Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad have been collaborating as BodyCartography Project since 1998.
We engage with the vital materiality of our bodies and minds and the more than human world to co-create live experiences that generate re-enchantment, relationship, and presence. Our artistic work cultivates tools from somatics, dance, and choreography that support our collective evolution in this moment of planetary crisis.
Through workshops, choreographies and performances, films, installations and festivals we create participatory spaces for collective imaginings for diverse publics, often beyond the usual institutional frameworks and spaces of dance production.
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. Somatic practice, specifically Body-Mind Centering®, is an integrated and embodied approach to movement, the body and consciousness. We are certified teachers of Body-Mind Centering® working internationally.
We are supported and inspired by the work of our mentors Steve Paxton, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, and Lisa Nelson. We teach their work as a way of care-taking these lineages.
Our work is featured in many publications including the first two books about site dance internationally: Site Dance, the Lure of Alternative Spaces and Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance published by Routledge.
Our work has been commissioned, presented and supported by SITE, Sweden, Norsk Teknisk Museum, DansiT, Trondheim, Oslo International Teater Festival, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis International Film Festival, Minnesota Public Television, Minneapolis; American Realness, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research, Dance on Camera Festival, NYC; TBA/Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts; Anti-Festival, Finland; Stromereien Festival, Zurich; Lyon Opera Ballet, Lyon; South East Dance, Cheshire Dance, UK; NZ International Film Festival, New Zealand; Cinedans, Amsterdam; Polish Public Television, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Tallahassee; Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin; K3, Hamburg; Les Subsistances, Lyon; amongst others.