Choreographer and dancer-
Co-artistic director Vanguardia Dance- Collaborator of multidisciplinary projects.
Olga Barrios
ABOUT
Olga is a multi-award winner artist, choreographer, dancer, teacher, producer and researcher based in Toronto and Santa Marta. Her artistic practice encompasses choreography for the stage, unconventional spaces, video dance, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her research stems from the infinite possibilities of the body as a sensitive, political, and poetic territory, exploring the relationships between movement, emotion, social context, image, sound, and other artistic disciplines. In her creative processes, the idea of the body as artifact emerges, employing resources such as projecting images onto the body, the sound body, the transformation of objects and materials, and the dancing camera, expanding the possibilities of the performative experience.
As a woman in the contemporary world, her work addresses questions related to the body and its context: the relationship with nature and the human footprint on the environment, the place of the feminine, the fragility and strength of women's voices, and the body as a territory that transforms in dialogue with the territories it inhabits.
She has 25 years of professional experience in Colombia, Canada, and the United States.
Repertoire
Group works for touring
ECHOE OF A HAIR: Hairy Stories
A FLOR DE PELO: Historias peludas
From bizarre tangled dreams, to hairstyle escape routes, to dispossession, censorship and hair desires.
CONVERSATIONS: Hidden Stories
Conversaciones: Historias ocultas
A dialogue of women throught the Americas.
A collaboration between Vanguardia Dance and Aanmitaagzi.
Directed by Olga Barrios
HYBRID WOMEN
MUJERES HIBRIDAS
A Vanguardia Dance production.
It is a site-specific dance theatre ritual.
A duet with live sound music.
Solo works
Solo works ready to tour. Choreographed and perfomed by Olga.
Echoe of Hair
(A Flor de Pelo)
Solo of 15 minutes
Petunia
Behind Windows
(A ventana cerrada)
Remembering the Farewells (Recordando los Adioses)
An awared dance theatre full lengh solo work.
Honorific mention, Colombian Ministry of Culture Awards 2004.
Other works
Independent selected works directed choreographed and produced by Olga
Cabaret Carnaval
A dance theatre work premiered at Quinta de San Pedro Santa Marta, Colombia 2018-19
Blue Trawl
(Arrastre Azul)
A contemporary dance work inspired by the Colombian Caribbean.
Creation Research Grant in Dance, Colombian Ministry of Culture 2014. Premiered in Santa Marta, Colombia.
Genoveva
2017
The call of the Shells
(El llamado de los caracoles)
Site Specific at the comunity of Pozos colorados. 2014
A dance work for stage in collaboration with Oscar Leone 2006.
Dance is poetry in movement
COLLABORATIONS
Working with diverse projects
One important aspect of Olga´s work is sharing ideas and explorations with artists and projects of diverse geograpraghies and pulsions. Thus, here are the currently collaborations.
LATITUDE-S COLLECTIVE
Collaboration by Olga Barrios and Edgardo Moreno.
In 2020 we started an artistic collaboration connected by video and online interactions, creating a series of experimental videos to be presented in diverse formats (screenings, online, exhibition, installation format). Starting with the connection of bodies in diverse landscapes and soundscapes, we aim to create an interdisciplinary dialogue between video, dance and sound design. Our questions are connected to shifted bodies in migration/displacement due to climate change and human impact.
Works:
Keeping the distance: Sculpting image in a shifted body, is a series of experimental videos (6 vignettes) where the process departs from the notion of a body as the place where the vibrations of creation start, connecting with the idea of the present situation of Covid 19, where the bodies are sick and need to be isolated. All activities are asking for the distance of the bodies. That is how many of the life activities need to be transformed in a digital space for a while, and we need to surf into it to keep contact. Meeting with friends, working, going to an event, having parties, and of course to continue our space of artistic creation as an important way of constructing society. Many things are connected now through virtual spaces. That raises questions related with a political body and the frontiers.
Memories of Water: Creation in Canada, Chile and Colombia. Series of 8 videos. Performance and installation in progress.
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PATA E GANSO
Plataform for creation, presentation and touring in Colombia
El colectivo y plataforma PATA E GANSO, es un espacio abierto con el objetivo de impulsar la creación y producción de trabajos de danza contemporánea en la ciudad de Barranquilla y el Caribe.
El colectivo, convoca a artistas establecidos y emergentes de danza contemporánea, para presentar trabajos en esta nueva plataforma de danza en la ciudad de Barranquilla desde agosto del 2017.
Este es un espacio que se abre para movilizar trabajos en diferentes momentos de la creación y puesta en escena. De esta manera es un espacio para trabajos en proceso, trabajos ya realizados y nuevas propuestas.
Fundado por las maestras Olga Barrios y Tania Iglesias, es un colectivo donde participan diferentes artistas jóvenes y establecidos del Caribe Colombiano.
TRIANGLE PROJECT COLLECTIVE
Interdisciplinary work
Choreographer Olga Barrios (Colombian/Canadian), performance artist/activist Coman Poon (Chinese-Canadian/Settler-immigrant) and musician/composer Edgardo Moreno developped The triangle project, a cross-disciplinary and polyaesthetic artistic conversation across physical and technologically mediated distance, where three artists from three different latitudes send signals to each other in order to transmute the space between.
CONTACT
