It’s not often you hear the voice of a 104-year-old on the radio. You’re even less likely to hear one so clear in thought, so spirited and full of enthusiasm for life. Eileen Kramer’s voice crackles with age, with the years she has lived, but from what she says, and the energetic way she says it, she could be at least 30 years younger. ‘I don’t know how long I will go on living,’ she says, but she’s still excited by the present: ‘There’s so much going on. I’m living in that period when a lot is being discovered about everything.’
Kramer is a dancer, artist, performer, famed in Australia for her expressive, idiomatic style of movement, and she’s still choreographing new works, although difficulties with balance have meant she has only just given up joining the dancers on stage. In Art of Now: Breath of Life on Radio 4 (produced by Eleanor McDowall) Kramer recalls how, aged 22, she went to see a performance by the Bodenwieser dance group and experienced a moment of recognition. Next day she went to watch them in rehearsal and then asked Madame Bodenwieser if she could join the company. ‘Life with her opened up your feelings,’ says Kramer. ‘The importance of feeling, the importance of expressing feelings.’ Bodenwieser had been forced to leave Vienna on the last train to Paris after the invasion by the Nazis; her husband, a theatre producer, had been arrested and died in a concentration camp. Kramer says of the experience of first meeting her, of the impact she had: ‘You have all this in you, and someone comes along and shows you how to express it in dance.’
After Bodenwieser died, Kramer left Australia and went to live in Paris where she worked as an artist’s model, at the same time as Jean-Paul Sartre and his friends were having their existential conversations at the Café de Flore.
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