Choreographer/Director/Performer/Producer
Olive Bieringa is a dance maker, somatic movement educator and therapist, and cultural producer who grew up in Wellington, New Zealand. She studied at the European Dance Development Center in the Netherlands and completed her MFA in Performance and New Media from Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY. She is a certified Body-Mind Centering® teacher and certified DanceAbility teacher, working with performers of all abilities.
Choreographer/Performer
Otto Ramstad holds a BA in Dance, Improvisation, and the Moving Image, from Goddard College and is a Certified Teacher of Body-Mind Centering(r). He has been featured in the work of DD Dorvillier, Miguel Gutierrez, Shelton Mann, Karen Nelson, Lisa Schmitt, Scott Wells, and Kitt Johnson. Ramstad’s solo work has been performed in Denmark, Finland, England, Paris, New Zealand, Italy, and around the US. He is a recipient of the 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, the 2010 McKnight Foundation Fellowship, a 2006 Archibald Bush Artist Fellowship, and a two-time DanceWeb Scholarship recipient at Impulstanz. He was also nominated for a Rolex Protégé Award in 2007. Together with Olive, Ramstad was an artist in residence at Carleton College 2016–17.
felt room Performers
Emma Barber is a dance artist living and working in Minneapolis. Emma likes to engage with the doers, makers, and thinkers of the Minneapolis performance scene and has worked with BodyCartography Project, Morgan Thorson, HIJACK, Maggie Bergeron, Samantha Johns, Mad King Thomas, TU Dance, and Ananya Chatterjea. She graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BFA in Dance, where she was active in performance and administrative roles.
Sarah Baumert, native to Nebraska, received a BFA in dance from the University of Minnesota in 2002. Sarah has worked as a contemporary dancer with choreographers Xavier LeRoy, Emily Johnson, Sarah Smith, Daniel McCusker, and The Body Cartography Project, among others. As a somatics educator, she has held teaching positions at the Harvard, MIT, the University of Minnesota, and the Saint Paul Conservatory. As a performer, Sarah Baumert worked with many artists of different aesthetics and practices including, Xavier LeRoy, Nell Breyer, Steve Paxton, Sarah Smith, Gabrielle Revlock, Body Cartography, Emily Johnson, and ARENA dances. She teaches dance at the University of Minnesota, has a private yoga practice in Minneapolis, and is currently training to be a Feldenkrais practitioner.
Maurya Kerr is a choreographer, educator, performer, and the artistic director of tinypistol, where her choreographic work has been honored by numerous awards, grants, and commissions. She is an ODC artist-in-residence (2015–18), and completed her MFA through Hollins University in 2016, writing her thesis on people of color and their access to, or prohibition from, wonderment. She most recently performed with The Foundry, and as a member of The Hard Corps, a year-long engagement with performance artist Julie Tolentino and three other bay area artists. In spring of 2017, in response to the election and her own need to engage in liberatory and cathartic practices, she helped inaugurate the tiny little get down, a quarterly dance party intended to defiantly and subversively fortify otherness through embodied joy and the power of the collective.
Julie Tolentino is a multidisciplinary artist who creates durational performance and movement-based installation. Tolentino was the originator of the Clit Club, a member of ACT UP and affinity groups House of Color and Art Positive, and is current co-editor for The Drama Review (TDR), MIT Press. Her practice explores movement, object-making, writing, mediation, and collaborative engagements.
Anna Martine Whitehead is a Chicago-based transdisciplinary artist interested in the body as material, as signal, as archive. She has been presented by venues across North America and Europe including Hyde Park Art Center; Watts Towers Art Center; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; and the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. She has contributed significantly to projects by the Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, Onye Ozuzu, Jefferson Pinder, Taisha Paggett, Thomas Teurlais, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, BodyCartography Project, and Julien Prévieux, among others. Martine has written for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, Art Practical, and Frieze, and contributed chapters to a range of publications including Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance (Oxford, 2017). She is a grant recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).
Arwen Wilder is half of the choreographic collaboration HIJACK with Kristin Van Loon. Van Loon and Wilder grew up in Chicago, met at Colorado College, and established their collaboration in Minneapolis in 1993. HIJACK’s roots are in a liberal arts setting isolated in the mountains laid the foundation for experimentation, invention without precedent, and making dance out of everything but dance. HIJACK has taught and performed in New York (at DTW, PS122, HERE ArtCenter, Catch/Movement Research Festival, La Mama, Dixon Place, Chocolate Factory), Japan, Russia, Central America, Ottawa, Chicago, Colorado, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, at Fuse Box Festival in Austin Texas, and Bates Dance Festival in Maine. In Minneapolis, HIJACK enjoys long relationships with Bedlam Theatre (as regulars at Romps), Red Eye Collaborations (as part of their Critical Core), Zenon Dance School (Wednesday morning Contact Improv class since 2000), and Bryant Lake Bowl (HIJACK’s 1996 “Take Me To Cuba” was the venue’s first ever dance concert).
action movie Performers
Joy Cosculluela is a somatic educator, choreographer, and performing artist. Cosculluela is artistic director of Wayfinding Performance Group, a multicultural ensemble in San Francisco. She has created full-length dance-theatre works Homing Devices and All that Remains, and presented at NOH Space, Z Below, Foolsfury, and has collaborated with many Bay Area artists. Cosculluela holds an MFA interdisciplinary arts from Goddard College and is core faculty at Tamalpa Institute in Kentfield, CA.
Margit Galanter is a movement investigator and dance poet living in Berkeley, California. Over the past several years she has been developing both Cave Forms, which is a transdiciplinary dance project, and a vivid grove for moving and learning, which is vehicle for movement inquiry based in cultural practice, collective liberation, and nourishing life.
Rebecca Hasaltine has worked in several media over the past thirty years. She has shown her work extensively and has worked collaboratively with dancers, composers, and filmmakers. Hasaltine has had a studio at the Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco for over twenty-five years. She also is a certified Somatic Movement Therapist and does bodywork and movement education with children and adults.
Justin Jones has created work for choreographers Ivy Baldwin, Chris Schlichting, and Chris Yon. His choreography has been presented in across Minneapolis and NYC. He has danced with BodyCartography Project, Morgan Thorson, Karen Sherman, and was a member of Tere O’Connor Dance Co. from 2001–4.
Diana Lara is a choreographer, dancer, and somatic therapist from Honduras. She graduated from the choreography program of the Center for Research and Choreography at the Mexican Institute of Fine Arts, the Somatic Research and Participatory Arts program at Moving-on-Center in Oakland, and the Body-Mind Centering® (BMC) certification program in developmental movement. She teaches BMC, and contact classes in the Bay Area. She has choreographed and performed for twenty years in dance groups in Mexico, Honduras, and the Bay Area.
Kevin CK Lo is a composer, choreographer, writer, and artist born in New Zealand and based in Oakland. His work utilizes instruments, digital sound processing, and generative programming environments to examine spatial and auditory sensitivities, topological structure, and audience kinesthesia. His work has been presented internationally, including at the Soundwave Biennial (Gray Area, San Francisco) and Real Future Fair (Oakland Museum of California).
Karen Schaffman (PhD) is a dance artist, professor, program director, curator, and Feldenkrais Practitioner. She has collaborated in works by/with BodyCartography Project, Anya Cloud, Eric Geiger, Deborah Hay (FIRE, SPCP, 1999), Kristine Diekman, Jon LeFan, LIVE, Lower Left, Sara Shelton Mann, Nina Martin, Mary Peterson, Peter Pleyer, Leslie Seiters, and Nancy Stark Smith. Since 2001, Schaffman has been running the Dance Studies Program at California State University, San Marcos.
