three premiered in May 2009 in the Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis in Paris. For his final graduation project at P.A.R.T.S., Linehan created the quartet Being Together without any Voice. This piece focuses on social interactions between people that occur without language. The ways that the performers interact—or avoid interaction—are paradoxical. The performers are engaged in something which might be useless labor, or which might be a purposeful game. Each performer treats the other as an object, and treats himself/herself as an other. At first the contradictions within their behavior appear strange, but over time their way of being together becomes more and more recognizable. Being Together without any Voice premiered at the Rosas Performance Space in Brussels in May 2010, as part of the P.A.R.T.S. Graduation tour. In his first year after graduating from P.A.R.T.S., Linehan created Zombie Aporia. In this performance, three dancers use their voices in order to create an intricate connection between dance and music. The performance breaks down the boundaries that separate body from voice, sound from image, rhythm from meaning. It is a performance that seeks to discover possibility within apparently impossible contradictions: music that is the result of dancing, emotional expression that begins physically, spontaneous feelings that are designed, words that give more of a sense of vibration than meaning. Zombie Aporia premiered at Vooruit in Ghent in March 2011, and it has since been presented at theaters and festivals in Kortrijk, Antwerp, Brussels, Amsterdam, Groningen, Vienna, Toulouse, Rennes, and Paris, among other cities. In 2012 Daniel created Gaze is a Gap is a Ghost. In this trio, he establishes a dialogue between the visible and the invisible, generating a confrontation between our external knowledge of the world and our internal imaginative life. Using video cameras, he gives us the impression that we are looking through the eyes of the three dancers. From the “inside” view, it appears that it is not so much the dancers who are moving, but rather the space itself which is spinning around and turning upside down. For his creation 2014, The Karaoke Dialogues, Linehan works with a team of seven dancers. He would like to reclaim the chorus aspect of choreography, in order to address urgent questions about what it means to be an individual in a group, what we gain and what we lose by participating in common forms of action. Premiere will take place in Opéra de Lille on May 13th 2013.