Moving With and As Objects

Open to all students interested in physically exploring theatrical presence in relationship to stage space and props, as well as thinking about the energy and history embedded in these objects through their performative use.

In this two-hour workshop curator, archivist and artist Cori Olinghouse (BA ’01), and choreographer Melinda Ring (MFA ’00), will share improvisational practices/methods of investigating our complex relationship to objects, and ways of thinking about the intrinsic value these objects may possess. Together we will experiment to uncover broader questions around memory, improvisation, and archiving.

This workshop will culminate a week-long Bennington College residency in which Olinghouse and Ring, along with movement artist Kai Kleinbard, will work on assembling a photographic archive of transitional objects that appear and disappear from Ring's choreographic practice. Situated in a reworked version of Ring's original set from her 1999 Bennington College performance of Impossible Dance #2 (still life), Ring and Kleinbard will assist Olinghouse with her research on how objects from performance act as retrieval systems for the senses, and how they are embedded with embodied experience.

Cori Olinghouse is an artist, archivist, and curator, spearheading the Trisha Brown Archive as archive director since 2009, a company she danced for from 2002-2006.  As an archivist, Olinghouse has worked with film historian, curator, and archivist, Jon Gartenberg, choreographer Cathy Weis, and is currently developing a series of projects with choreographer Melinda Ring. Recently, she was the recipient of The Award, conceived by Dean Moss (2015), a participant in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Extended Life Dance Development program made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2016-2017), and a panelist in the Museum of Modern Art’s Storytelling in the Archives forum (2015), alongside Boris Charmatz and Marvin Taylor. As part of her graduate research at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University, Olinghouse is working on a series of hybrid projects that bring together her research in archives, curation, and performance.

Melinda Ring, choreographer, born in Los Angeles, CA, has lived and worked in New York since 2001. She creates dances, performance pieces, videos and installations. Forgetful Snow (2014), her last project, was commissioned and presented by The Kitchen, NY and The Box, Los Angeles, and documented by Contact Quarterly in Chapbook 6, Forgetful Snow. Current work in-progress has been supported by Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, Whitman College, Gibney Dance Center (DiP 2016) and Movement Research (AIR 2014-2016). She has developed programing as an artist-curator for Danspace Project. Educated Bennington College (MFA) and University of California, Los Angeles (BA); Critic in sculpture, Yale School of Art, 2014 - present; visiting Lecturer in Dance, UCLA, Spring 2016 (Movement Research exchange program). Ring is a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artist awardee.