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.Upcoming/ recents

The Shadow Drone Project:

2022 Installation at Museo de Trajes in Bogota, Colombia

2022 Screenings at Luminous Flux DOCK 11 EDEN, Berlin 26

The festival for contemporary dance and performance art in berlin 2022

2022 - Work in progress showing

Thursday 7 April 2022 at 17:00

An informal half hour showing of live performance and film,

The Dance Space, 2 Market Square, Circus Street, Brighton BN2 9AS

A limited number of complimentary tickets available on request

Cath James and the team at South East Dance invite you to stay for a drink

Denge Sound Wall, Kent. 4 hour exposure

2022 The Sound Mirrors

New Film Autumn 2022

The Shadow Drone Project (ongoing)

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

The Shadow Drone Project has been shown at Festivals around the world including Brighton Festival, Dance Umbrella, Nottdance Festival, The Lincoln Centre, New York; Mexico City Video Dance Festival and San Francisco Dance Film Festival 

The Shadow Drone Project received a winning film award from POOL: INTERNATIONALES TanzFilmFestival BERLIN, 2019

A live integrated performance is available for touring 2022/2023. Premiered at Nottingham Contemporary

2018 Undertow

New work for Jin Xing Dance Theatre, Shanghai

China’s largest independent Dance Company

2016 A Quarter Plus Green

Brighton Festival. 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 Montess

2016 My Mother’s Tears

Brighton Festival. 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

Brighton Festival, The Corn Exchange  

2011 The Fault Index 

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 2010 Slow transformations evolve within a complex weave of beautiful sonorities and interplaying rhythms, in a sonic and lighting environment unique to each venue.
five musicians. Music: Commissioned Score by Richard Skelton

“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 2010 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. Dance Umbrella 2010
“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 

Commissioned by Dance Umbrella 2007

“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 

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

Finsbury Town Hall, London

2005 Prussian Blue

Skånes Dansteater, Malmö, Sweden
Malmö Opera House, national tour (Sweden)

2006 New Work Belgrade, Serbia

Collaboration with Belgradeyard Sound System with five dancers from Serbia and neighbouring countries

BELEF International Festival, Belgrade

A British Council commission

2005 Happy Days 

The trio Happy Days is a bittersweet replaying of past events with belated insight; a work of choreographic rigour and enigmatic simplicity with a powerful emotional undertow

“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 

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 

Dance Umbrella Festival

2004 Disintegration Loops (New Quartet) 

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 Podrzavinik, Rahel Vonmoos Music: Gate, William Basinski

Dance Umbrella

“its understated, moody intelligence inspires deeply-felt admiration – even adoration – from dancers, fellow choreographers, critics, thinking audiences and at least some promoters.”
The Dancing Times

“.. is 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

Collaboration with The Balanescu Quartet Bulandra Theatre, Bucharest

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 2001

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 2010 Music Dmitri Schostakovich, live solo piano
An outcome from winning The Jerwood Award for Choreography 1998

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

1997 Sefauchi’s Farewell 

Music: Bach cello suites transcribed for viola by Simon Rowland-Jones

1996 Untitled with Ultramarine 

A commission for the Royal festival Hall Foyer

Industrial sodium lights, nine dancers and live music from Ultramarine with guest Lol Coxill

1996 The Two Seasons 

Six dancers. Music: Nye Parry

1995 A New Ground 

Nine dancers. Music: Henry Purcell, harpsichord suites.

1994 Falling Light 

Duet featuring Charles Linehan in collaboration with Rahel Vonmoos