BIO:
Olana is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator, curator and producer based in Holyoke, MA. She holds an MFA in Experimental Choreography from University of California, Riverside and a BA from Hampshire College. She is a founding member and co-director of LOCULUS, a dance and performance collective that creates performance in non-traditional spaces, publishes The Loculus Journal, and directs The Loculus Studio in Holyoke. She has had the privilege of studying and performing with artists such as Chris Aiken, Angie Hauser, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Luis Lara Malvacias, Paul Matteson, Jennifer Nugent, taisha paggett, Joel Smith, and Ni’Ja Whitson. Her choreography has been performed in New York, Philadelphia, Southern California, Minnesota, and throughout New England. Her photography has been featured in a number of zines and journals and has been exhibited at VSOP Projects in Greenport, NY. Olana has held faculty positions in the Dance Programs at Sarah Lawrence College and Springfield College, was a graduate teaching assistant at the University of California Riverside, and has been a guest artist at Pioneer Valley Performing Arts High School. She currently teaches in the dance program at Keene State College, works as the Communications Coordinator for MASS MoCA's Assets for Artists program, and collaborates with Deborah Goffe/Scapegoat Garden as the Creative Producer for Liturgy|Order|Bridge.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My research looks at improvisational movement and technologies, including analogue photography and electronic music, for looping and layering in relation to liminality, memory, and the gray area. In discussing color, gray is a color without color – any shade that falls somewhere on the binarized spectrum between black and white is called gray. I work with overlapping, reused, and duplicated materials and mediums in singular performance as well as over time and seemingly separate projects. I seek to make public the spaces between the materials (photography, production, sound, words, movement), the multiple, sometimes conflicting ways they exist in space and how we engage with them across maker, performer, and witness lines. Through extensive repetition – materials repeating themselves, replicating each other, and overlapping over and over again – each material breaths, repetitively taking from and contributing to the work.
