About Yolande Snaith
"Yolande Snaith is a British choreographer whose particular interpretation of the post-modern fairy-tale embraces the magical, the sinister, the ambiguous: but all, often, strangely connecting with our contemporary life"
Rachel Duerden, The Dancing Times 2002
Yolande Snaith began her choreographic career in the early 1980’s as a solo dance theatre artist, with a uniquely individually physicality and aesthetic voice. Her multidisciplinary training in visual arts, theatre design, and dance and theatre provided a foundation for a consistently inventive and potent performance language that was later to emerge, from one of Britain’s most groundbreaking choreographers.
Snaith’s early solo and duet works toured extensively throughout the UK and internationally between 1985 and 1990, earning her several prestigious awards, including Time Out/Dance Umbrella and Digital dance awards. Tours to Hong Kong and Europe were supported by the British Council, introducing her to the international dance scene as one of Britain’s most promising young artists. The success of these early works led to the formation of her own company in 1990, Yolande Snaith Theatredance, supported annually by the Arts Council of England. So began the development of her artistic work on a larger scale through collaborations with composers, designers, actors and visual artists, as well as larger groups of dancers. Yolande Snaith Theatredance produced and toured eleven full length works, visiting over fifteen countries including; Germany, Romania, Lithuania, Italy, Spain and France. One of the company’s most acclaimed works was Blind Faith, which won the Prix d’auteur du Conceil generale de la Seine-Saint-Denis in 1997.
Yolande Snaith has created seven original works for the camera, four of which were broadcast on British television, and international TV stations between 1987 and 2001. Snaith’s long standing collaborative relationships with director Ross MacGibbon, composer Graeme Miller and designer Robert Innes-Hopkins led to the creation of three critically acclaimed dance films, one of which, Should Accidentally fall, was the overall winner of the Vancouver dance video festival in 1993. Their film adaptation of Snaith’s stage piece Swinger in 1996 inspired film director Stanley Kubrick to commission Yolande to choreograph the masked ball in his final film Eyes Wide Shut.
Other choreographic commissions have led Snaith into the worlds of theatre and opera, including choreography for the English National Opera and Paines Plough Theatre, as well as other dance companies such as Transitions and Ricochet.
Yolande Snaith moved to the US in 2002 to take up a position as dance professor at the University of California San Diego, and since then has been choreographing, teaching and performing in both the US and the UK. Recent collaborators have included composers Jean-Jacques Palix, David Coulter and Shahrokh Yadegari, visual artist Sharon Marston and designer Miranda Melville, resulting in works that become increasingly more poetic, complexly layered, hypnotic and resonant with historical, cultural and humanitarian themes. IMAGOmoves was established in 2006.
"She is, it could be said, the Lewis Carroll of choreography; creating magical and multi-faceted wonderlands out of intellectually diverse and challenging material. Snaith’s sources and themes are indeed varied and often erudite; she has drawn her ideas from literature, history, philosophy, sociology. The assimilation of idea and image is of central importance, and is something in which she is especially skilled"
Rachel Duerden, The Dancing Times 2002
