Research Project/ Production 2025/ 2026.

Choreography in collaboration with ‘outsider’ artist David Puttick.Supported by Arts Council England, Trinity Laban seed funding, South East Dance and Outside In.

This project aims to change the way choreography and visual arts are seen in galleries by proposing movement and choreography as the instigator of visual art processes specifically by collaborating with ‘outsider’ artist David Puttick.

We aim for true integration of choreography and visual arts through a series of reciprocal processes of choreography/ sound/ images in collaboration with the artist David Puttick.

“David Puttick  is an ‘outsider’ artist of passion and intensity who has been making art throughout his life. Diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic in college at age 20, his health has seesawed through the years. He sees faces in the cracks of sidewalks and bark of trees and “finds” them in his fierce, mixed-media, drawings of paint, pencil, ball-point pen, and bitumen paint (tar).”

 “Recently, I have noticed faces in natural forms such as trees, stones, paving stones, and other places, (even in Formica and mass produced tiling where a vision of general ambience is the norm). I believe this process of recognition goes back to pre-history. My course of enquiry has covered the Fibonacci sequence, our desire to create form out of the random, and embracing the unknown or unconscious. I photograph, document, and collect objects, and draw/paint my own interpretations of what I see.”

David Puttick, 2017.

Work in progress showing at the Jamie Watton Creation Space at South East Dance end November 2025.

More information to to follow…

The Shadow Drone Project

The Shadow Drone Project began as a collaboration between choreographer Charles Linehan and Lithuanian aerial photographer Karolis Janulis, filming planned and unplanned events in civic and natural environments from an unmanned aerial vehicle.

Shot in morning or late afternoon sunshine, the aerial viewpoint offers a unique cinematic perspective of dynamic patterning, where shadows of people and objects are sometimes revealed to be more present than their actual form.

The film also deliberately identifies with the same viewpoint as surveillance techniques that cross legal and national borders, occupying the same downward gaze, but here set apart from its violent and military context.

“The effect? Strange, almost alien, and beautiful." 
The Times

2022 The Sound Mirrors/ film

2018 Undertow

New work for Jin Xing Dance Theatre, Shanghai. China’s largest independent Dance Company.

2016 My Mother’s Tears

Brighton Festival, The Brighton Dome, Corn Exchange

My Mother’s Tears is both a poignant and irreverent take on Michael Nunn and William Trevitt’s (Ballet Boyz) history of their Royal Ballet repertoire, specifically their history of performing Ballet Mime. The work places 18th Century gestures in a contemporary context touching on themes of reflection, memory, their relationship and their shared personal and professional history.

2016 A Quarter Plus Green

Brighton Festival, The Brighton Dome, Corn Exchange

In A Quarter Plus Green, ideas of transformation are applied to movement, light and sound in a unique new setting at Brighton Dome Corn Exchange. With enigmatic simplicity and layers of detail, six performers are slowly submerged in an escalating wall of sound and distilled environments are undone by the overlapping of choreographic episodes. A Quarter Plus Green takes its name from the grade of lighting gels used in the piece.

Dancers: Lorea Burge Badiola, Robert Clark, Greig Cooke, Antonia Grove, Samir Kennedy, Henry Montes

2011 The Fault Index

The Place Theatre, London.

 A series of connected and unconnected episodes presented in a different order for each performance. Dancers: Luke Birch, Theo Clinkard, Claire Cunningham, Greig Cooke, Rachel Lopez de la Nieta.

✭✭✭✭✰ The Times

2010 The Clearing 

Dance Umbrella , Greenwich Town Hall

Slow transformations evolve within a complex weave of beautiful sonorities and interplaying rhythms, in a sonic and lighting environment unique to each venue.
Commissioned Score by Richard Skelton, 5 live live musicians.

“I feel like I’m sitting on its shoulders; it simply carries me, about as grown up as a dance can get. Simplicity may be old news for contemporary dance, but for Linehan it is his lynch pin. It is a taste thing, yes, but it is not whim. Linehan’s work has a consistency of instinct that gives it bearing without weight. Mass without heaviness. A reverent space for the act of choreography and just fine by me.”  Bellyflop magazine.  

Media partner: The Wire Magazine 

2010 Inventions for Radio 1964 

Dance Umbrella, Greenwich Town Hall

Inspired by Delia Derbyshire’s recording of reassembled interview footage about people’s dreams, Inventions for Radio 1964 uses the recurrent themes of drowning, colour and falling.

“his textured 13 minute piece of early sonic experimentation has a deep and fluid quality that carries you into its embrace. Likewise this duet hangs and scoops through the space, evoking a dark buoyancy rooted in the grounded and released vocabulary.”
Total Theatre 

2007 The Way Station 

Dance Umbrella. The Place Theatre, London.

“As Linehan has proved for over a decade now, the best things often come in the least hyped packages.” 

The Observer 

2007 The Wire XXV 

Finsbury Town Hall, London.

A one-off performance for The Wire magazine’s 25th Anniversary with live music by Richard Skelton.

2006 Prussian Blue

Skånes Dansteater, Malmö, Sweden. Malmö Opera House, national tour Sweden.

2006 New Work Belgrade, Serbia

BELEF International Festival, Belgrade.

Collaboration with Belgradeyard Sound System with five dancers from Serbia and neighbouring countries
A British Council commission. Media Partner: The Wire Magazine.

2005 Happy Days 

The trio Happy Days is a bittersweet replaying of past events with belated insight; a work of choreographic rigour set to Jim O’ Rourke’s (Sonic Youth) soundtrack that pits a lone guitar against a phalanx of hurdy-gurdy drones.

“Happy Days, Linehan’s new work, is superb; a spare, introspective piece that accumulates a mesmerising intensity as it unfolds”
The Dancing Times

“Charles Linehan is a thinking person’s choreographer. His work, understated and always sensitively crafted, is a stream of glancing but resonant encounters between dancers .. yet because their dancing is so honest and revealing, we never feel excluded”
The Times

2005 Number Stations 

Dance Umbrella. The Place Theatre, London.

Set to short-wave radio recordings of espionage codes from the Cold War to the present.

Specific and randomly timed lighting design and a series of flashes from 15 disposable cameras makes the environment appear to be controlled by an exterior force.

2004 Disintegration Loops (New Quartet) 

Dance Umbrella, The Place Theatre.

Initially submerged in a wall of sound, New Quartet opens up into a distilled environment of movement, music and light.

Commissioned by Dance Umbrella. Supported by Arts Council England through Grants for the Arts. Further support from: Kaai Theatre, Brussels; National Arts Centre, Ottawa; Harbourfront, Toronto.Dancers: Ben Ash, Greig Cooke, Andreja Rauch Podrzavinik, Rahel Vonmoos Music: Gate, William Basinski

“… rigorously constructed and shows his confidence in letting nuanced movements and a fast visual rhythm articulate the universal.”
The Irish Times

2003 Grand Junction 

Rigorously choreographed and densely atmospheric Grand Junction is driven by Julian Swales's compositions of cyclical acoustic guitar samples. It explores the shifting psychology and terrain of the relationship between the two performers, through an inspired, detailed and unsparing physicality.

“Linehan evokes a forceful emotional undertow with a rare economy of means.”
The Guardian 

2003 Lume

Bulandra Theatre, Bucharest.

Collaboration with The Balanescu Quartet . Inspired by the songs of singer Maria Tanase with seven Romanian dancers and five musicians.

A British Council commission.

2001 ‘Duet’ 

A 1 minute 45 second duet under a swinging light bulb. Music: Lou Barlow
Performed by a variety of dancers (and a stage hand) in multiple venues.

2001 Speak, memory

Dance Umbrella

Four dancers. Music: Julian Swales. Video projection: Wendy Houstoun.
Commissioned by Dance Umbrella. Supported by Arts Council England through Grants for the Arts.

2000 The Order of Things 

Mystery, enchantment and Gravity. Music: Various.

2000 Santa Pod 

Ambient soundscape meets extreme noise terror from recordings of drag racing at Santa Pod

Dancers: Florin Fieroui, Ioanna Popovici.

Sound: Julian Swales, recordings from Santa Pod race track.

1999 Preludes and Fugues 

Dance Umbrella

Music Dmitri Schostakovich, live solo piano
An outcome from winning The Jerwood Award for Choreography.

Dancers: Grieg Cooke, Henry Montes, Rahel Vonmoos.

1999 The Secret 

A backwards dive into the oceanic sounds of Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman’s 1960s exotica

Music: Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman.

1998 Rialto, The Place Production 1998 

Inspired by the film music of Michel Legrand.

The walls of the Place Theatre are temporarily painted white for 16mm and super 8 film projection.
Commissioned by The Place; The Place Production 1998.