Interview of Olive Bieringa by Anouk Llaurens
Anouk Llaurens: Hi Olive, thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions. Can you please start by situating yourself today ?
Olive Bieringa: I'm a dance maker, improviser, Body Mind Centering® practitioner, teacher and program director. I did my initial dance training in the Netherlands. I grew up in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I came to dance through improvisation, release technique and somatic practice. I would position myself now as being someone who's still engaged with all of those things, and is making performance work that is being produced on the peripheries of the production world of dance. I'm also teaching a lot of Body Mind Centering® in dance contexts. I'm in the middle of an artistic research doctorate at the University of the Arts in Helsinki working with ideas coming from embryology and ecosomatics. I am looking at things that are in our non-conscious, unconscious, dark underside shadow of awareness, asking what would change for us by bringing those into a larger cultural conversation.
I was introduced to Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores by Karen Nelson and K. J. Holmes in the Netherlands during my dance education at The European Dance Development Center (1991-1995). They were both active members of Image Lab. We tuned a lot within their month-long workshop. I was exposed to Lisa’s writings in Contact Quarterly. Then I had the experience of her performing at EDDC. A fellow student and I volunteered to interview every guest teacher that came through that first year in 1991 for a larger interview series that Peter Hulton was conducting. We sat with Lisa until late into the evening. And I was just so struck by her presence, thinking and articulation. It made such a big impact on me, and as soon as I could I found a way to study with her. Tuning Scores became so pivotal for me. It became so much the ground of how I was thinking and practising composing and sense making.
I graduated from the EDDC and headed off to explore the West Coast of the USA, Vancouver, San Francisco and Seattle where I joined the Skinner Releasing training and Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance and Improvisation before returning to New Zealand for a year.
Back in New Zealand (1995-1996), I started to play with the Tuning Score practice outside, in public spaces. It created the ground for what would become the BodyCartography Project [1]. It created a community of movers of all abilities, a language, and a way by which we could build ensemble performances in public spaces very quickly. This was years before there were flash mobs or other outdoor dance spectacles. We were working outside in different kinds of public spaces with Tuning Scores, which offered a very pragmatic toolkit. This was a quick way that people could drop in, even those new to dance. This would normally take many hours of working together in the studio to build such comfort and communication to cultivate a shared aesthetic. And over time they would fall deeper inside of the practices.
I think also this conversation between Lisa's work and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s work began to impact me indirectly. I hadn't studied Body Mind Centering® directly during my dance education but had been working a lot with Eva Kaczag who was very influenced by Bonnie’s work. So after a while, I started to realise that there was this kind of appetite to go more deeply into Body Mind Centering®. Still to this day, I feel that the conversation between Lisa and Bonnie is there through all the eyes closed work, the development of the senses, and specifically between touch and movement.
I feel like almost every time I teach a new group of people, there's something that I have to articulate around proprioception, kinesthesia as a ground for all of our other sensory capacities, and especially our eyes being the last sense to develop. That’s coming out of BMC®, but it’s also so clearly a part of Lisa's work. So I get to play with eyes closed, stillness and movement all the time with almost every group of students I teach, no matter what I teach.
The stillness and movement, eyes closed-eyes open score is so wonderful. And even touching into the “dance ability” work. I did the Danceability® training with Alito Allessi. And inside of that too, I felt like, here's the Tuning Scores materials again. It has been deconstructed by Alito to meet different groups of people who are coming in, new to dance or differently abled.
In January, I had to go and teach for Otto for the Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm. I had to teach Material For the Spine, which I've never taught before. I needed to do it my way, so I did Body Mind Centering® into Material For the Spine. Then I had to teach the Tuning Scores for a week, which I haven’t taught here in Oslo. And finally, over the weekend, I taught a BMC® nervous system workshop. So I had this feeling of what it is to teach these different lineages and what it does to me as a dancer, as a teacher and even as a person. What is the pedagogical approach or results that come with each of those specific lineages? So very cool to feel so distinctly the differences in my own body and being.
Anouk Llaurens: Can you describe a little bit how all these different practices of teaching are affecting you in different ways? How do you “behave” in each of these situations ?
Olive Bieringa: The experience of BMC® into Material For the Spine was at the end of the week. I demonstrated a lot, and I felt like people were watching the demonstrations. We did some hands-on work into these very specific forms and movement practices. I would do things without talking so much. At the end of the week, I felt strong and really integrated in a kind of springy way. In the pedagogical framing of teaching the BMC® work, it is often me using music or me talking through long somatizations or me demonstrating something. It’s a detailed nerdy study. It just got a lot more into language. Words are guiding, directing people through their own internal experience. The Tuning Scores work felt like it opened up my imagination. I wouldn't say so much, and we would do something for very long periods of time. I would take cues from the interest of the group or what the group was providing and just bring in other calls from that or other scores propositions in relation to the interest of the group. It became less about physical practice, even though we were moving a lot together. It's less material in a way, because it's the nervous system, but it was also about regulating somehow. The Tuning Scores work is deep compositional and sensory nervous system practice. What becomes physical in the tuning is the seeing, the consequence of the seeing and being seen at that same moment. The physicality of the seeing itself, feeling the seeing as a motoric act and feeling the consequence of the choices that I'm making with my eyes. Something like that.
Anouk Llaurens: You already mentioned some aspects of the Tuning Scores that touch you and that you use in your own work. Are there others you would like to talk about ?
Olive Bieringa: All of the practices of the eyes closed, like the Blind Unison Trio, for example, working in duos with the stillness and movement, but spending a lot of time with snapshots is pretty much foundational. One minuteSolo with multiple replays and Single Image have been very important too. This week, I really started to mess around and play with different things. We began with One Minute Solos, for example, calling begin and end. We also began out of stillness and movement. And we began out of trio units… So different places, just sort of looping the material back into itself.
Anouk Llaurens: When you say you “begin with”, do you mean no warming up ?
Olive Bieringa: I always did some kind of warm up this week. I spent some time with Otto trying to remember some pre-tuning things. I did work with the Bone Map, tracing the bones on the floor. And then we also did this duet which was, I think, called Muscle Map–pushing into each other and finding the moment together of potential stillness, of where we want to hang out and then feeling that moment decay or transformation in some way. I also did the BMC® way in, around proprioception and kinesthesia and the building of the sensory palette, the building of the senses. And then we used the stillness and movement a lot. The second half of class was more compositional and collective. I mean, it's all compositional, but I guess visually, practising something together.
I haven't taught the Tuning Scores work for many years actually. It's interwoven in different ways in my work. And now I'm switching back to working outside with integrating many of those things within the frame of a production and a performative work outside. The practice stillness and movement, eyes closed, eyes open got embedded and developed within our site specific training. The duet starts in a kind of insular way between the two bodies, but it extends out into the environment. We do a kind of micro-macro version where you and I are dancing together, and then over time, with the eyes open, people extend the practice, allowing themselves to be taken by the environment in different ways, by trees or flowers or the wind or car or whatever is there. But this feeling of extending it into a big play where two people might be on opposite sides of the park and they're still in the practice together. So you're extending this web. And at any point you can just go back to them. You could think about this feeling of building a web of relations from a BMC® perspective between a caregiver and a child. That kind of bonded place, where a little kid starts to run, and then, turns around and looks at their parents, and then they go too far, come back, and then go a little bit further. In our case, both people have agency and build up the feeling of being bonded, that can then go into this very extended space in the landscape. That would be one example of something we do all the time with people.
Anouk Llaurens: What are your interests in these practices of Tuning Scores that you choose to share and develop in your own work?
Olive Bieringa: I'm deeply interested in synesthesia, and different motors for kinesthesia.Taking away the social, cognitive or conscious tracking of the eyes into exploring movement from many different starting points just feels so missing culturally. It is also an incredible place to generate movement from, and find your dancing. Even in the performance work that I make, I'm not particularly interested in what it looks like. I'm interested in what it does to both people that get to practise and experience it as a mover and as a watcher. I don't design things based on the visual. I don’t want to make something that just looks cool but is cool, that has a kind of integrity, that makes sense from its own logic. Therefore, visually, it could be many different things. The work is based on what's happening in the moment, it is usually improvised and the performer has a ton of agency. Often these frames are one on one, happening in public space or happening in the context of a museum. I'm not making work for the stage so I care about the relationship and the sort of “consequentialness” that's unfolding between the audience and the performer. That's really the thing that I've taken from Lisa. And I feel like all of those things come into play, like building some kind of trust with delivering improvisational work. I am also interested in building something collectively. What does it mean to be in a committed durational practice where you're building a history together and you're able to go back to that history, restore or revisit something?
Another word that comes up is “practice”. We get to practice again and again and again a different possibility. It’s happening in my teaching also: I'm reiterating, I can keep building it and painting into it with more details. Or, I can say the same thing in a completely different way five minutes later. It is a process of being in the present so truly and that there's also a way in which I'm constantly referencing and recontextualizing myself in relation to what just happened. Feeling that together in a group practice is really cool. And the use of language, the calls, gives us these handles on time to mark a particular moment to then looking and understanding what happened in that moment. This reflecting, looping, beginning again is the act of practising. It has to do with the “perceptual response cycle” in BMC®: “I had this experience , I’m now digesting it and at the same time, I'm moving into the future”. How do I want to move into the future? What is it that I want to allow my body to perceive? I'm constantly tuning my senses to things and being affected by what happened in the past. In the moment of the pause for example, I am both feeling the group, but also deeply feeling myself to know when it's time to begin again. But there's definitely a moment of catching one's breath and acknowledging where we've landed together. There are very specific tools, ways of listening, noticing, challenging and reorienting. I am asking myself what’s my dominant choice making and choosing something else, constantly opening up and redirecting. That's very similar to what we do in BMC®, to recognize what's familiar and then see what's in the shadow, what else there is we could find support from. Because it's not about saying “no” to something, but it's about opening up and giving ourselves more choice. So that just makes the conversation richer and richer. In the circles around me, I see people working on their own as choreographers and hiring people. I don't see people working improvizationaly as collectives or as groups whether it was through other real time composition frames. I know that some people are still doing that, but in the part of the dance world that I'm in at the moment, I don't see this interest in compositional questions that could be coming from a collective conversation versus one person's vision.
Anouk Llaurens: Do you apply other Tuning’s principles or elements in your artistic work?
Olive Bieringa: Bringing the language in has been very important in the work that I'm making right now. I don't know if that comes from the Tuning Scores or more from the Body Mind Centering®, but we're doing a lot of talking and moving. We're walking and talking with people or we're showing people pictures and then we're taking people into moving. We're moving for them and we're using words to get there sometimes. So this bridging between language and embodiment is important.
I can give you two very specific examples: one is we're working with embryology so it's really complex and people feel they don't understand it. So if I show them an image of a human being at three weeks, I can use language to begin describing it, but then I can drop into embodied state with it. And they have a kind of bridge into experiencing some aspect of that moment. And I could just dance. But by using the language, I open up something. It is not being didactic but using this pedagogical tool that we have in BMC® to bring people closer.
Another example is we're outside walking in the environment and we're taking people through the forest and along the fjord. We're having conversations with them about the weather and then, all of a sudden, we are in the water dancing or whatever. We're slipping and shifting our relationship with the audience so that way we build trust and relationship with them. They have agency and figure out how they want to be with us as the conditions keep changing. Questions of uncertainty or manifestations of change are happening, but they also have to adapt.
Anouk Llaurens: What's the context for this kind of practice with the audience?
Olive Bieringa: One is a performance project called Resisting Extinction. It happens within the context of festivals and theatres and it happens in a public space. People pre-book and they come for a two hour experience. They've signed up and committed to some kind of process. And then of course, there's people that we meet as we're doing it. So there are people that get exposed to the work, and are like, “wow, what's going on here?”. That happens. The other project takes place in a medical museum context. There are people wandering through the museum, but then there are people that are coming specifically to see the work as well. And that work unfolds also over ninety minutes or it happens in a shorter duration in kind of installation loops within the spaces of a medical museum. So people have also entered this museum to see scientific objects. And then there's this weird art movement thing happening. There is a kind of displacement of both the general public that's in that space, and ticketed public.
Anouk Llaurens: How do people feel during and after the performances? Do you get feedback?
Olive Bieringa: Everything you can imagine. Some people love it and some people hate it. Some people come and they're really open and deeply engaged, and they don't want to leave. They just want to hang out with us and cry or have their process. Mostly, the people that seem they've really struggled the most with the work are people that are trying to review the show because they're trying to hold some kind of distance, and we're just actually trying to hang out with them and have a relationship when they don't want to. They don't want to give us very much. And so then there's this kind of challenging exchange to bring them in, as they're coming in with some kind of expectation. But often people let go and engage in. They’re there with us with both projects. The Resisting Extinction piece starts out in the forest as a one-on-one and ends as a collective dying and decomposing practice in relation to the climate crisis. People are joining in “dying and decomposing” over forty-five minutes together. Generally, they release into it. So far, the majority of people that commit is a kind of art crowd. It would be very cool to figure out how to extend who gets exposed to the work, so we get more beyond “us”, the art world.
Note:
[1] https://bodycartography.org/