Photo Marta Rozanska
Resisting Extinction program
Passage Festival 2025
Concept: Olive Bieringa
Direction & choreography: Olive Bieringa & Otto Ramstad
Costume design: Kristine Gjems
Performers: Angelika Mizińska, Daniel Persson, Dorte Bjerre Jensen, Joanna Kalm, Marelene Bonnesen, Olive Bieringa and Sigrid Marie Kittelsaa Vesaas
Special thanks to the whole Passage Festival team and Andreas Jarløv Busch
Funders: Made possible with support from PAHN, The Fund for Performing Artists, Norway and Perform Europe, who is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union and implemented by a consortium of six organisations: IETM – International network for contemporary performing arts, European Festivals Association (EFA), Circostrada, European Dance Development Network, Pearle * – Live Performance Europe and IDEA Consult.
Biographies
Angelika Mizińska (PL) is a dance artist, researcher, and educator whose work is rooted in somatics, dance improvisation, and choreography. She explores how imagination and creativity can open new ways of responding to the ecological crisis—interweaving embodied, sensorial, and movement experiences with the evolutionary intelligence of life on Earth. Drawing inspiration from nature’s adaptive strategies, she investigates models of coexistence within the web of life, grounded in dignity, diversity, regeneration, and resistance to oppressive systems. Her artistic curiosity manifests in a wide range of educational and artistic activities, and in collaborative, socio-politically engaged ways of thinking and working. She holds a BA (Hons) in Dance and Performance from Coventry University (UK), studied on a scholarship at the University of Illinois (USA), and attended Viljandi Culture Academy (Estonia). Additionally, she earned a degree in Contemporary Culture from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Angelika is a certified Somatic Movement Educator in Body-Mind Centering® and is currently continuing her training in the Practitioner Programme at Moveus (Germany). She collaborates with the Nurt Foundation and Nowy Teatr and is a member of the Centrum w Ruchu collective. In 2024, she launched Ecosomatic Artistic Practices, a project combining education, art, and ecological activism. https://linktr.ee/angiemizinska
Daniel Jeremiah Persson (SE/KR) is a Swedish-Korean dancer and choreographer based in Malmö, Sweden since 2018, holding a BA (Honors) Degree from London Contemporary Dance School (2011-2014). Daniel has performed in numerous works, spanning from site-specific performances (Tate Modern, British Museum, Statens Museum fur Kunst, Kivik Art Center, etc.) to blackbox dancetheatre pieces (MDT, Palladium, Robin Howard Dance Theatre, etc.). He has worked with choreographers/companies such as: MYKA, Body Cartography, ENT, Bobbi Lo Produktion, ENT, Khamlane Halsackda & Maria Stamenkovic Herranz, Joan Jonas, AdeY, KASPERSOPHIE (& Martin Forsberg) to mention a few. In his choreographic work he explores themes on gender- and intercultural identity with a focus greyzone-perspectives/in-betweenness. The pieces are often investigated through the use of costume-, set- and lighting design and text in symbiosis with dance/movement.
Danish artist Dorte Bjerre Jensen’s work is anchored in an evolving artistic inquiry into multisensory relations of ecological attention through the moving sensing bodymind. DBJ’s artistic productions include performative scores as live art installations,workshops,labs,hybrid immersive performances and writing. DBJ holds a Master in Fine Arts from the Danish National School of Performing Arts, and is currently an artist and a PhD student at UC Davis Performance Studies. Her works Sharing Perspectives and INviteME have been published in Frontiers in Psychology and Performance Research Journal.
Joanna Kalm (EST/SE) is an artist-researcher engaged in contemporary dance and somatic embodiment practice. Currently enrolled in the Doctoral programme at Estonian Academy of Arts, she is focused on developing artistic approaches founded upon somatic co-self-regulation in the context of participatory (performance) spaces. She interlaces her practice with readings on cellular biology, consciousness theories and ethodiversity.
Marlene Bonnesen is an Oslo-Copenhagen based dancer and performer. She holds a BA in dance and choreography from The Danish National School of Performing Arts in Copenhagen (2015), and an MA in Dance from The National Academy of The Arts in Oslo (2023). She has toured and performed in works by Angéls Margarit (ES), fieldworks (BE/NO), recoil performance group (DK), GAZART (DK), Ellen Jerstad (NO), UTVIK/BARFOD (NO), Max Wallmeier (DK/DE) and Naya Moll (DK). Furthermore, she is making her own work together with the Norwegian dancer Emilie Marie Karlsen. She is a co-founder of the dance collective Danseatelier in Copenhagen which is a space to work, host workshops, festivals, and develop artistic ideas and concepts through a collective lens. In 2025 she was the Rehearsal Director of the Swedish company, Norrdans. With a strong interest in exploring what it means to work as a dancer, she is finding ways of working ‘inside-out’ through bodily exploration and physical exhaustion, and she enjoys facilitating and embodying other people’s choreographic ideas.
Olive Bieringa (NZ/NO) works at the intersection of creative practice and pedagogy in dance, performance, somatics and media. Together with Otto Ramstad as the BodyCartography Project their artistic practice cultivates approaches to support our collective evolution in this moment of planetary crisis. She holds a BA in Dance from European Dance Development Center in the Netherlands and an MFA in Performance and New Media at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY. She is a doctoral candidate at Uniarts, Helsinki. She is Certified Movement Therapist (ISMETA), and Infant Developmental Movement Educator®, Body-Mind Centering® Teacher and is Program Director of Somatic Education Australasia. Since 2018 she works on the board of PRAXIS Oslo as a curator and producer for the local dance and performance community.
Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad have been collaborating as BodyCartography Project since 1998. Our artistic practice cultivates approaches 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, co-creating live experiences to generate re-enchantment, relationship, and presence through somatics, dance, choreography and performance. 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.
Sigrid Kittelsaa Vesaas from Vinje, Norway, trained as a dance artist at Skolen for Samtidsdans. She works as a freelance dancer in her own projects and in collaboration with other artists. She recently worked and works as a performer in projects with choreographers as fieldworks(Avdal/Shinozaki) and BodyCartography Project, director Ludvig Uhlbors and architect and artist Julie Barfod. Vesaas is also involved as a dance artist in new art projects with film-maker Aleksander Andreassen, and the artist group in The Molecular Ballet. And she finishes her Masters in Dance at Oslo Academy of the Arts spring 2026