A conversation with Andrea Olsen, Caryn McHose and Eeva-Maria Mutka focusing on three chapters from Olsen’s newest book, Moving Between Worlds: A Guide to Embodied Living and Communicating.
This event included a screening of the multi-award-winning dance film (short) Matkalla (On The Journey) by Scotty Hardwig, co-created with Olsen and Mutka in Finland and Sweden. The 15-minute film is the first of a three-part project, Mothers|Lands, focused on dancers creating in their native landscapes. Matkalla has already won the Best Dance Film award at international festivals in Canada, Germany, Belgium, Greece, and Sweden and was selected for festival screening at numerous venues including the 2023 Cannes World Film Festival: Remember the Future.
Together they share their experiences and memories of embodied movement practices as well as the skills and surprises of moving on camera.
Learn More:
Moving Between Worlds: A Guide to Embodied Living and Communicating by Andrea Olsen
Andrea Olsen, dance artist, writer, and educator, is author of a quartet of books on the body: Bodystories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy (1991), Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide (2002), The Place of Dance: A Somatic Guide to Dancing and Dance Making (2014), and Moving Between Worlds: A Guide to Embodied Living and Communicating (2022) with colleague Caryn McHose, along with numerous articles and chapters in anthologies. She is a Professor Emeritus of Dance at Middlebury College in the US and teaches and performs internationally. Recent film projects co-created with media artist Scotty Hardwig include the website Body and Earth: Seven Web-Based Somatic Excursions with Caryn McHose and international dance artists, and the multiple-award-winning dance short Matkalla, filmed in Finland and Sweden with Eeva-Maria Mutka.
Caryn McHose is a movement artist, Advanced Certified Rolfer™ and Rolf Movement Practitioner®. and co-author (with Kevin Frank) of How Life Moves, Explorations in Meaning and Body Awareness (North Atlantic, 2006). She collaborated with Andrea Olsen on the books Bodystories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy; The Place of Dance, a Somatic Guide to Dancing and Dance Making; and Moving Between Worlds: A Guide to Embodied Living and Communicating. She has taught creative movement for people of all ages for over fifty years. Her work is influenced by her study with Hubert Godard, developmental movement with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, and Continuum with Emilie Conrad and Susan Harper. She is also a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner and Certified Biodynamic Cranial Sacral Practitioner.
Eeva-Maria Mutka is a Finnish performer, maker and community dance leader currently based in Bristol, UK. She trained initially at London Academy of Movement and Dramatic Art and continued her professional development in dance and somatic movement work gaining qualifications to teach Body and Earth and Space Dance/New Butoh work, and to deliver the Touch Trust programme and the Youth Mindfulness 8-week programme. Since the 1990’s she has been performing internationally in dance theatre & film, site specific works, and TV in the UK and Finland, working with Gaby Agis, Andrea Olsen, Tetsuro Fukuhara, and Miranda Tufnell amongst many other choreographers/directors. Between 2002-2021 Eeva and her husband Andy Paget ran a rural creative retreat p e n p y n f a r c h near Llandysul in SW Wales developing their work as ‘this is somatic’ and hosting Olsen and McHose for an impactful decade of Body and Earth retreats.
