Moving STILL is a site-specific performance created under the direction of Melanie Kloetzel and performed by students at the University of Calgary. The work explores West Campus Park, a hidden natural area that connects two hospitals with a quiet green space. Offered as a way to connect issues of perspective and care, the contemplative work functioned as an evening-length walking tour through the park.
Premiere date: August 2025.
Embodied Facilitation is a methodology in development by Melanie Kloetzel/kloetzel&co. that allows groups (neighbours, community organizations, collectives, NGOs, etc.) to deepen connections and problem solve while also being involved in fun, physical activities. Embodied Facilitation sessions aim to support fuller and more intentional social connections through a process that prioritizes dialogue, physical movement and joy. Created as a way to address societal challenges (social isolation, sustainable futures, food insecurity, etc.) the process allows for individuals and communities to nurture local connections while also finding space to envision improved futures. The sessions grow from the understanding that intentional social connections offer a path to mutual aid and community-based sharing, creating resiliency and hope for an uncertain future.
Randonnée Chorégraphique is a choreographic hike created by Laurent Pichaud and Julie Perrin with Melanie Kloetzel, Vicky Hunter and Karen Barbour. Taking place in the French countryside, outside of the small town of Évelle, as part of a site-specific performance festival, the hike offered the audience-participants a view into the dance history of rural areas both in France and internationally. Pichaud and Perrin teamed up with visual artist Nicolas Lelièvre to create a “choreographic topoguide”, which helped develop a dramaturgical ‘twinning’ of the rural French location with those of distant site dance choreographies.
The work premiered in 2024 and acted as a pilot project for the In Situ/Site Dance International working group. This project was supported by the Fondation de France, s-sud art/site, and CDCN Le Dancing Dijon Bourgogne-Franche-Comté.
Through a spectacular joining of dance, voiceover, projection and light design, What Matters offers a dance theatre satire that highlights our economic reality and the cultural obsession with unsustainable growth.
What Matters developed as an artistic investigation into two key areas. One, the piece experiments with the dismembering of movement and sound delivery (as an homage to Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young and to the Japanese form of Bunraku). Two, the work examines how performance can dig into cultural conceptions of the economy. To do so, What Matters embraces the setting of a medical facility to riff on the media’s personification of the economy, in particular, how the ‘economy’ becomes an anthropomorphized figure that we are expected to care for in a deep and abiding manner.
The work premiered in 2024 at the University of Calgary.
Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy (Just Breathe, Mother Earth) is a collaborative project led by Cree artist Sandra Lamouche and settler artist Melanie Kloetzel.
Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy offers intimate groups of 25-30 individuals an immersive journey into and out of climate anxiety. As the audience-participants are physically guided through a crafted landscape, they experience hope, deceit, folly and serenity, while also uncovering alternatives to a shocking fate.
Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy presents audience-participants with the opportunity to engage with the climate crisis as a nexus where economics, ecology, health and Indigenous knowledge meet. Using tactics of disorientation, satire, and state-based tasks for audience-participants, those joining the Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy journey experience both the deep inequalities and inadequate nature of Eurocentric cultural responses to the climate crisis, as well as the cultural possibilities that exist in reconnecting to the land via Indigenous worldviews.
Each Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy journey concludes with an hour-long debriefing session. These sessions, facilitated by clinical psychology trainee Camille Mori, help the audience examine the feelings that emerged during the immersive journey, as well as connect to others who may be feeling disempowered in the face of the climate emergency.
Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy premiered in 2023, and has been performed over 15 times between 2023-2025. A film version of the project will be released in 2025 for greater audience accessibility.
Landscape in Motion (LIM) is an interdisciplinary project that brings together landscape architect Enrica Dall’Ara and site-specific choreographer Melanie Kloetzel/kloetzel&co., with a research team of graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Calgary. To access all outputs from the project, please see Landscape In Motion.
Through a three-year site-specific analysis of the neighbourhoods of Inglewood and Ramsay in Moh’kinsstis/Calgary, the project seeks to create an innovative methodology that informs both design and dance creation processes in urban settings.
Crafted in dialogue with a landscape that is undergoing massive urban redevelopment, the project aims to respect the larger scale of the neighbourhood alongside the smaller scale of the human body.
A key output of the LIM project involves the interdisciplinary production of ‘score-maps’, which offer information regarding a movement’s placement on site, a mover’s positionality and the quality and actions generated on site. A second output involves the creation of a series of dance films that focus on individual ‘microsites’ and, when collected, offer a sense of the ‘life in the landscape’ to inform landscape design processes.
VINES is a site-adaptive workshop and performance created by Melanie Kloetzel (kloetzel&co.) with dramaturgical support from Brandy Leary (Anandam Dance). Using state-based and durational approaches, the work explores how the human body can corporeally adapt to urban spaces by rigorously embodying growth patterns from climbing plants.
The VINES process asks dancing bodies to adopt ideas from the more-than-human world to impact a series of spaces, just as, perhaps, plants do when enacting a reclamation of abandoned or disused areas.
With deep appreciation for concepts of relationality, which have been emphasized by Indigenous communities around the world, VINES considers what it might mean to identify with plants as kin. Through an investigation into the growth-oriented movement patterns of vining or climbing plants, the VINES process offers a framework for translating such movement into the human body. In this way, the process helps us consider whether an embodied translational approach can engender a sense of kinesthetic empathy with our more-than-human kin.
The work has enjoyed research development in both Toronto and Calgary with support from Canada Council for the Arts.
VINES has been performed at Contemporary Calgary Art Gallery as part of Fluid Fest in 2024 and in 2025 as part of the New Works Calgary season in collaboration with a live presentation of Emilie Lebel’s ‘field studies’ performed by the UltraViolet Ensemble.
For more about this research process, see:
‘New Directions in Site Performance Practice’
and
The Coming Silence is a film based on the live site-adaptive performance installation, The Coming Silence. Released in 2022, the film premiered at the Green Montenegro International Film Festival (Montenegro), and has also been screened at DANCE ONSCREEN (Canada), the Outlet Dance Project (USA), and HECare Film Festival (Canada). The film also won an Honourable Mention for Costume Design at the Exeter Dance International Film Festival (UK).
The Coming Silence is a site-based performance installation that highlights humanity’s ethical dilemmas in the Anthropocene. Created with support from Canada Council for the Arts, The Coming Silence examines the concept of extinction, whether through viral, climatic or ecological means, by focusing on the taxidermied space of the natural history museum.
A creation of kloetzel&co., The Coming Silence includes direction/choreography by Melanie Kloetzel with cinematography by Linnea Swan and poetry by A.E. Stallings. Performers for the work include Kaili Che, Shondra Cromwell-Krywulak, Hannah Isbister, Megan Koch, Alyssa Maturino, Meghann Michalsky, Sarah Mitchell, Camille Mori, Maggie Myles, Rufi Oswaldo, Taylor Ritchie, and Reese Wilson.
The Coming Silence is a site-based performance installation that aims a critical eye at the divisions humans create between themselves and the rest of the biotic world.
The Coming Silence comments on the larger notion of human extinction, whether through viral, climatic or ecological crises, highlighting humanity’s ethical dilemmas in the Anthropocene.
An in-process showing of The Coming Silence occurred as part of TRAction’s ‘Procession for End Times II’ in September 2020 as audiences honoured the loss of the Milne Ice Shelf.
The premiere of the work occurred as a walking tour and performance on Prince’s Island Park on May 1&2, 2021, presented as part of ReLoCate’s The Experiment series. For more information, see https://relocateyyc.wixsite.com/. A film that documents the live performance was released in August 2021, again as part of ReLoCate’s The Experiment series.
The Coming SIlence enjoys support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.
Lot C is a site-specific performance produced by kloetzel&co. with direction by Melanie Kloetzel and choreography by students in the BFA Dance at the University of Calgary. The work evokes images of cinematic landscapes and children’s perspectives amid the peculiarities of a pandemic. Performed in an abandoned lot next to a Children’s Hospital, the performance offered a free and accessible live viewing experience for those more and less intimately connected to the hospital during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.