What the critics are saying…

Performance works

Holiday House stage work

"It’s always nice when nothing much happens in a piece and yet you’ve acquired some concentrated sense of emotional truth. “Holiday House” works by a gradual accumulation of apparently arbitrary activities and by its strange air of drugged calm."

"Otto Ramstad and Olive Bieringa make clever use of the doubling power of video..."

Roslyn Suclas, New York Times 2009

"We are treated to unobstructed views of a cast of extraordinary movers. Quicksilver Olive Bieringa attacks space with power and agility. Dustin Haug’s virtuoso duet with a red bicycle is reason enough to leave home on a cold night: frantically twisting the front wheel, Haug balances on the seat and jerks at the handlebars, then repeatedly crashes into the set while remaining upright."

Mary Hodges, Brooklyn Rail, 2009

Holiday House site work

"The pleasure of viewing is so intense here, so fun as to be nearly guilty...what you see is at once brilliantly planned - lighting, angles, perspectives clear as cinema - and breakneck. The movement feels dangerously unhinged."

Lightsey Darst, MSP magazine 2008


“These performers could just as easily run rampant through your house, upending your best-laid plans, haunting your dreams… With sly wit and subtle socio-political commentary, the BodyCartography Project revealed the teeming chaos within the shadows of even the happiest home.”

Caroline Palmer, City Pages 2008

1/2 Life

“Even more visually stunning was Half Life, a powerful dance work by the BodyCartography Project, which utilized subtle sound design, video, and a battery of acoustic “instruments.” Crinkly plastic body suits and intricately choreographed, rumbling fiberboard panels coalesced into structures, gestures and slowly developing scenes of tense calm and silent impact.”

Justin Schell, mnartists.org, 2008

Lagoon

'“It has high visual impact and offers a series of images that can seem like the eye’s equivalent of Haiku…”

Jennifer Shennan, Evening Post, New Zealand, 2002

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“This was not lighthearted stuff, but singularly emotional, and moving.”

Jeffrey Kalstrom, mnartists.org, 2006

Dance film works

Holiday House

"Hoilday House," however, is in a class by itself as the sort of gift that comes not once a year but rarely…. as if an experimental Maya Deren film had been spooked by "The Evil Dead."

Rob Nelson, Minn Post, 2008

Dry Wash

“In a series of slowly accumulating images, it presented a vision of individual and communal  struggle set against a gorgeous, unforgiving and quintessentially Western landscape.”

Jennifer de Poyendate, The San Diego Union Tribune,  2005