Interview of Otto Ramstad by Anouk Llaurens
Anouk Llaurens: Hi Otto, thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions. Can you start by situating yourself today?
Otto Ramstad: I was born in 1975 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US. My mom is a visual artist, she makes film animation, ceramics, sculpture, performance and music. My dad was interested in history but drove a truck. My dad's family is from Minnesota, people that came from Norway in 1911 and my mom's family is from the East-coast, Massachusetts, Cambridge, they came from England right after the Mayflower. So It’s a real cultural meeting: newer working class US immigrants and longtime more intelligentsia-artistic class US family. I grew up in Minneapolis. I was a very kinetic kid so my mom enrolled me in dance class. It was in 1981. The teacher's name was Suzanne River. Her school was called Green River Dance and her pedagogy approach “Kids make magic moves”. She was a student of Body Mind Centering® and a teacher. I worked with Suzanne River and her children's version of BMC® and improvisation from age six to fourteen. That was my introduction to the dance world. I stopped at fourteen probably because of gender awareness. As a family we did not see dance art.
I was also skateboarding and snowboarding in parallel to dance. I continued that after the dance finished. I lived in the mountains for a couple of years after high school, working at ski resorts. I didn't go to university right away. I was out travelling, driving around the country. When I came back from my trip, I started college in the course “Introduction to western music and dance”. I took some Laban/Bartenieff influenced modern dance classes. I met Contact Improvisation from another student that was teaching, but it was more like partnering work. Then, I quit that university to work on a farm. I met people that were going to the Breitenbush Jam in Oregon, organised by Alito Alessi. I did not really know any of the people but I had bought the 25th anniversary Contact ImprovisationContact Quakerly at a bookstore. After a couple of days at the jam, I was like “oh, that's Steve Paxton, those are the people from the magazine”. Right after Breitenbush, I got invited to what used to be called “diverse dance”, originally initiated by Alito and Karen Nelson. It was an experimental art retreat with people with and without disabilities. The format was people from dance were assisting people with disabilities with their needs as well as doing dance together. Steve also was there. I have a cool video of him performing there. Karen Nelson was there, I think K.J. Holmes was there. That was in 1999. That's where I met Olive so I have been together with her since then. That was my introduction into “experimental dance”.
Anouk Llaurens: “Experimental dance” is the term you use to call it ?
Otto Ramstad: In the Netherlands, at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam and EDDC in Arnhem, people described it as "New dance".
Anouk Llaurens: "Experimental dance" says something different.
Otto Ramstad: I met my first teacher Suzanne again in 1999. I hadn't seen her in years and she encouraged me to join the professional Body Mind Centering® training in Massachusetts where she was teaching with all of the older teachers that had followed Bonnie from New York to Massechusettes. The format then was not like now, where it's two years and you can go anywhere in Europe or the US to do your modules. It was four years, two months every summer and if you dropped out of something, you had to wait another four years. You really had to go through and commit. It was incredible. So I entered the Body Mind Centering® professional training in 1999 and that went to 2002. I was together with Olive so engaged with the Body Cartography Project [1].
Anouk Llaurens: So when did you meet Lisa and her work?
Otto Ramstad: I was going every summer to Massachusetts for the BMC® training, and I started to go to MadBrook farm in the summer. I would just hang out with Lisa, Steve, Kathy Weis and Simone Forti, everyone that was there. I just slept in my van. Sometimes I showed some work in progress performances and sometimes there was some dance in the studio. Olive and I, and then a few other people from San Francisco from Body Cartography went to Seattle to practise Tuning Score with Lisa in 2000. I remember hearing that Lisa said “Body Cartography people need to get Tuning Score information, let's make a context where we can exchange”. That was not the only reason. Lisa and Steve were performing PA RT in Seattle. After the workshop in 2000, we worked a lot with Tuning Score with Body Cartography and also with video. We re-interpreted, or reverse-engineered Tuning Scores back into video.
I don't think I did another workshop until 2004, 2005. I was living in England for some time, then I was able to do workshops in Europe. Lisa was not teaching in the States. Because I was in England, I went to Florence to take a workshop with Lisa there. I went to Finland when Steve and Lisa performed Night Stand. Lisa did a long workshop there. Then after 2005-06 we were in Minneapolis for a long time. I think at that point I was practicing by teaching with Olive. We worked with Tuning Scores a lot.
Anouk Llaurens: How did you work with the Tuning Score?
Otto Ramstad: We used it in various public proposals. For example, we’ve been working with moving and pausing with eyes closed and eyes open, in workshops and rehearsal processes. Also working outdoors in particular. We did use this score in a performance, as a tuning in preparation at the very beginning of Resisting Extinction when the audience arrives. In the beginning of the piece we do a one-on-one performance, which is quite intense to do. It's walking and talking with the audience, talking about the surroundings, practising being in the surroundings and also about the climate crisis and your emotional response to it. It's a pretty intense part of the performance to do so instead of waiting for people to show up and then choosing a person and approaching them for the one-on-one performance right away, we had all the dancers in duos doing stillness and movement in the forest or in the periphery of the meeting point before the performances.
Anouk Llaurens: Why is the proposition so intense?
Otto Ramstad: Well, I don't know if this is related to Tuning or not. In one-on-one performance, there's just one audience member and you're being seen and getting feedback all the time. Of course you're getting that on stage too, but because there's so many people in the audience, it's just very different. It feels like your whole body, all angles and dimensions of your body are involved. Also you are hosting, there's a lot of care involved. It’s a very radical way to do performance. And it's not comfortable for the public a lot of the time, depending on who they are. It brings in a lot of aspects of different kinds of practices that are not usually associated with performance, like therapy workshop culture. For me, it's a very direct way of sharing what it's like to be inside of a dance, verses showing the image of a dance. And that is very important, I think. A lot of my work is about sharing what it's like to be in a dance and that the potential of dance is in the dancing.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, that's important. At the moment, I'm sharing that culture through talking, writing, and editing. It's good that people are continuing to share it through dancing.
Otto Ramstad: But talking is part of it. With Steve and Lisa, it's also a lot about talking and really examining everything. In that kind of culture of the Tuning score, Material For the Spine and others, Lisa and Steve, it's really about being pretty broad within what can be examined. And that is also an important feature of Tuning or Steve's work and Bonnie's work that are looking at all the phenomena, applying their questions to everything. On the other side is the restraint of form for Tuning Score and Material for the Spine. Material for the Spine has a very small amount of practice. Tuning Scores has more practice. Body Mind Centering® has a massive holographic encyclopaedia because you're dealing with body systems, body tissues and everything. Though the principles may be simple, the application is very big. It allows to look at all the phenomena by taking an evolutionary biology perspective. To look at other animals and other situations and look at the bare phenomena of what is the information, you're able to perceive and play with, dance with. Those people–who are my three big people–, they're all dance artists. It's kind of a puzzle behaviour, dance behaviour, I think. And that happens with talking and with the different scores and everything. That kind of heritage of experimental dance, is a form to let the project of playing with phenomena be. To play with what you have at hand and really directly use the affordances of your body and your direct surroundings. Not Greek mythology or Horton technique. Through practice, you do acquire a sort of enhanced capacity, but in a different register. And the seriousness of the pursuit, just being dedicated and continuous. I know your project is about Lisa, but it's hard for me to separate because I think it's so much about the relation between Steve's work and Lisa's and Bonnie's. The slide between those forms is interesting. And also the kind of re-categorization of Lisa and Steve as “somatic”.
Anouk Llaurens: What do you mean?
Otto Ramstad: Well, in my imagination and my thought, you could think about Material For the Spine and Tuning Scores, especially pre-tuning, as somatic, in the sense of dealing with the experience of being a body, the experience of living as a body. So I think that with this look to all the phenomena and using your anatomy and physiology as a source, for work, for education, for exploring, BMC®, Tuning Scores and Material For the Spine have all a look at phenomena by using your anatomy and physiology as a source, be it for work, education, or exploring. I'm saying “re-categorising” in terms of how it exists in the bigger image of what dance is. So many people resonate with the term “somatic” now. In current times, it has a higher profile than it used to. And it is even becoming a requirement in dance education. And I have my own mistrust and doubts about a serious hollowing out potential of this moment, you know, when everyone is doing somatics but no one has done it. Steve was saying you have to do, I forgot how many hours of each approach, to actually embody it. Ten years or something. It takes a long time to embody something.
Most of my work is about sharing the way of being that dancers have with each other. The way that we communicate, that we care for each other, that we listen to each other, that we share with talking and not talking and exchange, which is very complicated and direct. If we can share that culture, that’s what I'm engaged in. Experimental dance has a lot of useful cultural material that can be shared in a performance context in a way that, I think, could be more applicable to the problems that we see ourselves faced with now. I'm not against dancing and the craft of it and virtuosity on all the different scales that are possible, but the potentiality of dancing and of being together, living and dancing is very huge. And I look for ways to share that. For me “dance", that word is not only confined to artistic canon, but a kind of puzzling behaviour. Puzzling, playing, experimenting with the capacity of your body. That's why I identify with the term “experimental dance”, because that's what I am doing: I am experimenting with the capability of my body and how I interact with my surroundings. I think I really bound with that term for a lot of reasons. And sometimes, I identify with what it is to use your body as a source and the processes of your body as a source for play.
Anouk Llaurens: What do you mean by puzzling?
Otto Ramstad: The word “puzzling” is coming a little bit related to Material For the Spine. “To puzzle with something” is to explore different possibilities of how you can do it. So you have to try different approaches, you have to play.
Anouk Llaurens: Ok different angles, different perspectives,
Otto Ramstad: Yes. I really identify with “play”. Trying, playing with different possibilities is like puzzling. When you have a regular puzzle, you are trying different pieces, “Does that one fit?” You are trying different strategies, exploring and experimentation with what you can do. There is exploration, play, puzzling, improvisation, those are all synonymous with dance for me. It takes it away from canon. You can make dance bigger than just one canon.
And when time comes to create a context to share a dance, we propose formats that people feel active within, that’s where a lot of the one-on-one format work comes from.
There is another performance score related to Lisa’s work that we have done in different contexts Olive and I called Action Movie [2]. It comes from the exercise we do in a workshop where one person guides another person with their eyes closed through whatever space and they would call open for the person to open their eyes and close to close their eyes. And sometimes you would put yourself in the image as a dancer, sometimes you are just looking at a flower, and then close and then you are looking at the inside of a sewer drain and then you are seeing me as a figure amongst people on a bus, and it's cinematic. We came upon that exercise trying to teach video from a dance perceptive, it is a deconstruction - reconstruction of sort of Tuning propositions into making video. At one point, we made a festival and all of us were puzzled about how to perform. We were not sure if we wanted to be seen by people, but we still wanted to be in space. So Olive reached for this exercise from a workshop, framed it, gave it the name Action Movie and proposed it as a performance. That's an example.
There is another one called Go, this can be for a small group and there is one, two or three dancers we have done it in different formats. The audience is given the instruction to watch the dancers as they move through a city, an urban environment. We tell them “Try to preserve the autonomy of the dancer, you are not attached to them. Your activity is to ‘audience’. Follow your desire for proximity and try not to make the performer visible.” There is another format which is similar but different called Closer. That one is one audience member and one performer. I would come to you to say “I am gonna dance for you. You can follow me as close or as far away as you like. After fifteen minutes, whatever the format, I will bring you back here.” And it’s a non-verbal format. If the audience or other people in the public talk to you, you are not allowed to talk back. Those are some formats where we would try to make “audience” as an action word, as a verb, “audiencing”. I like this kind of contract where all the roles are active. I find it generous: “I let you observe or be part of my experience but I give you rules”. It is a way of leading people into the potentiality of being inside a dance and knowing that their perception is active. In Closer, I feel that the audience can have this kind of care for the dance. Because other people don't know we are dancing, and the audience can choose if they are going to frame the dance by their viewing, and how they are going to care for the experience. I find that very interesting.
Anouk Llaurens: So other people in the public space don't know that you are “performing”?
Otto Ramstad: No. One time in Oslo I rolled on top of a car at a stop at an intersection and it was undercover police. One of the audience members was the curator of a public art sculpture park, here in Oslo, and with her husband they talked to the police.
I would have been forced to talk if I was getting arrested. They saved me, they saved the performance by explaining to the police what I was doing.
Right now, we got approached by the National Museum in Norway. A woman that works there came to a performance that we did in Tromso, a city in the far north of Norway where we were doing Action Movie as a stand-alone performance. I performed for her and I brought her around the city. I took her to the supermarket, guiding her with a shopping trolley and we were just going all around. Then she brought some young people to another work we did, which is one-on-one practices and some group practices called Togethering in a city square and library in Oslo. She is proposing to do a workshop with them and figure out if there is a way that we can adapt some of our formats in their museum, with young people that are between thirteen to fifteen. Her question is “How can we make this age group bond to the museum?" “How to help them feel that they can connect to that place, feel that they are welcome or have a resonance?” It's the National Museum, it's a huge permanent collection, and it's in the rooms that have more density history. We want to design something that is using workshop culture and this kind of format of guiding to make a proposal to support these young people connecting to the art and to the building. How to make them feel active, and not technology based, by analogue, person to person? Can we, through time, create an accessible and safe feeling format? How to create a container that people feel comfortable and safe enough to experiment with their perception? Ideally, it would be leading in a way that they would facilitate each other in this work of leading someone with the eyes closed and opening and closing and perhaps interacting with different layers of the culture of the museum, the cleaners, people that work behind the desk, the curators, the guards of the gallery, in getting into secret space of the museum, the storage... Actually under the age of eighteen it's free to go to the museum, so it has a lot of potential for them to actually have this as a space for them. That's the kind of work that I think is “experimental dance”. How do you experiment with your perspective with space and your body and how does your body move in space? That’s the potential of cultural intervention, rather than just sitting in a theatre watching Merce Cunningham.
Anouk Llaurens: Merce Cunningham in a theatre is also a kind of cultural intervention.
Otto Ramstad: Of course it is, but for some people it's opaque. Arts gets put into this elite expert culture box. And depending on the class and the cultural background that you are coming from, you are either part of that elite class or you are left out. What people want to know a lot of time in dance is “what does it mean?”. The potential of experimental dance is that your perception is the meaning. So we look for a format that doesn't verbally explain but creates the context for that process to be present physically.
Anouk :Now can you talk about your work Lineage?
Otto Ramstad: Yes. In late 2015 early 2016, I started formulating this project called Lineage [3] . I was thinking about learning and the position of learning within dance which to me is just so huge: A large part of what I want to share with the public is the process of learning dance. It is so important and it's a lifelong endeavour, especially in experimental dance. We don't just stop after the arts academy, you would always keep going. That's a very special thing. I know so precisely what I have learned from Lisa, Steve, Bonnie–my main people–and I know that there are a lot of other learnings that I have in my life, cultural learning that I have but don't know what it is.
My dad's family is from Norway. I knew my great grandparents, John and Anna Ramstad, when I was a child. My great grandfather died when I was nine years old, so I had a relationship with him. And no one ever talked about Norway or where we came from. As a classic immigrant US kind of position, we left that behind. We came here to the United States, we don't have cultural information, we are just white. My great grandparents came from a really poor area and then, it was just better to come here not to speak your language anymore and just be white. I knew that I had learned something because I grew up in Minnesota which is a Scandinavian heritage area. Because I had never been to Norway and no one had ever made contact with any family since early 1900, I went back there. I used the few documents that I found in the National archive, the boat ticket of my great grandfather ship registry. Then I found out where he was born, which is on a farm in the middle of Norway. And because I am a dancer, I had to go there. It is not enough just to know about it, you have to put your body in that place. So we got a rental car and we drove up to this farm. People we met there did not ask for me to come. I am like a ghost from history, like a mythological thing that you knew about: at the turn of the century, a quarter of the people left Norway and went to the United States. What do they think about those people? I don't know. So I showed up there and I had some nice but awkward meeting of coffee and cake. Then they pointed me towards where my relatives were from, which is the upper part of the place. In Norway there is the version of serfdom, which is called husman, house man. It means that poor people did not have their own land – they had a lot of big families and a small amount of land in Norway. Only twenty-five per cent of the land is able to farm, because of lots of mountains and coast. So those people were in a class called husman where you were allowed to rent land and build a house on it but you could not own it. And you had to give products, and your labour whenever asked. So you were attached to the farm but you didn’t have ownership rights. As I was learning all this information, I was wondering how to process that. I went to the space where my ancestors were from and there was just the land and the rocks that were the same as before. And I wondered how to interact with them, with my body.
I just walked up the field in the days that I spent around there. I really wanted to give myself space and time to absorb the information I was getting. I did not feel like dancing in the space, I did not want to be in the kind of habits of my body, I needed a different context. So I did a lot of walking like Steve but also just basic. I was in space, with the subcortical processing of space that my relatives had as well in their life living on a mountain farm.
Anouk Llaurens: So, it was a way to put yourself at the place of your relatives.
Otto Ramstad: Yes, to understand what it would be like to have a body in rural Norway at the turn of the century. Of course, I drove there in a rental car and I could not have the same experience but I would try to approximate just being in these places. I made some video where I work with pausing from pause to pause against this one rock that is right near the house. Pausing was really helpful. I just needed time to be in the space in my thoughts and in my experience. It gave me the context to be with everything. Moving through is a way of being but also just staying in something. And I was interacting with this other artwork by the artist Bruce Nauman, you might be familiar with, Wall Floor Positions, where he is just doing different positions between the wall and the floor. I was doing that but between the ground and a rock.
I used that video for the performance I made later. It was projected onto a roll of paper and then I did video puppetry with it. It was like a big roll of paper hanging from the ceiling on ropes and curving to the floor and I projected this video onto it. Then I used another piece of paper to highlight different parts of the video. So this would be like myself in close and there would be shadows. I worked with shadow and also projecting the video on different paper objects and also on a blanket. I am inside a blanket, the video is on me, wearing the same clothes as in the video. When I do video puppetry it is thus like doing with a small version of myself. I also play with stillness and movement, pausing and moving, composing with the video and myself as a figure. I also worked with Lisa in the studio on that for a couple of hours. That was really cool. I actually have a video of Lisa doing a replay of me, early on.
I also used Body Mind Centering®, particularly embryology, just being in different times in your current body. Your body is an expression of embryology, because everything that comes before you is informing the different forms. At a certain point in your formation you are only two fluid filled sacs, the big fluid filled sac which is now your back body, the amniotic sac, and a fluid filled sac which is your yolk sac that will become your organs, your lungs, and digestive organs. The back body sac is gonna surround you and become your skin and your nervous system. I made a video of me holding a piece from the house that my great grandfather was born in, while going through embryology. Then I reprojected it in the theatre on top of the paper and the actual piece of wood. As people look at the video, I do a report in real time of what I am doing in the video (going through embryology). Then I ask audience members if they can see it . Then they are invited to walk forward and then they all get to come around this piece of wood and smell it. Now I have it in my attic here in a plastic box, waiting for another use of it.
Now, I am going back into this “lineage” and focusing on what is the matrilineal that comes through me. Men are much easier to find in archives than women. All I could find was my great grandfather’s boat ticket but nothing of my great grandmother. I want to go back to different archives and try to find her. My mom was a film animator and I want to collaborate with her to make film animation, together with my daughter Uma. My daughter is thirteen and we are making a performance together. She is a teenager, and she's lived in Norway for half her life, very different from me. What is the kind of experience of body and formation that she is having, because she has this culture that I did not have? It's just a very new look at it. We went back up to the farm and also to the valley around it and made videos together. The working title is Circling the Line because lineage is like a line going through time, line-age. This idea of a line circling back, you know, indigenous knowledge systems that see all sorts of time together. Multigenerational perspectives from the past, being in the present, and looking at the future.
notes:
[1] https://bodycartography.org/
[2] https://bodycartography.org/portfolio/action-movie/
[3] https://bodycartography.org/portfolio/lineage/