Choreographer and dancer Deborah Hay often says, as a movement directive for performers, “turn your fucking head.” It’s anatomical and literal, but it is also psychological and phenomenological. It’s about what happens to your perception of space and time when you turn your head: to get un-stuck from wherever you think front is, to experience your surroundings, to add dimensionality to your perspective, to avoid tunnel-vision or spacing out. I think this makes a lot of sense, not just in the studio or onstage, but in the field at large. Looking to the side means not just seeing where I’m going or what’s in front of me, or being in a line of futures and pasts, but remembering to check out who’s with me. Looking to the side means remembering how much information, ideas, and wisdom my contemporaries, colleagues, and collaborators have that I don’t. As we share the same time, all these other perspectives bring what’s happening and what we are doing here into resolution, which makes the paths forward multiply, or the one I’m on feel wider and less lonely. In the art world, people aren’t encouraged to cite one another’s work that much, as if we should all be claiming originality and individual genius. I don’t believe in either of those things. We are all perceptual sponges. Our bodies are dirty containers through which everything passes and leaves a trace. Our minds are fully populated with arbitrary and curated collections of learned behaviors, patterns, beliefs, and concepts. What falls out when we move, act, speak, and create is not one of ours but all of ours. The people that are in and around me keep me company when I dance. Especially when I’m alone in the studio, that’s when I see and hear them the most; when I’m groping for tools and support in my practice, when I’m riffing and recognizing what’s in there, when I’m deciding where and how to start. I’m never alone in my bind (mind + body = bind) and thank goodness because it’d probably be boring and awkwardly narcissistic to look inward and find just one coherent thing I could call myself. I think dancers are often acutely aware of our own influences, as self-observation and understanding our patterns are among our most important tools. In this way, turning inward and turning our fucking heads are almost the same thing. In all of my dances, explicitly or implicitly, I nod to the many within and out there. – Eleanor Bauer, August 2019