by AMY BARRATT

We had scheduled a phone interview for 10 a.m. The hour came and went with no word from Lin Snelling. Artists, I muttered to myself. An apologetic Snelling finally called at quarter to one. She got hung up, she explained. Literally.

The show that Snelling is collaborating on with Nathalie Claude, Limbes/Limbo, opening tonight at Usine C, involves interacting with all of the theatre machinery that is usually hidden from view. At the appointed time of our interview, Snelling was stuck in mid-air on an apparatus that refused to budge. Okay, good excuse.

Claude and Snelling, both actor-dancer-choreographers, have worked together frequently over the years with companies like Carbone 14, Pigeons International and Momentum, which is co-producing this piece. Limbes/Limbo, subtitled An homage to Samuel Beckett, is based on a short poetic prose work by Alberta-born, Paris-based author Nancy Huston.

The bilingual Huston was the subject of controversy in literary circles a decade ago when her novel Cantique des plaines won a Governor General's Award for fiction in French. Some complained that it was nothing more than a translation of her English novel Plainsong, but Huston insisted it was a separate work.

Limbes/Limbo was published as a chapbook with the "same" text (Huston would probably argue that a text is never the same once it switches languages) in English and French on alternating pages.

It's not surprising that this writer, with her English and French "selves", has a particular appeal to Montreal artists.

"Nathalie and I live in both languages," says Snelling, "and we love that." In the piece, each woman speaks in her mother tongue, representing the two halves of the writer's self.

It's not difficult to see why Huston would feel an affinity for Samuel Beckett, who was born in Dublin but lived in Paris and chose to write primarily in French. The text is, by all accounts, very Beckettian in tone.

"It questions everything," Snelling says, in life and in art. "It's really about that moment, that place before something begins. All the doubts we have as artists: why do it at all?" That, of course, is the "limbo" of the title: a place of nothingness which can be either full of possibilities, or a terrifying void.

The initial work on the piece was done during a residency at Usine C last summer, and consisted of finding out what the bare space could do.

There is no conventional set; instead everything is stripped bare and used in unconventional ways. Expect to see the performers balanced atop lighting grids and swinging from curtains.

Once they knew what the physical possibilities were, they began to incorporate the text. Snelling describes the process as "taking what the theatre offers us" and "creating the outside first." Even the soundscape was created out of ambient sounds in the theatre.

It seems entirely appropriate that an homage to Beckett would inevitably find its way on to the stage. All that remains to be seen is whether Huston's prose can rise to the Beckettian challenge of holding an audience's attention on a piece in which nothing concrete happens. And whether the performers can return to terra firma when it's all over.

LImbes/Limbo runs Jan. 15–24 at Usine C
(1345 Lalonde), 521-4493

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