Be still.. and wait.. until your movement comes from your heart
Moving through everything
I started dancing at around 10 years old because I loved moving and the way it made me feel inside. After a few years of playing around I quickly decided that I wanted to become a dancer and started studying ballet, tap dance, jazz and contemporary. I travelled to London and New York when I was young deeply inspired and set to learn. In 2007 I started studying at Oslo National College of Arts- BA in Jazzdance. I then went to New York for one year, after ending my last year in Oslo with a BA in Contemporary Dance.
After finishing school I started creating my own projects and art. I created an outdoor Company with my friend and collegue Caroline Skjørshammer- named Compani UT. We created dance in nature, in close contact with water/wind/earth and fire.
I also worked for serveral years with disabled children and created a performance with an autistic young man named Stian. You can see the link below.
I also worked with horses and movement for many years.
Moving “the stage” to life
After I became a mother in 2016 everything about me changed. My relationship to my body, my way of moving, my nervous system, my family, my needs (and the list continues) changed. I did not want to dance anymore first and foremost because it felt too unsafe to be embodied, it was too overwhelming to face myself and all the feelings stored in my body after a traumatic birth.
And so I started creating in other ways. From another place. A need started arising deep within me to create change- on a personal, generational and collective level.
I wanted a different way of living, and I also really needed to make big changes in my life because my health was no longer what it was. I wanted to live closer to the land, more slow, more connected with me authentic self. A life without all the regular societal structures, more natural, more real.
And so much of my creative energy went to mothering. Staying close to my daughter, my family and trying to create an enviroment for us all, that felt nourishing. We also started building our straw bale off-grid house in 2018. So either I was mothering, house building or in therapy. It was intense.
Building team- myself, Arnfinn and his dad Bjørn. First night in new home.
Photo: Elin Osjord
Many expressions
In the years after birth I felt I needed to express myself. And, for a long time, I felt I did not have much energy to creative, so for many months my goal was to shape one ceramic bowl a week.
After months and years of not sleeping well, I eventually started writing things that I experienced in nature. And lastly, I started writing down memories of death, grief and sorrow. The past 6 years have been a huge trial in “letting go”. And there has been so many experiences in my life of grief, that I never had the capacity when I was younger to feel.
Now, in 2022- 6 years after giving birth I am brading this story, of me, into an expression I still do not know what is yet. But it is certainly very personal and very universal at the same time.
