Embodied Facilitation

Embodied Facilitation by kloetzel&co.
Embodied Facilitation by kloetzel&co.
Embodied Facilitation by kloetzel&co.
Embodied Facilitation by kloetzel&co.
Embodied Facilitation by kloetzel&co.
Embodied Facilitation by kloetzel&co.
Embodied Facilitation by kloetzel&co.

Embodied Facilitation

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

Randonnée Chorégraphique
Randonnée chorégraphique
Randonnée chorégraphique
Randonnée chorégraphique
Randonnée chorégraphique
Randonnée chorégraphique
Randonnée chorégraphique

Randonnée Chorégraphique

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.

Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy

Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe

Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy

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 as part of the Professional Series at the University of Calgary in January 2023 with additional performances scheduled for 2024 and 2025.

Landscape in Motion

Landscape in Motion
Landscape in Motion
Landscape in Motion
Landscape in Motion
Landscape in Motion
Landscape in Motion

Landscape in Motion

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

VINES by kloetzel&co.
VINES by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Weeds
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Weeds

Vines

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

‘Climate Art‘

The Coming Silence (on site)

Photo by @SentientForms
Photo by @SentientForms
Photo by @SentientForms
Photo by @SentientForms
Photo by @SentientForms
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
Photo by @SentientForms

The Coming Silence

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.

The Coming Silence

Lot C

Lot C
Lot C
Lot C
Lot C
Lot C
Lot C
Lot C

Lot C

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.

It began with watching

It began with watching
It began with watching
It began with watching
It began with watching
MEN in charge / Dance of the Puppets
MEN at Christmas
It began with watching
MEN at The Head
It began with watching
MEN at Mac Hall

It began with watching

Through blunt text and even blunter physicality, It began with watching offers a brutally humorous take on the political landscape as ‘alternative facts’ and outlandish acts take centre stage. A site-adaptive work that is tailored to each space it visits, the absurdist exchanges between performers and audience members and droll commentary in  It began with watching  provide an entertaining and honest portrait of a sector enthralled with power. A droplet of intelligence here, a hint of a shadowy figure, and we are all marionettes, putty in the puppet master’s hands.

The evening-length site-adaptive version of It began with watching premiered in Edmonton on June 27-29, 2017 at Edmonton City Hall and on June 30, 2017 at the Vignettes Building through The Works Art & Design Festival. 

Excerpts of this work have also been shown at more than ten sites between 2017 and 2020 across Calgary’s downtown, at various on-campus locations at the University of Calgary, as well as at EV Junction as part of Alberta Culture Days and at the DJD Dance Centre for the Canadian National Dance Assembly’s annual conference in 2017. 

The film, MEN in charge, which was released in 2021, is based on the stage and site versions of It began with watching, directed by Melanie Kloetzel and shot and edited by Linnea Swan.

Contact kloetzel&co. to book the MEN for your site – restaurant, brewery or boardroom!

Room

Room at southside-3 square
Room
Room (a film)
Room

Room

Through residencies at Southside Studios with Team Effort as well as The Work Room (Tramway) in Glasgow, kloetzel&co. created a site-adaptive solo work that explores climate change, human arrogance, and adaptation. The work has been performed at various venues across the UK, in Canada, and in the U.S. from 2014-17, including at The House at the University of Plymouth, through the IF series with TeamEffort in Glasgow, at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and through the CanDance Network’s REMIX series at Spazio Performativo. Through a REMIX residency, the work also inspired a ‘remixed’ solo that responded to Room; this solo was created by Newfoundland’s Sarah Joy Stoker for Kloetzel and was performed at Spazio Performativo in Edmonton.

Room has also now inspired a a site-adaptive film that received a ‘Creativity Award’ from A Show for a Change Festival. For more information, see Room (a film) in the On Screen section of this website.

Set by Fergus Dunnet, voiceover by Suzanna Ferguson, video by Suzanna Ferguson, Chantal Wall, and Rose Ruane.

Frames in Time

Frames in Time
Frames in Time
Frames in Time
Frames in Time
Frames in Time
Frames in Time
Frames in Time
Frames in Time

Frames in Time

Sponsored by kloetzel&co., the School of Creative and Performing Arts, and cSPACE King Edward, students from the University of Calgary under the direction of Melanie Kloetzel created and presented Frames in Time in partnership with the historic King Edward School in Calgary. One of Calgary’s original sandstone structures that functioned as a school for 89 years, the building has undergone an extensive renovation and opened as the cSPACE arts centre in 2017. The renovated site has preserved many elements of the original architecture and offered a rich dialogue for the performers. Structured as a 1-hour performance tour that addressed issues stemming from military history, gender roles, and the changing nature of childhood, Frames in Time offers audiences a humorous as well as sobering depiction of the site’s historical nuances and layers.