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6 Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad are directors of the BodyCartography Project, a site-specific dance and improvisation company based in Minneapolis . Since 1997, the BodyCartography Project has created more than 150 performance events in sites from Russia to Japan to New Zealand. Investigating lagoons, city sidewalks, and mountaintops, Bieringa and Ramstad ’s ventures tease out the distinctions between private/public and urban /wild through workshops, performances, site films, and installations. Their works have received awards in the United States, New Zealand, and Europe, and they were recently featured on the BBC for their work with Cheshire Dance and Crewe Station. Bieringa and Ramstad were named 2008 Public Art Saint Paul Sustainable Arts Fellows and the Project has enjoyed support from the Archibald Bush Foundation, Multi-Arts Production Fund, Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Creative New Zealand, and Forecast Public Artworks. Pavlik interviewed Bieringa and Ramstad on September 7, 2005. An Interview with Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad CP: Is site-specific an appropriate term to describe your work? OB: We have played with the terminology a lot trying to decide whether we want to call our work site-specific or place-based or various other things. It keeps coming back to site-specific because it is a term that is the most accessible or known. When I make something that is site-specific, it is really generated from that site. It is not something I could just do in any outdoor locale. I could make something in a bus stop and perform it in a train station, for example , but that for me is not site-specific. I would call that location-specific. I think the term site-specific means different things to different people and that for many people it includes the historical aspect of the site. Our practice has been very physical and very present. Even if we do read about the history of a site, our process is not about reenacting or illustrating that history. Our prac- 126 Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad tice has been about what is here right now in this space and how we respond to it. We generate material from that point, although history does provide us with a wider context for awareness. OR: I would also say that our site-specific work is about using the space we are in, in that moment. But I don’t feel we need to impose a reductionist view on other people’s ideas of site work. I was in a festival in Duluth called Dances on the Lake Walk that was set in a rose garden. Many of the companies chose to work on the flat lawn so that they could bring pieces they created in the studio. To me, those pieces were not really site-specific. They were just pieces performed on a lawn. I have never thought about this before, but I guess that work could be site-specific in a bourgeois, high art, rose garden way. [Chuckles] In fact, many of the pieces were like the garden itself, cultured and ordered. But we used the actual environment when we did our piece. CP: What attracts you to making site work? OB: For me, there are many layers that draw me outside. I think initially there was a desire not to be making art in the commodified context of a theater . There I would have had to spend my time and energy on publicity and trying to get people to come and see the work. But if I perform out in a public place, then I can expose my work to a whole new audience. All my energy can go to the art making rather than the production and publicity aspects. If, early on, I had the ambition to produce a saleable product to be noticed by the media or by the dance hierarchy, then I probably would have made more work in the theater. But once I started to do site work, I realized that I was so engaged and inspired to work in the public realm. It is still exciting for me to figure out how to generate and frame work out in the world in different kinds of environments . That act of framing and collecting material from the places we work has become the source material for much of our work. CP: Speakingofframing,IknowthattheBodyCartographyProjecthascreated a number of dance films on site. Can you talk about your first film venture? OR: The first...

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