BodyCartography Project is the Minneapolis and Oslo based dance collaboration of Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad, who are partnering with WAM this summer. In celebration of their twentieth anniversary BodyCartography will present four pieces: action movie, the one-on-one collaboration between a dancer and a viewer on a personalized score; felt room, a three-hour spacetime environment built of light, darkness, movement, and soundscapes; Lineage, an embodied narrative of a dancer’s artistic lineage and ancestral heritage; and a collaboration project between somatic movement practitioners, dancers, and UMN medical students on understanding embryonic development.

Traditional performances are mostly structured situations: performers tell a story to viewers, who in turn agree to embrace it as real and suspend their own reality. BodyCartography’s performances are different—creators ask the viewers to embrace their own reality instead of suspending it. Each piece has a unique story, an entry point from which the performance will evolve and viewers are responsible for this evolution as much as the dancers.