jeaninedurning

Nonstopping. The practice is called nonstopping because it makes direct felt-sense to anyone
who hears it. It could be called keeping-going, but it’s not. Nonstopping is a negation of
stasis, a project against paralysis. “There is a lot of shit going on,” says Jeanine during the
workshop introduction, “sometimes it’s hard to go to the studio and do stuff.” And from this
point forward there is an outside in this room, the larger lifeworld each of us carries and
sometimes ignores is made present. “There are so many external and internal circumstances
that can conspire against creativity... How can questions be motivators instead of paralyzers?
You’re gonna want to stop. Find out how to continue.”

Someone walks into the room at the start of the workshop and leaves just a few minutes later.
They came to pick something up that they’d left in the studio prior. “Leaving – so soon?”
Jeanine says, in a dry but somewhat theatrical tone that is both funny and sad. It feels sincere,
even if we all recognize it as a well-timed improvised joke, and laugh. This double tenor of
gravity and humor marks a lot of what Jeanine does and says. I can see it as a framework for
complexity to unfold within her work, but I also see it as one of the many possible strategies
for relentless continuity in nonstopping: how to be both light enough and serious enough to
carry on. Too much gravity could weigh anyone down and make them want to stop, and too
much lightness could feel like nothing matters and make them want to stop. When the person
who came and left leaves, she says, “We’ll be using that door later on. But not now.”

Another framing tension that supports nonstopping is speed; the tension between fast and
slow, or, how to move fast enough to maintain the necessary momentum to keep going and
how to move slow enough to track. It sounds simple, and in language it is, but it holds up a
framework for attention, for attending to what we’re doing, for tending what we’re doing,
which in practice is actually quite complex. The idea of tracking is about awareness of action,
to which Jeanine also says, “don’t move faster than you can feel.”

We are asked to be aware of location, as in, where we are in the room. “Where you are is also
where you are not,” says Jeanine. In this very T.S. Eliot style paradox lies another framing
tension to help resist stagnation. I could be aware of where I am in the room in relation to
everything else and have a sense of space and composition while sitting still, but as soon as I
am reminded that where I am is where I am not, the whole space is charged and I have to
escape where I am before the negative space collapses around me.

The door is finally introduced. If you need to refresh your desire, refresh your concentration,
get unstuck, restart to be able to go on, you can simply leave through the door and come
back. And sometimes we do. The hard part is not considering the entrance or exit any more
special than any other movement; not to come in and declare here I am and I’m starting again
now but to start before you are ready even if you left to come back in order to be ready. I’m
dropping quotation marks and punctuation here in order to make that sense of nonstopping
more felt. The door is there but it’s not an escape, it’s just another trick to keep going. And it
works because there is an outside of this room even if I choose to be in it.

Accepting the material that arises might be the hardest thing of all. When everything that
arises has a past and makes an impression in the now, I experience recognition that perhaps
includes boredom of my habits; I experience taste that perhaps includes distaste; I have an
opinion that perhaps includes regret or embarrassment. I want to get stuck just so that I have
an actual problem to solve that makes me move to become unstuck, I kick around objects or
push up against the walls just to feel something besides my own dancing in its own echo
chamber. But there is a deeper implication to accepting the material that arises, and that is in
Jeanine’s consideration of nonstopping as choreographic.

In a small booklet also titled nonstopping, Jeanine writes in dialogue with Hillary Clark:

We are put in pairs and instructed to take turns nonstop talking for ten minutes while the
listener attends primarily to the structure of the thinking rather than the content. Jeanine
speaks about articulation without accuracy when it comes to nonstop talking – one doesn’t
have to say exactly what they think or feel or get bogged down with finding the right words
or telling the truth. The focus is on the continuity of articulation itself. It can feel
psychoanalytic at times watching this river of content spill forth and soft-wondering in my
inner Steve Urkel voice, “did I do that?” Yet the deeper discovery is not in what I’ve said but
in the underlying structures of thought that point to the choreographer inside the nonstopper:
the way of navigating, turning corners, circling around, connecting, bouncing off of and/or
moving through stuff.

“Nonstopping is a survival technique,” Jeanine tells us, “but also practical.” The pragmatic
nature of the practice itself creates ripples of wider poetic resonance, because of the openness
in relation to content as met with rigorous presence. Openness and rigor: another framing
tension. It occurred to me at one point that nonstopping is like meditation but harder. Again in
dialogue with Hillary Clarke, Jeanine writes: “It’s an ongoing life process that isn’t just about
dance or performance or even always getting into the studio to practice but it’s become more
about a way of living or a philosophy that has a practical methodology to it.”

After the workshop I tell Jeanine she has a masterful way of facilitating this practice, she says
thanks, it’s taken several years and several workshops to figure out. It’s been a process of
finding out how little can be said before getting going. “What are the minimal conditions to
be ready?” is one of the first questions she asks us, and she reminds us to “start before you
are ready,” almost every time we begin a practice.

In the nonstopping booklet I read that nonstopping came about around 2008 through pieces
such as inging which was nonstop talking and later on To Being (2012) which was nonstop
moving, and carried on to also include nonstop writing. Other pieces that held nonstopping
have been This Shape, We Are In (2015), dark matter (2017), here, before (2019), Last Shelter
(2021), and untitled (2023). Even these dates are a simplification, marking perhaps the first
public presentation or the start of research, but the processes bleed and bled into one another
through varied research residencies, performances, or iterations, and above all the
ongoingness of Jeanine’s own nonstopping, which is not just about going to the studio and
setting a timer, but the steady nonstopping of her questioning, caring, observant, absorbent
modybind that refuses to settle, refuses to settle for less, refuses to settle on a final point.

After her practice presentation, also during Within Practice, Jeanine reads a long list of thank
you’s, ranging from the presenters and curators who have sustained her practice over the
years to the Within Practice team of curators, producers, and assistants who made her week in
Stockholm possible, to the Dansenshus technican Johannes Fäst who custom-built a black
wooden theatrical cube for her presentation. The depth of her appreciation for every detail of
circumstance that conspires to make her practice possible underlines her constant awareness
of the circumstances beyond her control that threaten to halt it.

BIO:

Eleanor Bauer is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of dance, writing, choreography, music, and image. Her work is a synthesis of embodied intelligences, a practice of making sense with the senses. From solos and talk shows to large ensemble pieces and films, her versatile works ranging in scale, media, and genre have toured internationally to critical acclaim.

Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, Bauer holds a BFA in Dance from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts (2003), is a graduate of the Research Cycle at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels (2006), and completed her PhD in Performative and Media-Based Practices with a Specialization in Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts (2022).

Bauer established the Brussels-based company GoodMove vzw in 2007, through which she produced performances and collaborations until 2020. During this time her works toured internationally to critical acclaim in prominent festivals and theaters primarily in Europe. She was artist in residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels from 2013-2016. She has been commissioned as a choreographer by, among others, Cullberg in Stockholm, Schauspielhaus Bochum, Corpus at the Royal Danish Theater, Nora in London, and several universities.

Bauer has worked as a performer with Matthew Barney, Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas, Tino Sehgal, Trisha Brown, Every Ocean Hughes, David Zambrano, Mette Ingvartsen, Ictus music ensemble, The Knife, and Fever Ray, among others.

Bauer has extensive teaching experience in both academic and public/professional contexts. As an insatiable researcher, Bauer teaches, writes, lectures, and co-creates contexts for exchange of knowledge in the arts. Together with Ellen Söderhult and Alice Chauchat, she co-founded the open-source format for exchange of practices in the performing arts called Nobody's Business in 2015, which has since been adapted by practitioners and organizers worldwide. Other past and ongoing educational, performative, and discursive projects include BAUER HOUR, PROTO TALKS, Doctor Dance, and A class for a cause, as well as two podcasts: How Dance Thinks from 2018, and Sleeping Giant Dreams in 2020. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Dance at Stockholm University of the Arts.

www.eleanorbauer.info