Photo by Andrew Jordan

Cori Olinghouse is a movement artist, teacher, and archivist whose work explores the shapeshifting capacities of the body, space, and time.  Olinghouse’s choreography has been presented by The Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Bennington College, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Dixon Place, Roulette, and Movement Research. In 2011, Olinghouse was commissioned by Danspace Project to create voix de ville, featuring work by herself, voguers Javier Ninja and Archie Burnett, Kota Yamazaki, and Bill Irwin, as a re-imagining of Vaudeville in which freestyle performers expressed their culturally unique voix de ville, or “voices of the city.”  Receiving wide acclaim, Deborah Jowitt of The Village Voice heralded, “What Olinghouse has quite entrancingly deconstructed is the notion of calculated expertise, efficient timing, and showmanship.”  Olinghouse has also been supported as a Movement Research Artist-in-residence (2009-2011).  She has received residencies from Baryshnikov Arts Center, Kaatsbaan, The Yard, Bennington College, Ohio State University and Dance Theater Workshop’s Outer/Space Program.  Currently, she is collaborating with filmmaker, Shona Masarin to create a 16 mm b&w film, Ghost line. She holds a BA in Dance, Writing, and Video from Bennington College.

“Since 2005, my work has centered around the physical research of movement forms that explore transformation and shape-shifting.  From the eccentric dancers of the 20’s and 30’s, irreverently winding their rubbery legs and corkscrewing themselves to extremes, to the clowns like Bill Irwin, Grock, Keaton, and Chaplin – shrinking and growing – masters of illusion and humor, to the underground voguers – arm clicking and contortioned in polyrhythmic grace.  I am drawn to shape-shifters – to artists who have fluidity in revealing the complexity of patterns embedded in their own experiences and physical realities.  Many of these forms use storytelling, illusion, improvisation, and walk the edge between chaos and order, entertainment and art.  For me, the body is a rich point of entry because it is a alchemical place of possibility – that contains within it complex patterning, plasticity, and the ability for change.”