Presenters

Artist talk: Olive Bieringa’s artistic research questions how tools from dance, choreographic and somatics can support our collective evolution in this moment of planetary crisis. As we practice our becoming can we also practice our dying and decomposing? How should we grieve our own potential extinction? These questions will be scrutinized through artistic practice that attempts to rebuild our relational field to conjure new narratives of embodiment. For many of us, embryogenesis (the development and formation of our embryonic selves from conception through the first ten weeks of life), and death are hidden from view, unknown, barely recognizable, even forgotten, and yet they are universal experiences. A goal of the research is to make what is often perceived as a complex, irrelevant, or unconscious body of knowledge more tangible in the public imagination in order to reshape our understanding of our embodied subjectivities. Her research evolves from two iterative site responsive performance works. The first , ‘ a collection of fluid spaces” engages with embodied embryology in medical museums. The second “Resisting Extinction” addresses our dying, decomposing and extinction in a time of ecological crisis through intimate performances along waterfronts in different communities. 

Workshop: Ecosomatic practices for living or dying on a damaged earth. In this workshop we will offer practices for living and dying together on a damaged earth. Together we will practice living, breathing, sensing, perceiving, digesting, dying, and decomposing to help us perceive more of the whole scale of the sensitivities and intelligences within us, the human and non-human, the transforming spaces, the before and after.

Olive Bieringa is a dance, performance and visual artist working at the intersection of social and creative practice, pedagogy, and healing. She is a teacher, and practitioner of Body-Mind Centering and a program director of Somatic Education Australasia. She collaborates for almost 25 years with Otto Ramstad as the BodyCartography Project whose mission is to engage with the vital materiality of our bodies and minds to create live performance that facilitates a re-enchantment of embodiment, relationship, and presence. She is a doctoral candidate at the Theatre Academy, Uniarts Arts, Helsinki.