Eleanor Bauer Documentation / Examination

What happened

Who asked for it

What mistakes were serendipitous

How did the piece get mad

Who’s idea was it

Whose line is it anyway

How did it get so big

When didn’t I say no

What did I learn

How was it structured

The style and form of feelings, also fleeting⁸

I have no more colours¹⁰

I am interested in how the words stick
how the words drift
how the words get ripped

I saved all the versions of the score
in chronological order
I saved all the notes from all the runs
scribbled in the dark
I saved all the schedules of all the rehearsal days
revised and reformulated

I saved all the programs and tickets¹¹
I saved all the videos and recorded interviews
I saved all the writings and screen recordings
I saved all the sleepless nights
I saved all the emails and negotiations
I saved all the self-righteous moments of diplomatic triumph
I saved all the embarrassments
I saved all the mistakes

At the end of the day
I’m gonna take it from the top
and I’m gonna repeat myself   
I’m gonna revisit the wounds
and perform the same errors twice
I’m gonna preach about the insights
and carry on rendering myself vulnerable
to fucking it up
or getting it right

This time
there is not an order
but a number of orderings
emergent forms
parts without a fixed position in the whole

There will be histories
like how a text went from this to that
or who said what that stuck and became a thing¹²
or how things made sense later and in retrospect

future and past selves leaving each other cryptic treasure-hunts¹³
under the undecided orderings and intuitive associations
the unturned rocks and the whispered inklings

There should be no end
But we’ve gotta stop somewhere

There will be a book series
called A lot of moving parts
and it will be just that
no beginning and no end
many minor figures
assembled in a system of relations

Essays

Stories

Poetry

Negotiations

Scores

Rants

Models

Letters

Insights

Fantasies

Problems

Maybes

The process of documenting all of these has already begun
The question remains
What will remain
What sticks
What bounces
What’s worth the storage space
What’s worth repeating
For the children
For the futures
Maybe
it’s less
than

we

or I
think
Maybe
it all comes down
to a feeling
a repertoire and a compass
the sea and the life rafts
the depths and the islands
the ineffable and the dings we ding
dinging

ringing

so maybe the question is rather

What Resonates?

– Eleanor Bauer, June 2018¹⁶

Notes

1. It is said that smell bears the strongest link to memory, of all the senses.
2. I have also heard that we remember better what impacts us emotionally.
3. My friend Chrysa Parkinson told me once, by way of talking me out of obsessing over an unrequited love, ‘drop it, and if it bounces back, then it’s worth your time.’ In an artistic process, if an idea’s not working, I tell myself to drop it, and if it bounces back, then it’s worth my time. But I’m stubborn and tenacious.
4. Den Danske Scenekunstskole / The Danish National School of Performing Arts.
5. (2017). Choreography and Direction: Eleanor Bauer. Dance, Choreography, Text, and Performance: Ágnes Grelinger, Amalie Bergstein Nielsen, Andreas Haglund, Evita Tsakalaki, Irma von Platen, Jon Andreas Hoff, Kalliopi Siganou, Paolo Gile, Sara Grotenfelt, Tilda le Grand, Tobias Skjöld, Vivian Põldoja, Onur Agbaba.
6. This is not a reference to Deborah Hay, but an actual hypothetical question.
7. Peli as in Peli Grietzer, PhD from Harvard Comparative Literature and the HUJI Einstein Institute of Mathematics, whose dissertation borrows mathematical forms from deep learning theory to model the ontology of ‘ambient’ phenomena like moods, vibes, styles, and ‘structures of feeling,’ and goes on to deductively derive something like Modernist poetic practice from this premise. (source: Glass Bead)
8. The style and form of feelings, also fleeting is the name of a score performed in a piece called NEAR (2018) that I choreographed with the dancers of Cullbergbaletten in commissioned collaboration with pop music artist Yung Lean. The style and form of feelings, also fleeting is a task that sources the felt sense of emotion for rendering formal movement material. The language comes from my practice of a task called Dancing Is (see footnote 9).
9. Dancing Is is the name of a dancing and writing practicedeveloped by Zoë Poluch and Stina Nyberg that is used to give definitive language, however temporary in its accuracy, to one’s immediate subjective experience of what dancing is.
10. Jag har inga färger (translation: I have no more colours) is a line in Oktober Poem by Jonatan Leandoer Håstad/Yung Lean, from the piece NEAR (see footnote 8).
11. I don’t have paper traces of everything I have performed, but I keep a ticket stub or program from every performance I see. In some cases, I keep more, like from Directory 3: Tattoo by Deufert and Plischke at DeSingel in February 2006, wherein they gave the audience a signed artefact from the performance as if from an archive. I still have mine. It’s a white paper hat with charcoal markings from the show. In 2017, when I was moving out of my home of thirteen years in Brussels, I was convinced by my friend Povilas Bastys not to throw it all away. So the pile of tickets and programs is sitting in storage. Now most tickets are digital, so the archiving has kind of stopped.
12. like when Adam Schutt from Cullbergbaletten thought I meant text message when I said text, and I liked the idea, so the whole task evolved into people texting each other scores.
13. I have the impression when things fall together in a creative process that my past and current selves have suddenly made new sense to each other. It makes me feel that time is not linear. It makes me think that maybe our past and future selves are always in conversation, and sometimes our present selves are let in on it.
14. Premiere 10 August 2018 at Way Out West music festival in Gothenburg, Sweden.
15. Premiere 23 February 2019 at Schauspielhaus Bochum in Bochum, Germany.
16. This text was written as the final examination material for a PhD course on documentation in artistic research at Stockholm University of The Arts in June 2018. The poem-essay is an attempt to address documentation as re-mediation through a form that is appropriate to my research (on a closer relation between dance-thought and language-thought) and methodological aims of poetic efficiency and accuracy. It documents my documenting. Approaching the partial-ness of documentation via the selection processes of memory, trying to spatialise the felt sense of how reflection and memory organises itself, and expressing the dis/integration of embodied history as an archive of its own logic in which details expand and contract in a dynamic manner, the essay-poem is at once a frozen slice of time in a continual process, just like any other writing in a life of writing, and an examination of what that continual slicing process captures, or doesn’t, and how.