ELEANOR!
Eleanor Bauer's signature solo ELEANOR! is a humorous diatribe on the blur between artistic production and survival skills entangled in an artist's basic drives for money and recognition. In the place where self-promotion becomes artwork, selling and trading one's skills becomes selling and trading oneself, and diversity becomes sustainability, Bauer delivers a schizophrenic and side-splittingly critical portrait of the performing artist today as a "post-fordist art prostitute".
Bauer situates her story within the lives and realities of the audience members, meeting each one individually and conducting a demographic survey of their professional lives, giving away or selling t-shirts with her name on them, explaining the economic benefits created by this efficient form of authorship and self-distribution...
Each performance of ELEANOR! is unique to the time and place in which it is performed, ranging in length from 45 minutes to an hour, depending on the context and necessity of translation, as well as the mode of translation (live translation, translation by a brave volunteer from the audience, or a rehearsed double). Featuring an incisive lecture adapted from Portrait of the Artist as a Worker by Dieter Lesage, as framed by a detailed and rhythmic dance phrase rooted in the same frenetic behavior as described in the lecture, the originally concise twelve minute solo remains intact within the performance as a historical document of the exigent conditions that necessitated it's creation.
ELEANOR! premiered January 28, 2005 in New York, New York, as curated by Miguel Gutierrez in 'Young Americans,' an edition of the biannual artist-curated benefit performance series 'Food for Thought,' presented by Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church.