Reality Research Center
& the University of the Arts Helsinki
present

Resisting Extinction

Mustavuori forest, Helsinki, October 10-12, 2025

 

Concept and text: Olive Bieringa
Direction & choreography: Olive Bieringa & Otto Ramstad
Performers: Anu Laiho, Georgie Goater, Mari Pitkänen, Pia Lindy, Otto Ramstad, Olive Bieringa, Sara Le Mela and Sigrid Marie Kittelsaa Vesaas
Song: Luonto kutsunut was written and composed by Pauliina Helle and Diederik Saeijs (lyrics edited by Sara La Mela)
Costume design: Kristine Gjems
Special thanks: Mari Pitkänen, Georgie Goater, Hanna Pajala-Assefa, and biologist Tuomas Lilleberg

Funders: support from Fond For Utøvende Kunstnere, University of the Arts Helsinki, Kulttuuri Helsinki, the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture funded by Nordic Council of Ministers and Taike.

Biographies

Anu Laiho (b.1996, she/they) is a Finnish Dance Artist based in Oslo. They have graduated from KHiO (NO) with a Master’s Degree in Dance (2021) and Arts Academy TUAS (FIN) with a Bachelor’s Degree in Dance and Dance Pedagogics. Strong believer in communities in the freelance field, they are part of the multidisciplinary artist collective Montebøllo, and have previously been part of the board in Montebello Kulturhus (2023) and PRAXIS Oslo (2022-2023). Their artistic work focuses on the self under the gaze of the other, the feminine queer body in the arts and society as well as practices of kinaesthetic clarity. Their works have been shown at Mind the Gap, Scenehuset and Koreografilaboratoriet, Dansens Hus in Norway, and internationally at Impulstanz’s ATLAS Program, Austria and Performing Arts Forum, France. They have hosted workshops and lectures about their artistic work and movement methods at PRAXIS Oslo, PRAXIS Trondheim and the Performing Arts Forum’s Summer University. During their studies and as a freelancer they have worked as a dancer, choreographer and researcher with artists such as BodyCartography Project, Jules Fischer, Hanna Våge Skjeggestad, Lisa Colette Bysheim, Janne-Camilla Lyster, Ingri Fiksdal and Peny Spanou.

Georgie Goater is a dance artist from Aotearoa, currently based in Helsinki. Born and raised in Nagoya and Ōtautahi with her twin brother, she carries Irish-Scottish ancestry.  Over the past two decades, her work has spanned Aotearoa, the UK, and Finland as a performer, choreographer, and facilitator in multidisciplinary performance and pedagogical projects.  Georgie’s dance practice has developed within disability and multicultural contexts, honouring each person’s unique embodied intelligence and perception, activated by relational and feminist perspectives. She has collaborated with Touch Compass (NZ), Kaaos Company (FI), Body Island (NZ), Memory as Medium (FI), and BackLit (NZ), and has performed for numerous choreographers internationally. Her collaborative works have been presented at Zodiak Centre for New Dance, X Dance Festival, Basement Theatre, Tempo Dance Festival, Somewhere Series, Short+Sweet, Yötön Yö Festival, and Feel Helsinki, among others.She holds a BPSA in Contemporary Dance from Unitec (2006) and an MA in Dance Pedagogy from the Theatre Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki (2019).

Mari Pitkänen (FI) is an actor and performing artist, working with applied theater and performance processes. She holds BA and MA degree in Acting (Norwegian Theatre Academy 2018, Fredrikstad, NO) and in Performing Arts (Centria University of Applied Sciences, 2012, FI). Focus of her artistic work is transformations of bodies and their impacts in public spaces. Central aspects of my work are finding ghostly and haunted (hi)stories and voices, and to engage considerate dialogues with non-humans; creating links between peripheral factors; creating spaces, where gender, especially feminine can be renegotiated; and exploring ways of incorporating ’play’ in terms of carnivalesque into artistic practice, also as a way of relating to movement or trauma. This work I realize in various collaborative constellations with artists in the free field and institutions, as well as finding new precarious positions for performing art. My approach is rooted in physical embodied practices, where movement, voice and costume work shape the base for creative encounters. I incorporate theoretical research and narrational tools to create spaces, where performers’ relation to audiences is uncertain and negotiable, and where identities can become many, entangled and fluid instead of affirmed hegemonic truths. My work is concentrated mostly to Norway, and also Finland and Trinidad and Tobago. As an artist I approach carefully considering political, ecological, demographical and artistic aspects of the areas for artistic interventions. She is one of the founding members of Vaara – Performance Art Collective, based in Kajaani, Finland.

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.

Otto Ramstad is a dance artist who makes performances, video works and installations for theaters, galleries, museums and different site and context specific encounters. He has an MA in Choreography from KHiO, Oslo, a BA in Dance, Improvisation, and the Moving Image, from Goddard College, Vermont and is a Certified Teacher of Body-Mind Centering®. He has worked intensively for over twenty years with three primary dance/somatic artists: He assistant teaches for Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, founder of Body-Mind Centering®. Researching and teaching Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores. With Steve Paxton’s contact improvisation and Material for the Spine, which he taught in the exhibitions Steve Paxton: Swimming in Gravity, Brussels and Steve Paxton / Drafting Interior Techniques, Lisbon. He also has taught, amongst many other places, at organizations: Praxis Oslo, Independent Dance, TanzFabrik and ImPulsTanz, companies: Cullberg Ballet and Carte Blanche, universities: KHiO, Oslo; SKH, Stockholm and Yokohama University. His commissions include Lyon Opera Ballet, Walker Art Center and Performance Space New York. He has been featured as a dancer in the work of DD Dorvillier, Miguel Gutierrez, Shelton Mann, Karen Nelson, Lisa Schmitt, Scott Wells, Kitt Johnson and Mia Habib. He is the recipient of an Arbeids Stipendieum from Norsk Kulturrådet for 2021-2024.

Dancer, choreographer Pia Lindy works as an artist in different collaborations and projects in various environments and contexts. Pia is interested in exploring how society is embodied and seen in our bodies, movement, actions and choices. What is art at this time? Lindy´s working, teaching and performing is based on improvisation and site and process-oriented approaches. The latest projects have drawn from experiences, the moving dialogues and the mixing of skills/knowledge between people from different backgrounds and ages.
Sara Le Mela (FI/IT) is a dancer and movement educator specialised in embodied anatomy with an ecosomatic approach. In her work, both as performer and educator, she is curious about how humans can land into an embodied experience of being nature. She is passionate about bringing movement outdoors, into forests and aquatic environments. She is a graduate of the dance program at Outokumpu and has an education in Dance and Somatics from Eastern Finland Sport Institute. She has been creating danceshortfilms on evolutive movement and has taught ecosomatics in various festivals and courses. Her background in contemporary dance, somatic methods and manual therapy shapes her approach to movement as a living, breathing dialogue with the body and its biological and cultural surroundings. She aims at co-creating inclusive and encouraging learning spaces for movement that forster deep listening and kinesthetic empathy towards ourselves and all life forms as well as building trust in the inherent non-verbal intelligence of bodies.

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