Olive Bieringa (Program & Educational Director)

Olive Bieringa is a dance maker, somatic movement therapist and cultural producer who grew up in Wellington, New Zealand. She is a Registered ISMETA Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator, a Certified Practitioner and Teacher of Body-Mind Centering®, Shiatsu practitioner and certified DanceAbility teacher, working with dancers of all abilities. She holds an MFA in Performance and New Media from Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY and a BA from the European Dance Development Center in the Netherlands. She is currently based in Oslo, Norway.

Olive teaches internationally in Body-Mind Centering® trainings for Moveus/Germany, Leben nuova/Italy, Moving from Within/USA, Soma/France, Sonder/USA and in universities and festivals such as Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Praxis Festival/Oslo, Impulstanz Festival/Vienna, Movement Research/NYC, and for dance companies Lyon Opera Ballet, Footnote Dance, Touch Compass/New Zealand. As a curator & producer she has developed projects such as SEEDS Festival (Somatic Experiments in Earth, Dance and Science) at Earthdance/USA and Public Art St Paul’s City Art Collaboratory, bringing together artists and scientists.

For twenty years she has been collaborating with Otto Ramstad as the BodyCartography Project creating dances, performances, films, installations, and festivals. BodyCartography’s offerings have functioned to deepen the conversation in experimental and somatic practice to give value to other ways of experiencing and making dance. Their work lives in the collection of Te Papa Tongarewa National Museum of New Zealand. Their performances have presented at the Walker Art Center/Minneapolis, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, PS 122 and American Realness/NYC, amongst other places. Together they run Embodied Performance intensives for performing artists.

Otto Ramstad (Co-Educational Director)

Otto Ramstad is a dance and video artist and Certified Practitioner & Teacher of Body-Mind Centering®. He began Studying BMC^sm in 1981 at six years old with his first dance teacher Suzanne River, Body-Mind Centering® Practitioner. He has a BA in Dance, Improvisation, and the Moving Image from Goddard College and an MA in Choreography from Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2019. For twenty years he has been collaborating with Olive Bieringa as the BodyCartography Project creating performances, films, installations, and festivals.

He has taught in Body-Mind Centering for Moveus/Germany, Leben nuova/Italy, Kinesthetic Learning Center/USA, and been an assistant teacher in Soma/France, and The School for Body-Mind Centering® in Chiemsee/Germany and Amherst, USA. He also teaches for dance institutions and festivals such as Tanzfabrik/Berlin, Tanzquartier/Vienna, Contredanse/Brussel, Culturgest Gallery/Lisbon, Studio 303/Montreal, Praxis Festival/Oslo, Impulstanz Festival/Vienna, Movement Research/NYC, and for dance companies Culberg Ballet/Stockholm, Lyon Opera Ballet, Footnote Dance, Touch Compass/New Zealand.

Otto is a recipient of Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship 2015, McKnight Foundation Fellowship 2010, an Archibald Bush Fellowship Artist 2006, twice a DanceWeb Scholarship recipient at Impulstanz. He has been featured in the work of DD Dorvillier, Miguel Gutierrez, Shelton Mann, Karen Nelson, Lisa Schmitt, Scott Wells, and Kitt Johnson. His most current work Lineage looks at learning and how we learn, drawing lines between his learning of experimental dance and somatic practices, specifically Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores since 2000, Steve Paxton’s Material for the Spine and Contact Improvisation since 1998, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s BMC and learning of his Norwegian cultural heritage which has been invisible to him. In his exploration of his Norwegian great grandfathers life and the places he moved through he is reflecting on what it was to live in a body in rural Norway 100 years ago. This research has led him to emigrate to Norway as a way to experience the cultural learning his great-grandfather went through in 1911. Lineage was presented as a studio practice, a series of discussions and a dance, video and storytelling performance for the culmination of his MA in Choreography at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2019.

Kim Sargent-Wishart (Administrative Director)

Kim Sargent-Wishart is an educator, researcher & artist specializing in somatic movement methodologies across a range of applications, including continuing education, creative development and leadership. Research & practice interests include embryology as a model for embodiment and creative practice, somatic writing, contemplative photography & perceptual process. She is a Certified Practitioner (1999) and Teacher (2019) of Body-Mind Centering®, a Certified Teacher of BodyMind Dancing, and a Registered Somatic Movement Educator & Therapist (ISMETA). 

Kim holds a BA with Honors in Dance (Wesleyan University, 1987), Massage Therapist certification (Connecticut Center for Massage Therapy, 1990), and an apprentice-based Pilates instructor training (San Francisco, 1993). She completed a PhD in Performance Studies at Victoria University (Melbourne, Australia, 2016) with a focus on somatics, experiential embryology and Tibetan Buddhist philosophies in creative practice. She works across contemplative photography, screendance, somatic writing and dance/movement improvisation, and her writings have been published in several journals and anthologies. She is the co-founder of ASTER Association and co-editor of The Art of Embodiment. She lives on Wadawurrung country, Bellarine Peninsula, Victoria. Visit kimsargentwishart.com for more.

Jens Johannsen (Program Supervisor) is a dancer, movement-teacher and -therapist from Germany. Since 1978 he has been exploring the relations of body and mind on personal, social and global levels. For many years he has studied with teachers in the fields of theatre, dance, voice, ritual, humanistic and Buddhist psychology, yoga, meditation, body-therapy and others.

Jens is a senior BMC^® Teacher, teaching in the trainings of the School for Body-Mind Centering® since 1993. He directs BMC trainings since 2003 and co-directed moveus with Friederike Tröscher. For over 15 years Jens has been leading his own BMC training groups, and he works with clients of all ages. He is interested especially in meditation in and through movement. Jens integrates detailed knowledge about the physical body and the process of embodiment with humour, joy of movement and expression, with a spiritually open approach.

Amy Matthews, BMC^sm Teacher, IDME, CMA, RSMT/RSME, has been teaching movement since 1994. She is a Body-Mind Centering® Teacher, a Certified Laban Movement Analyst, an Infant Developmental Movement Educator, and a movement therapist and yoga teacher based in New York City. Amy has partnered with Sarah Barnaby to create Babies Project – a space in NYC dedicated to developmental movement for babies (of all ages). Previously she was a director of The Breathing Project, and co-authored with Leslie Kaminoff the best-selling book Yoga Anatomy (published by Human Kinetics).

Amy is the Program Director for Sonder Movement Project‘s SME and IDME programs, and teaches on SME & IDME Programs in the US, Germany and Italy. She taught for four years with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen in Berkeley CA, and was on the faculty of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies for 10 years.

Amy has participated several times in Gil Hedley’s dissection workshops, and has studied kinesthetic anatomy with Irene Dowd. She has studied yoga with Alison West, Mark Whitwell, Genny Kapular and Kevin Gardiner, and full-contact karate with Sensei Michelle Gay. Amy is certified as a yoga teacher and as a shiatsu practitioner, is registered with ISMETA as a Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator and has been registered with Yoga Alliance as an E-500 RYT. She teaches embodied anatomy and movement workshops for programs in the US and internationally, and works privately integrating Laban Movement Analysis, Bartenieff Fundamentals, yoga, Body-Mind Centering and Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF). Learn more about Amy here.