Intimate Choreography and the Responsibility of the Audience: BodyCartography Project’s closer

Michael J. Kramer reflects on his experience of closer, a contemporary dance performance created by BodyCartography Project, led by the Minneapolis-based creative team of Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad and presented by the Chicago Cultural Center. The performance’s two parts—site-specific one-on-one performances in Hamlin Park and an ensemble performance turned social dance at Links Hall—stage “two dreams of contemporary dance”: “One is the urge to dissolve the boundary between performer and audience; the other is to intensify that distinction.” Kramer probes the responsibilities and intimacies of spectatorship, asking “What does it mean to watch dance-based movement, aesthetically, ethically, politically?”