... phase one

3 dancers		15 minutes
choreography		Kim Olson and dancers
costumes		Paula Hutman
music		Dani Siciliano
Commission		Aspen Dance Connection
World Premier		2007 February 7th
Wheeler Opera House		Aspen, Colorado

This is the first in a sequence of vignettes that will collectively form the full suite Butter Colored Hum. Inspired by witnessing mangled trash bags and newspapers fused and dancing in barbed wire fences along the HW 93 en route to Boulder ... the chaotic beauty of detritus.

Using reclaimed materials - newspaper, cellophane, and fibers ... the work evokes specific ecosystems of consumption. Each movement echoes the ephemeral affection of our society to consume and discard. Touching, tearing disintegration collides with the physicality of life. As costumed materials restructure implications on the character of consumptive culture, the hope remains that human ingenuity that put together a convenient world will reorganize to create sustainable world.

5 dancers		60 minutes
choreography		Kim Olson and dancers
concept & direction		Kim Olson
original score		Randy Gibson
costumes		Paula Hutman
set concept		Patricia Tinejero-Baker
World Premier		2006 August 24th
Boulder International Fringe Festival
Dairy Center for the Arts, Boulder, Colorado USA

Designed for stage theatre, black box, or warehouse performance space. Music played live by composer Randy Gibson and one violinist.

In 2005, Olson was commissioned to create a site-specific work for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. The evening length installation became an experiment on both audience and performer. Set in the small lower galleries, Olson used the limitations and awkward nature for viewing dance in this untraditional space, and created movement situations and stations that both audience and performer had to navigate through/around. The result was a fascinating experiment of personal comfort levels, vulnerability, engagement and fear.

The evening length work, Separate Haven, grew from this experiment, and evolved to question the broader ramifications of the concept of separation – the desire to expose the psychological underpinnings of self protective environments - concrete and fabricated boundaries that shelter and divide. As the world population expands, morphing cultures and people, the desire for autonomy and individuality remains strong - how do we maintain ourselves at this rate of absorption - what are the costs? Separate Haven challenges both performers and audience to consider these boundaries - concrete and conceptual - that shape our personal and shared spaces.

Olson’s signature raw and synergistic movement sensibility combines with the vision and evocative live electronic soundscape of Gibson (with violinist Miguel Ramos), creating an atmosphere of poignant juxtaposition - light with dark, angelic with destructive. Paula Hutman creates costumes that brilliantly interpret the aesthetic and conceptual forms of the piece, as they crunch and reflect with grotesque elegance.

This evening length work evolved from a desire to expose the psychological underpinnings of self-protective environments - concrete and fabricated boundaries that shelter and divide. As the world population expands, morphing cultures and people, the desire for autonomy and individuality remains strong - how do we maintain ourselves at this rate of absorption - what are the costs? Separate Haven challenges performers and audience to consider these boundaries - concrete and conceptual - that shape our personal and shared spaces.

8 dancers		40 minutes
choreography		Kim Olson
music		Hans De Back and Radiohead
costume design		Kim Olson
video		Ana Baer-Carrillo
Commission		Tanzcompagnie Giessen, Germany
World Premier		2006 May 27th
TanzArt ostwest		Karstadt-Parkhaus Giessen, Germany

Created site specifically (in a parking garage) to open Giessen’s annual European dance festival.

Olson met Tanzcompagnie Giessen Artistic Director, Tarek Assam, at international tanzmesse nrw 2004 in Düsseldorf. Assam expressed interest in Olson’s work after witnessing kin olson / sweet edge’s performance of All this Fool of Light during the festival.

In 2006, Tanzcompagnie Giessen formally commissioned a new work to be set in a popular setting in Giessen – the Parkhaus, adjacent to a well-known department store in the city center. The piece, in its unusual location, opened the annual TanzArt ostwest – a 2-week festival featuring invited European contemporary dance companies.

Olson created and set Cargo on 8 members of Tanzcompagnie Giessen, and invited video artist Ana Baer-Carrillo to join the project. Taking advantage of the eerie and urbane concrete landscape, 5 stories high, Olson sought to create a counter environment, one of warmth, intimacy and intensity that would draw an audience in rather than keep them at a distance in the enormous space – an experience surreal that would surprisingly alter the energy of the place itself, transforming it and the audiences relationship to it. An important site-specific element for Olson was that the performers, video and audience travel and change perspective and the actual configuration of the space, several times within the piece.

Focusing on the round, rural and earthy sounds of De Back, and the intensely intimate and provoking score of Radiohead, Olson created an organic, deeply entwined and fiercely independent movement score. Baer-Carrillo’s video footage, (much of which was shot at the local meat packing plant in Giessen, and combined with overlay of the dance and dancers themselves) provided a 4th dimension of light/texture and moving image to the performance. The video worked as a catalyst for the movement, questioning and implicating the parameters of our intensions as animals, humans, individuals. The herding, collective energy of the moving audience and dance ultimately created a unifying and uniquely interactive performance experience.