Lecture demonstrations are available for all age groups and all abilities. Informal performances and dance film screenings can take place in a variety of settings.
Technique and Compositional workshops
We teach workshops at dance festivals and universities internationally. Any of these workshops can be tailored for integrated groups, people with & without disabilities. Dancing within an integrated dance context empowers participants socially and artistically and can provide a rich resource for our art making practices.
Ecosomatics Classroom
This social sculpture project will create the conditions for a new model of interdisciplinary learning across systems and as a result imagine alternate futures in relationship to the issue of sustainability through behavioral re-patterning. This collective classroom will function to implicate our very cells/selves in how we interact with and understand the environment. Read more.
Site Performance
In our site workshop we invite participants to enter their animal-like appetites and childlike curiosities for physical investigation through engagement of the sensorial body. Working on visual, kinesthetic, tactile and aural levels we aim to articulate the very process of perception and discover the innate composition of the spaces we research and perform in. We will investigate the relationships between body systems and earth system as a way to build empathy and understanding of the planet and to build movement with meaning for ourselves and our communities. We will combine embodied anatomical studies from a Body-Mind Centering® perspective with tools for composing dance.
Dance Video
The principle aim of this workshop is to give an overview of using digital video as a versatile medium within an intensive physical & participatory environment. Through the lens of the camera we will open the dancers eyes to the stage of the screen and lead filmmakers into the world of movement. Coming from a kinesthetic perspective we will use the physical and social landscape to generate video material. We will learn the practical essentials of camera techniques and the physical and perceptual techniques that support them.
Body-Mind Centering®
In this class we will holographically explore the human body to understand self and increase physical potential using tools from Body-Mind Centering® through movement and hands on study. Participants are invited to enter their animal-like appetites and childlike curiosities for physical investigation through engagement of the sensorial body. We will explore embodied anatomy and developmental movement through the systems of the body (e.g. bones, organs, ligaments, fluids, endocrine, nervous system, senses and perception) and investigate how these materials inform our dance and performing practice.
Contact Improvisation
This workshop focuses on how bodies move while in physical contact with each other while focusing on the physical laws that govern motion: mass, gravity, momentum and inertia. It trains the body in heightened sensory awareness, weight bearing partnering skills and improvisation. As a social dance it defines and asserts boundaries of intimacy, trust and self. It is a physical practice in democracy that can be profoundly meditative and acrobatic in the same moment.
Improvisational Composition
We will mine the materials of our bodies to generate material for spontaneous composition. Together we will cultivate a vitality of presence, embodied intelligence, creativity and organization to put guts in our dancing and our mind in our bodies. Articulate perceptual skills and sophisticated bodily thinking are key aspects of our improvisational performance training. Together we will build scores for performing solo, duet and group dances.
Embodied Aerobics
Engaging the body-mind and imagination in a cardiovascular workout that addresses the materials and systems of the body.
In Symptom, twins dancer Otto Ramstad and visual artist Emmett Ramstad, examine the human body, as both an object of study and as a producer of knowledge, investigating notions of social bodies versus biological bodies, communication and the gaps between seeing, knowing and empathy. Symptom explores the slippage between subjective and objective understandings of the human body, where a symptom acts as an indicator, trait, feature, mark or sign that is open for interpretation.
70 min stage work for 3 performers + 12 local performers + composer + installation artist
½ Life investigates the survival of the body amidst a world of scientific research, data, and control. The performance hovers geographically at the edges of the Pacific Ocean - connecting nuclear super power USA, atomic survivor Japan and nuclear free New Zealand. A contemporary ritual to address our dormant nuclear nightmares. Dance and video artists Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad bring together an extraordinary collaborative team including composer and harpist Zeena Parkins, visual artist Emmett Ramstad, physicist Bryce Beverlin II and performer Takemi Kitamura and an ensemble of twelve local dancers.
25 min solo for Otto Ramstad Playing in between scientific observer and empathetic participant, Ramstad teases out distinctions between THE nervous system and HIS nervous system. He is researching how the nervous system spreads a net of attention throughout the body, physically touches all of its substance, and functions as an aggregate of processes. Hello Nervous System is not an anatomical study, but the insistent position that the dancer you see in front of you is first and foremost a person.
On holiday the normal sequence of time unravels. Regular activities, chores and spatial awareness of ordinary places are deconstructed or completely altered. In this space of relaxing (or trying to), perception bends. Reality shifts. An adventure into the domestic space of others that pitches the performers all over the stage, under furniture, over each other and tilting precariously from bicycles. Video is used to geographically locate the piece, move us in time to other locations, provide live feed of hidden live moments and to create life sized video portraits that become dance partners.
75 min site work for 5-7 performers An adventure into the domestic space of others where the audience is invited to travels into spaces throughout the house to witness the performance. They discover performers playing games, delivering lectures on the nature of space and black holes and pitching themselves under furniture, over each other, tilting precariously from bicycles and appearing on televisions wired to surveillance cameras all over the house.
50 min for a public street 3 performers Three simultaneous movement solos that begin at the same point on the streets of your city, take place along three intertwining trajectories and end at the same point for a very small audience. The performers would include Olive Bieringa, Otto Ramstad and a local guest artist. GO is an investigation of the ongoing journey between our inner and outer landscapes and the ecological entwinement of self, other, and environment. The work is an investigation of physical freedom in the urban environment. It is a practice of kinesthetic empathy with the city and its inhabitants.
This work is an experiment in endurance and decay. It is an attempt to track transformative consciousness and the autonomic nervous system. A context in which both active participant and active audience can become aware of their minds activity as they focus on a relatively singular series of events; focus, breath, physical sensation, boredom, sound, excitement, physical discomfort, joy, sweat, exhaustion.
Site and Context Specific Commissions
We have developed numerous site and context specific projects and community commissions since 1998 from intimate solos for the street to large community dance works in train stations or harbors. Some examples include Station/Stationary, GO and the award winning Lagoon.
The BodyCartography Project archive is a comprehensive listing and description of all previous BodyCartography events and performances. The archive is updated regularly to reflect recent events.
