MORNING: 11am-1pm

Dancing, not the Dancer

Through a series of practice-based choreographic scores, we will work on how to get out of the way of our own dancing, allowing ourselves to be the medium for dance to appear, rather than having dance be a medium for ourselves to appear. Starting with a score called "Dancing, not the Dancer" and moving through related exercises and conditions for dancing, we will focus the lenses of reception, initiation, completion, imagination and observation to learn from our own dancing. Dancing not the Dancer is about using everything we know and don't yet know to construct and maintain a horizon of continuously unfolding potential for movement and its actualisation. Exercising a breadth of technical, artistic, expressive, and performance skills, we work towards activating and refining each of our embodied knowledges in a way that is synthetic, intuitive, multi-intelligenced and generative. Dancing through, next to, with and beyond ourselves, Dancing not the Dancer lets the dancer be nothing more or less than everything that is danceable.
Assuming the subject of the dancer as a flexible and malleable agent, the interest is to experience how the dance changes the dancer, as much as, if not more than, the inverse. Dealing with dance post-self-expression, and yet situating the dancer and their choices within the system of what is danced, we assume dancer and dance as interdependent and co-constitutive. If every dancer is a constantly constructed process full of histories and futures, and every dance is a constantly constructed process full of histories and futures, how do these complex systems of constructed potential engage and actualize each other, as mutually influential agents? Let’s say the dancer (any dancer) is a corrupt conduit, constituted by and constitutive of all the dances they dance. Not transparently and thoroughly calculated, but mysteriously assimilated and coordinated by that little bit of chaos, indeterminacy, and x-factor that structures any being, and in structuring also corrupts anything learned or expressed by said being. Let’s call our mind-heart-bodies "dirty containers," through which everything that passes leaves a trace, and see our dancing (any dance) as a process of shaking our dirty containers. In short: we’ll shake our dirty containers and study what comes out.

AFTERNOON until 5pm

CHOREO | GRAPHY

CHOREO|GRAPHY is an inquiry into the nature (systems, processes, qualities, structures) of thought in improvised and choreographed dance in relation to the nature (systems, processes, qualities, structures) of thought in spoken and written language. Or, the relation between what we say we’re doing and what our dance is doing, what is understood through language and what is understood through movement, and how these things collaborate and collide in choreographic practice.
Respecting that different media enable different kinds of thought processes, ideas, or concepts to be reached, at the base of the research is how movement-thought itself, translatable or not to language or any other medium, might be observed and understood, incorporating perspectives of dance experience, scientific knowledge production, ontology, and philosophy of mind. Through the development and of dance and writing practices, we will work to get closer with language to the specificities and idiosyncrasies of dance-thought, challenging the structures and codes of language with the logics of the dancing body to produce more situated discourse and embodied poetics from within dance.
Working with the frictions and gaps between these two media of thought, through different approaches of translation, transposition, or intermediation, the project of articulating dance-thought in language is a means to reshape, manipulate, and handle the structures of language with critical and creative agency, to question the givens, to make words move, and ultimately to forge new choreographic tools by restructuring how we talk about and write dances, taking choreography literally as the writing of the dance, or dance-writing.

Biography:

Eleanor Bauer is a performer and performance-maker working at the intersections of choreography, dance, writing, music, and performance. Her pieces range in scale and media towards challenging categories, methods of producing, and ways of talking about performance. She has been producing her own work within the structure GoodMove vzw in Brussels since 2007, touring her versatile works internationally to critical acclaim. Bauer was artist in residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels from 2013-2016, and co-founded the open-source format for exchange of practices in the performing arts called Nobody's Business in 2015.
As a performer, Bauer has worked with David Zambrano, Mette Ingvartsen, Trisha Brown, Xavier Le Roy, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker/Rosas, Boris Charmatz/musée de la danse, Matthew Barney, Emily Roysdon, Ictus, The Knife, and others. Bauer also frequently teaches, mentors, and writes about dance and performance.
Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, Bauer studied at Idyllwild Arts Academy in California, holds a BFA in Dance from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts (2003), completed the Research Cycle at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels (2006), and is a current PhD candidate in Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts (2017-2022).

Please note, if you are doing the workshop you can attend the 9:30am YOGA class at a bargain rate: £7

Book two workshops and get 10% off the Early Bird Price!
contact: workshops.tripspace@gmail.com