Proper Dancing in the Background

Proper Dancing in the Background is a work in three parts:

1. a live performance

2. a video installation and

3. a set of instructions

Make a 360° rotation on one leg with a crisp packet under the pullover. Then shake the upper body until it rustles and scrunches. Balance on tin cans with hands and knees. Smear your naked body with Vaseline and lie in a pile of parsley leaves. Cut an onion, hollow it out, fill it with cherry purée and sew it together again.
In Proper Dancing in the Background, absurdly comic actions such as these are placed one after the other in a collage and seem at first sight not to follow any perceptible order. However the piece's unique logic quickly emerges. It is based on the simplicity and clarity of the actions themselves, which decide in their handicraft accuracy, the order and in which tempo they must be fulfilled. The performer's body sometimes moves in an everyday way and sometimes more dancerly while interacting with the objects. The familiar appears in unfamiliar relationships and it is these little alienations of the everyday that produce a unique associative series of meanings.
In connection to the other two parts of the project, the video installation and the set of instructions, questions are raised about the possibilities and boundaries of staging actions and their repeatability. With these Meyer-Keller invokes the carrying out of one's own version of Proper Dancing in the Background. Despite the expectations, where can the precise, even strict instructions leave the space needed in order to fulfil them? Or to put it differently, don't the strict instructions expose the very differences in the individual approaches to an action?

Proper Dancing in the Background was produced in 2000 during a residency at the Liminal Institute, a loose collective of SNDO graduates at the Gasthuis in Amsterdam. During two weeks, the five choreographers Nicole Beutler, Martin Butler, Erik Pold, Litò Walkey and Eva Meyer-Keller developed work independently of each other while offering regular feedback.