Resisting Extinction program
Warsaw, June 21 & 22
Credits
Concept: Olive Bieringa
Direction & choreography: Olive Bieringa & Otto Ramstad
Costume design: Kristine Gjems
Performers: Angelika Mizińska, Nieszka Bogusławska, Tere Więcko, Bartłomiej Mikuła, Kasia Stankiewicz, Maria Lothe, Otto Ramstad and Olive Bieringa
Funders: Made possible with support from PAHN, the Directorate of Culture, Norway and Perform Europe, who is supported by the European Union, and is a funding scheme for the European performing arts sector. It facilitates international networking and supports inclusive, diverse, and eco-friendly touring projects across the 40 Creative Europe countries. Perform Europe emphasizes practices rooted in sustainability and inclusivity, aiming to transform the performing arts sector and ensure a balanced distribution across the continent. Perform Europe 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
Katarzyna Stankiewicz is a Berlin-based performer and interdisciplinary theater maker. She graduated with a degree in European Theater Arts from the Rose Bruford College of Theater and Performance in London, combining it with studies in Physical Theater at the Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático in Madrid. After her studies she moved to Wrocław where she collaborated with the Grotowski Institute. It was in Wrocław that her adventure with somatic work began through various courses and contact improvisation classes. Kasia co-organized two editions of ‘Songs to Heal Wrocław’, in which polyphonic songs entered into dialogue with the current climatic situation. During this time she also completed a one-year Body Mind Centering course in Warsaw deepening her movement practice. She is currently in the process of working on her latest project, which will premiere in Yorkshire, England in 2025. This project explores the Brontë writers’ relationship with the landscape of the north of England paying particular attention to the impact of the drenched moors and vast fields in shaping the writers’ sensibilities.
Agnieszka Bogusławska is the Vice-President of the Nurt Foundation, project coordinator, dance artist, therapist, educator. She deals with dance improvisation, performative activities, co-creates interdisciplinary and research projects. Her artistic practice draws on, among others, in Body-Mind Centering®, ecosomatics, somatic psychology, posthumanist ethics and feminism. She is interested in working with process, local contexts and communities, death, social change, incorporating touch and sensory as an artistic channel and artistic research around identity in the context of worldview changes and the climate crisis. Member of the international experimental collective as part of the Soliloquy project co-financed by Pro Helvetia Swiss Art Council and the City of Szczecin. Co-creator of the artistic and research project Formy Płynne (hydrofemiznim/somatics/performance). She is training as part of certification programs in the Body-Mind Centering® approach and Bodynamic® somatic psychotherapy.
Teresa Więko is a multidisciplinary artist, improviser, photographer, educator, bodyworker. In 2022, she completed a six-month dance residency in the United States at Oberlin College in Ohio. She studied various techniques of somatic bodywork, including Thai Massage, the Ilan Lev method and Body Mind Centering. She also completed a one-year course at the Institute of Dance and Movement Therapy. She is developing her own practice of intuitive body and voice work. She is involved in activist activities for the education of equality and social justice. She works with the topics of returning to nature, decentralization of man in the ecosystem and with the queer community.
Bartłomiej Mikuła is a movement and voice artist who explores the polyphony of the body and its relationship with the environment in his projects. He has collaborated with international artists and institutions, and his work focuses on site-specific and somatic practices, engaging the audience in the exploration of space and sound. His skills in movement and voice enrich the project with new artistic perspectives and interactive experiences.
Angelika Mizińska 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
Maria Lothe is a dance artist, working as a mover, maker and producer. She has a two year degree from Skolen for samtidsdans (The School for New Dance) in Oslo and a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Dance from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. As a performer, Maria has been working within dance, theatre and performance art, with companies/artists such as Martin Creed, What’s Coming out of the Box, BitterSuite Company, Livia Rita and the Bicycle Ballet Company, and performed in venues such as The Twist Museum, The Royal Opera House London, Rich Mix, Roundhouse, Royal Academy of the Arts, Whitechapel Gallery and has toured across the UK. She has also been a member of Backspace Collective. Her work often involves questions around climate change and our relationship to nature. Her work has been shown in venues such as The Place, Chisenhale Dance Space, Turner Contemporary, Ugly Duck, Røros Museet, Galleri TM51, Ælvespeilet, Norsk Skogmuseum and Musea i Nord-Østerdalen. She performs with STICKY, Karstein Solli, amongst others.
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.
Olive Bieringa 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 curater 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.