Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad have been collaborating as BodyCartography Project since 1998.
Our artistic work cultivates approaches and tools with somatics, dance, and choreography to support our collective evolution in this moment of planetary crisis. We engage with the vital materiality of bodies, minds, and the more than human world, to co-create live experiences to generate re-enchantment, relationship, and presence.
Through workshops, choreographies and performances, films, installations and festivals we create participatory spaces for collective imaginings for diverse publics, often beyond the usual institutional frameworks and spaces of dance production.
Over the past twenty six years BodyCartography’s offerings have functioned to deepen the conversation in dance, somatic practice and site work, to give value to other ways of experiencing and making dance. Movement research, somatic and improvisational practice inform the ground of our dance-making and teaching practice. Somatic practice, specifically Body-Mind Centering®, is an integrated and embodied approach to movement, the body and consciousness. We are certified teachers of Body-Mind Centering® working internationally.
We are supported and inspired by the work of our mentors Steve Paxton, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, and Lisa Nelson. We teach their work as a way of care-taking these lineages.
Our work is featured in many publications including the first two books about site dance internationally: Site Dance, the Lure of Alternative Spaces and Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance published by Routledge.
Upcoming highlights include our Resisting Extinction tour to Poland, Cyprus and Denmark in 2025 with the support of Perform Europe. Our 2024 pitch for Resisting Extinction as part of Norway Now 2024, presented by The Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York & Performing Arts Hub Norway. Our 2023 performances of Resisting Extinction in New Zealand and Estonia. Our 2022 residency and performance of Resisting Extinction at SITE, Sweden. Our performances and residency for “a collection of fluid spaces” at the Norwegian Technical Museum, Oslo. Our 2020 performance of Lineage at the Oslo Teater Festival. In 2018 our work Follow was acquired by Te Papa Tongarewa National Museum of New Zealand, the first intangible dance acquisition for their permanent collection. Also in 2018 our works felt room, Lineage and action movie were presented at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Early works have been commissioned, presented and supported by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis International Film Festival, Minnesota Public Television, Minneapolis; American Realness, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research, Dance on Camera Festival, NYC; TBA/Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts; Anti-Festival, Finland; Stromereien Festival, Zurich; Lyon Opera Ballet, Lyon; South East Dance, Cheshire Dance, UK; NZ International Film Festival, New Zealand; Cinedans, Amsterdam; Polish Public Television, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Tallahassee; Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin; K3, Hamburg; Les Subsistances, Lyon; amongst others.