Eleanor Bauer

Residency at ImPulsTanz 2010

Project:

The Newest Age

What is specific and irreplaceable/untranslatable about the movement of the body, the organization of bodies moving in relation to each other? How can we work on dance in a way that capitalizes on its strengths as a medium made of people, by people, for people? How can we make dance-in/of/for-itself without denying the cultural, political, narrative and nonabstract realities that the body is a part of, and also without falling into the trap of multimedia or dance theater framing? How can we get on with dancing in a way that remains contemporary, not rooted in nostalgia for or quotation of other periods in history, art, or philosophy when we found (or thought we found) ways to appreciate a certain purity of experience of things-in-themselves, or a certain cultural relevance or importance of dancing? Does such purity or relevance exist, and did either ever exist? How can the contemporary experience of networked sense-making help us get over our cultural confusion about dance and update our understandings of purity, abstraction, and meaning?

In a multi fold investigation of what is essential to dance and choreography as a total
artwork of being human, The Newest Age is a dance piece that proposes an inclusive approach to the complexity of the body in motion, for makers and viewers alike. By approaching choreography and dance as an expression of energy, I hope to access a vital experience of the human body as a volatile meshwork of senses, sensations, and sense that brings together the material and conceptual aspects of the moving body. The Newest Age is rooted in a desire to tackle the very is-ness of dance and choreography while unhinging it from recent and historical framing that don’t allow it to be seen in it’s own light. By working towards an ontology of dance that embraces the absolute marriage of subject and object in the truth of experience, the inseparability of thought and action at the level of being-in-itself, the conflation of abstraction and meaning that the human body cannot escape, and the socially shared circumstances of meaning production that dance as a medium epitomizes, The Newest Age is an attempt to create an experience of dance that pushes it out of its hermetic history and prison of selfreference, forward into the present tense, where it belongs as a live art form.

Researching body practices and anatomical concepts based on energy systems, exchange, and transformation is a method to see what such elemental, qualitative, borderline material/immaterial paradigms can offer in terms of expression. As in all systems, the simpler the rules, the more complex the results: perhaps this very ancient, very contemporary notion of “energy” provides an abstract enough motivation for revealing the body as a non-abstract network of meanings, via a method which does not start from the meanings themselves, but rather allows or invites meanings as emergent properties of a somatic practice. Conceiving of
dance as the making-visible of invisible omnipresent forces (sic Deleuze) I am interested to utilize energy models such as chakras and meridians, among other such spectra, as systems from which to build and organize modes of movement and performance that are as abstract as they are not, as human as they are non-human, in order to create a situation that marries body with environment and instigates a sense of movement-in-itself that is less encoded by a
particularly recognizable dance lexicon.

In most all my previous works -- ELEANOR! (2005), Dig My Aura (2007), At Large
(2008), The Heather Lang Show By Eleanor Bauer and Vice Versus (2009), and (BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS) (2010) -- I have combined my education and interest in dance and choreography with a general affection for other forms of expression, be they music, theater, performance art, photography, video, writing, or mainstream entertainment, in order to connect my dancing to a wider field of operation and existence, or in order to coordinate my dance experiences with other experiences and modes of understanding. Prompted by my love of dance-in-itself as well as my observation of the difficulty I see now in the contemporary dance field for choreographers to create contexts where dancing can be fully appreciated without irony, recourse to history, or interdependence on other media, I'd like now to focus
more specifically on dance and movement alone, to articulate what choreography is about for me as its own combination of various modes of meaning production and synthesis. I'd like to get towards an experience of dance for a viewer that is as varied in terms of intelligence and connections to other fields of information as the experience of moving is for me. I feel an urgency now to use my skills and experience to push this very particular medium forward in a way that asserts relevance for myself and others by working on the plenitude of what dance is
without wandering into the neighboring forms of expression that surround dance but are not necessarily dance. Although what one considers dance is very open to interpretation and I do not wish to control or limit that, I am interested to explore the medium of dance “on its own terms” which means that no matter how philosophical my thinking becomes in the process of defining my practice, in the end product of The Newest Age, my neighbor’s mother will understand it as dance and should not feel excluded from creating its meaning.

In pursuit of a pure dance experience we must avoid the trap of nostalgia for a time
when "just dancing" was possible. It is not uncommon that people in the dance field who are concerned with the role of dance today speak of getting "back to dancing", in terms of the “conceptual” or postmodern effects on the way we can or cannot accept dance as a current and self-sufficient art form. I am not interested in going back in time, in referencing or borrowing from any period when one could imagine that “just dancing” was either easier or more permitted, nor in using reference as an excuse or frame through which to make full-out, welldone, detailed, precise, embodied, sincere, bombastic, voluptuous, expressive, serious, articulated, or skill-oriented dancing more comfortable and known. I am not interested in putting dance in quotation marks. Quotation marks are the ultimate postmodern excuse which says that context redefines content. Rather, I would like to think how content defines context: how a movement, the body, or matter defines the space and environment it inhabits, how the object of attention looks back at the looker and thus defines the terms and conditions of looking. The strength of dance as a medium of performing subjects grants the potential to produce unique experiences regardless of context, and therein lies the inimitable power of dance. Rather than suffering the melancholy of dance’s ephemerality as a constant death, let’s take advantage of its contemporaneity as a medium locked in the present-tense, constantly refreshing itself, and learn to use it.

Eleanor Bauer

Eleanor Bauer's performance at ImPulsTanz 2010:
"(BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS)"

within the frame of the [8:tension] Young Choreographers' Series

Photo © Eleanor Bauer