Yolande Snaith’s choreographic and performing career spans thirty years. Her range of artistic engagement is broad, from solo performance work to group choreography and dance theatre, choreographic commissions and improvisation ensemble practice. Her work has been presented internationally in more than fifteen countries, and she has created several dance films in collaboration with renowned film directors. Yolande has been commissioned to choreograph works for dance, theatre and opera companies internationally.

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Yolande’s artistic roots lie in her native Britain, where she emerged in the mid 1980’s as one of the UK’s most innovative young choreographers, at a time when the European dance theatre scene was rapidly evolving. Having trained in visual art and Wimbledon Art School UK, and dance and theatre at Dartington College of Art UK, the foundations of her arttistic practice are multidisciplinary. Between 1985 and 1990 Yolande created a number of full length solo and duet works which toured the British dance venues and European festival network, with support from the Arts Council of England, and the British Council. Yolande received a number of dance awards including; two Digital Dance Awards, a Barclays New Stages Award, the Bonnie Bird Choreography Award and two Time Out/Dance Umbrella Awards.

Yolande’s UK company, Yolande Snaith Theatredance was established in 1990 with funding support from the Arts Council of England. The company’s work was renowned for its innovative collaborations with composers, designers, writers, dancers and actors, creating striking visual and theatrical worlds with their own unique performance vocabulary and internal logic. The company created and toured eleven full length works between 1990 - 2004, visiting dance festivals and venues in France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Spain, Romania, Lithuania, Isreal, Greece, Hungary, Austria, Ireland, Switzerland, UK and Scotland. One of Yolande Snaith Theatredance’s most renowned works, Blind Faith won the Prix D’auteur du Conceil Generale de la Seine-Saint-Denise in 1998.

Yolande has received commissions from dance, theatre, opera, film and television companies, including the English National Opera, Birmingham Dance Exchange, Transitions Dance Company, CNDC, Ricochet Dance Company, The Verve, Paines Plough Theatre Company, McCaleb Dance, Jean Isaac’s San Diego Dance Theater and Trolley Dances and the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj. Yolande has created eight dance films in collaboration with a range of directors, designers and composers, including director Ross MacGibbon, composers Graeme Miller, and David Coulter and designer Robert Innes-Hopkins. Should Accidentally Fall (1992), Swinger (1996) and Tablecloth Garden (2000) were all screened on television stations internationally, including the BBC and Channel 4. In 1997 Stanley Kubrick commissioned Yolande to choreograph his final film Eyes Wide Shut, and in 1999 she was the choreographic adviser for David Hinton’s film Birds, which was the overall winner of the 2001 Monaco Dance Screen Awards.

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Yolande moved to the US in 2002 to join the faculty of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego, and since then her choreographic and performance work has diversified through a broad range of artistic collaborations, commissions, site specific works, improvisation ensembles, film and solo projects, with performances in Los Angeles, San Diego, Germany, France, Holland, Romania and Hungary. IMAGOmoves was established in 2006 as an artistic ‘umbrella’ for collaborative projects with other artists and performers. Since its inception IMAGOmoves has created six full length dance theatre works and several shorter pieces, including large group site-specific events in urban city locations, to intimate smaller group and solo work presented in a range of venues, from the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj, Romania, to San Diego’s alternative performance spaces such as SUSHI Visual and Performing Arts and Space4art.

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Recent projects include: Ruins True (2010 - 2011), a dance theatre collective creation between theatre director Gabor Tompa, co-performer/choreographers Yolande Snaith, Liam Clancy and Mary Reich, composer Shahrokh Yadegari, and scenic/projection designer Ian Wallace. Inspired by the work of Samuel Beckett, Ruins True was previewed at SUSHI Visual and Performing Arts, San Diego , and toured to international theatre festivals in Romania, Hungary and Avignon, France. In 2012 Yolande was commissioned to choreograph a re-creation of Ruins True with performers from the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj, Romania, and the piece (Ruins True Refuge) is now performed regularly as part of the company’s repertoire, touring to international theatre festivals. The Art of Fugue (2012) was an international music and dance collaboration with baroque music ensemble The Bach Collegium San Diego and Brazilian violinist Rodolfo Richter, presented at UC San Diego. The Art of Fugue sought to create a marriage between tightly scored dance improvisation, set choreography and the timeless, spacial geometry of Bach’s fugues.

One Hundred Feet was a full length multimedia solo work choreographed and performed by Yolande, created in collaboration with video artist Natalia Valerdi, sound designer Nick Drashner and lighting designer Wen-Ling Liao, presented at UAG San Diego, Space4art San Diego and the UCSD Department of Theatre and Dance’s ‘Dance Series’. Between 2009 - 2012 Yolande was a member of LIVE, an improvisational ensemble based in San Diego, who have been presented in Mexico, Germany, Los Angeles and San Diego.

Yolande created choreography for Eleanor Antin’s production of Before the Revolution, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in January 2012, directed by Robert Castro. Yolande’s most recent film project was a choreographic commission for Queens Dream in collaboration with director Mark Freeman, 2012, which is currently being presented in dance for the camera festivals internationally.

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