Ecosomatic practices for dying and decomposing workshop with Olive Bieringa

In this workshop we will explore practices from BodyCartography’s performance work Resisting Extinction.

Resisting Extinction seeks to generate new practices for living and dying together on, in and with a damaged Earth. This work unfolds as an ongoing, iterative process through participatory, site-sensitive and trans-temporal performances in forests and along bodies of water. This research is part of Olive's doctoral work at the Theater department at the University of the Arts Helsinki. 

In this workshop we will practice warm up and practice weather walks, a one-on-one performance journey through the landscape. What begins as small talk about the weather transforms into a meaningful exchange about the climate crisis. As we walk, we draw on tools from dance, somatics, philosophy, and ecology to open perception and embodied relational awareness. weather walk invites participants into an immersive encounter, a potential state of falling into awe and connection.

This will be followed by a collective dying and decomposing practice to prepare for different climate scenarios, a physiological journey into the land or sea. 

Olive Bieringa is an artist and movement therapist working at the intersection of social and creative practice and pedagogy. She is Certified Movement Therapist (ISMETA), Infant Developmental Movement Educator® and Body-Mind Centering® Teacher and Program Director of Somatic Education Australasia. 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 the Theatre Academy, Uniarts Arts, Helsinki. She founded BodyCartography in 1997 in San Francisco with Otto Ramstad.