Alumni

Tia Kramer

Tia Kramer is social choreographer, site specific performance artist, and educator interested in everyday gestures of human connection. Through her practice, she rearranges elements of daily life—relationships, site and community—to create experiences that interrupt the ordinary. She aspires to engage participants in acts of embodied poetry and collective imagination.

Kramer’s work has been supported by the Seattle Art Museum OSP Residency, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Henry Art Gallery, 4Culture, Artist Trust, and the Eichholz Foundation but her biggest accomplishment to date is when her 5 year old son said “I’m already an artist, just like my mama.” Tia lives in Walla Walla, WA, a vibrant community nestled among expansive agricultural fields and the Blue Mountains.

www.tiakramer.com

Visit her website to see what she current work.

Performance for One Person, A series of public encounters choreographed with and for individual residents of Walla Walla, Washington

Performance for One Person, A series of public encounters choreographed with and for individual residents of Walla Walla, Washington was devised by Tia Kramer in collaboration with writer/performer Sabina Rogers and dancer Kathryn Padberg. Each performance is researched in relationship with a single audience member and created in collaboration with their shared communities. Woven into the routine of the audience member’s life, these encounters unfold over the course of hours or days and often end in one culminating event. By rearranging elements of daily life—relationships, site and community—Kramer and her collaborators blur the line between everyday and performance. 

As of May 2020, two performances are complete: At Dusk We Walk Home Together, Performance for Guillermo and Three Larks, Performance for Laurie. A third is being developed for Tia’s postal worker, Phillip. Kramer approaches these performances as testimony both to the subjective state of individual bodies and to the histories that have molded them. They mingle, percolate, and pour into each other. There is no single thread, but rather a meshwork of tangled narratives.

Orbiting Together

Orbiting Together
Seattle Art Museum Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, WA

Where we once used the stars and our intuition to locate ourselves, we now look to our phones, rarely considering our bodies in relation to celestial objects orbiting overhead.

Orbiting Together was a participatory project created by Tia Kramer and Eric John Olson. This project used a network of satellites flying over the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) Olympic Sculpture Park as triggers for messages encouraging participants to engage their somatic awareness. Individuals opted into the system create a rhizomatic positioning system composed of people in the place of technology. By the end of the two-month SAM residency, 500 subscribers participated and the project collected hundreds of responses logged on Instagram account and website.

Orbiting Together’s satellite triggered text message system was book ended by two participatory experiences that playfully embraced and critiqued the ways we interact with technology. Choreographer Tamin Totke then joined Tia and Eric to create two public programs called Art Encounters. Throughout the performances, participants received text messages directing them through a series of movements, acts of connection with strangers, and imaginary landscapes. The instructions corresponded, in real time, to satellites passing overhead.

To learn more about the text instructions, satellite triggers and to view the AMAZING contributor responses visit: http://tiakramer.com/projects. ORBITING TOGETHER was generously funded by the 2018 Seattle Art Museum Olympic Sculpture Park Winter Residency and a grant from the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation.