Olive Bieringa & Otto Ramstad

Minnesota
Performance/Choreography/Dance
Olive Bieringa & Otto Ramstad, 2016
Artist in Residence, 2006
www.bodycartography.org

Project Description

“the felt room” is a performance installation enacted by twenty performers designed for an elusively dark gallery. We seek to create an autonomous zone of experience that is not reducible to logic, reason or morality. “the felt room” will engage performers and audiences in a practice of intentional aliveness together.

We want to make a dance that temporally allows for the empathetic impact of the movement to register. We will create a distinctive choreographic language with movement invention that is behavioral, reflexive and personal. Twenty individuals abstracted by darkness will become a mass of thirty bodies breathing, shaking, shunting, spinning, humming, finding stillness, touching. We want audiences to feel, be moved, stay long, shift location, physically participate, return often, and gain agency over time. Collectively swimming in a sea of aliveness we will create the conditions for emergent forms and extraordinary experiences to arise.

Artist Statement

The mission of BodyCartography Project is to engage with the vital materiality of the body. We create dance in urban, domestic, wild, and social landscapes. Our work is rooted in contemporary dance, somatic technique, education, socially engaged practice, and public art. We are deeply invested in the power of live performance to facilitate a re-enchantment of embodiment, relationship, and presence.

Alumni New Works is a project-based award program that supports the cutting edge contemporary creative practices of Headlands Alumni, and provides impactful resources toward the development and completion of a project.