performance
Separate Haven
in its earliest form was a commission by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Set in the small lower galleries, Olson used the limitations and awkward nature for viewing dance in this untraditional space, and created an installation with stations in which both audience and performer had to navigate. The result was an evening length performance experiment of challenged personal space, comfort levels, vulnerability, and voyeurism.
An outshoot of the original project, the evening length piece asks performers and audience to consider boundaries, concrete and conceptual, that shape personal and shared spaces. The work questions the broader ramifications of separation, the psychological underpinnings of self protective environments and concrete and fabricated boundaries that shelter and divide. A world expanding couples with a desire for autonomy and individuality.
Set to Gibson's evocative live electronic soundscape with solo violin, the atmosphere is of poignant juxtaposition where the angelic meets destructive. Hutman’s costumes feed the aesthetic as they crunch and reflect with grotesque elegance.
choreography | Kim Olson and dancers
5 dancers | 60 min
costumes | Paula Hutman
light design | Craig Bushman
original live music score | Randy Gibson + violinist
world premier | Boulder International Fringe Festival
Dairy Center for the Arts, Boulder CO : 2006 August
Cargo
was commissioned by Tanzcompagnie Giessen to open the TanzArt ostwest – a 2-week festival featuring acclaimed European contemporary dance. The piece was set in Parkhaus, an urbane concrete parking garage in the city center and set on 8 members of Tanzcompagnie Giessen. Olson with video artist Ana Baer-Carrillo formed a counter environment of warmth, intimacy and intensity in the vacuous space. Performers, audience and video, migrated in the space, and shaped an experience that altered and transformed the energy of Parkhaus and the audience’s relationship to it.
An organic, entwined and fiercely independent movement score was fueled by the round, rural sounds of De Back, and an intensely provoking score of Radiohead. Baer-Carrillo’s video footage – rich with overlay of the dancers often moving with themselves and stark sterile factory images, brought a 4th dimension to the performance, serving as a catalyst to question and implicate the parameters of our intensions as animals, humans, and individuals.
choreography | Kim Olson
video | Ana Baer Carrillo
8 dancers | 45 min
music | Hans De Back, Radiohead
costume design | Stadttheater Giessen
commission | Tanzcompagnie Giessen, Germany
world premier | TanzArt Ostwest
Karstadt-Parkhaus, Giessen, Germany : 2006 May
All this Fool of Light
choreography | Kim Olson
5 dancers | 16 min
music | Lucene and Mouse on Mars
costume design | Kim Olson
world premier | Dairy Center for the Arts, Boulder CO : 2005 June
Brenman’s Gate
choreography | Kim Olson
3 dancers + 1 actor | 15 min
film | Nikki Widner
music | Erik Satie/ Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz Ensemble
set design | Kim Olson and Nikki Widner
light design | Kjesti Webb
commission | Naropa University
world premier | St-Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival
Montreal Arts Interculturels : 2003 June
Invited Thunder
choreography | Kim Olson
5 dancers | 20 min
music | Mark Deutsch
costumes | Esther Kang
light design | Kim Olson
world premier | Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Garage Theatre, Edinburgh, Scotland : 2002 August
Blood Ridge
choreography | Kim Olson
6 dancers | 25 min
music | Arvo Pärt
costumes | Kim Olson
light design | David Ortolano
world premier | International Choreographer’s Showcase
Teatro del Estado, Xalapa, Mexico : 2001 February
photo: Doug Gulick of thin WATER blue ICE at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House