Otto Ramstad (USA), 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.
His current work Circling the Line asks: What passes between generations? Between countries? What lands in our bodies? How have our embodied relationships to the ideas of ‘land’ and ‘nature’ transformed through time?
He collaborates with his 13 year old daughter Uma Rabbit to work together with matrilineal family lineage and extend this notion of family to ecosystems and mother earth. They share creative and embodied ways of processing what it is to be a human being in this rapidly changing time; using ‘personal’ story telling as a portal into interrogate universal conditions of what it means to be connected across time and through difference.
This collaboration is a continuation of Ramstad’s research from Lineage, which was presented at KHiO 2019 and Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival 2020. With artistic genealogical research as a backdrop, he and Uma will move from looking at the past in the present to looking from the present to the future.
He is the recipient of an Arbeids Stipendieum from Norsk Kulturrådet for 2021-2024.