Reflection by Tristan Bass-Kreuger

When I first invited Eiko to present her work in our Dance on Film series, I envisioned something more sedate than her usual performances. She need only verbally introduce a selection of her short video pieces, expand on the growing importance of visual media in her work, and answer a few questions from the audience. What the event turned into, nearly a year later, was something far more ambitious—a narrated journey through her recent works Rock is Broken, A Body in Fukushima, and What is War, wherein she played the role of the impresario, offering thoughtful and frequently amusing introductions, before launching into full-scale performance, transporting the audience into irradiated landscapes and spaces marked by catastrophic violence. “I’m being greedy,” she said at one moment during the night, acknowledging that we were packing sections from multiple evening-length pieces into an unnaturally short time frame.

But despite fears that the evening’s performance/lecture might lack the sense of duration achieved, for example, in the 7 hour MoMA performance of A Body in Fukushima, these three selections, when placed in conversation with each other, had a cumulative weight of their own; they worked together to make distance and absence tangible. Rock is Broken was filmed mid-winter in the charred remains of Jacob’s Pillow’s Doris Duke Theater, and it was a last-minute addition to the program, inspired by Rochester’s desolate snowscape and by the memory of the late Kat Sirico, a beloved production manager at both the University of Rochester and Jacob’s Pillow. Eiko wanted to bring the outside inside—and indeed the gently crackling snow and ice in the film let us live with the cold we had escaped from, while showing us how spaces are combustible, liable to disappear at a moment’s notice.

A Body in Fukushima took up the bulk of the performance. During rehearsal, Eiko announced that the stage needed more mess, and indeed during the night of the show I sat mesmerized as she ramped up the intensity of her movement, covering, bit by bit, the pristine wooden floor in fabric, soil, and paper, until the whole stage looked like an abstract expressionist canvas. This was a deliberate desecration that only appeared incidental. After the performance, she took a degree of joy in watching us PhD students diverging from our usual scholarly endeavors to get on our hands and knees to scrub the floors. Cleaning and dirtying are serious practices, thankfully made easier when not dealing with Caesium’s 30 year half life.

What is War reinforced the urgency in the night’s meditation on catastrophe. In resonance with the tales of the women sexually abused by Japanese soldiers in Nanjing, Eiko stood naked in the center of the stage. I felt struck, as an observer, by the stark reality of the lonely, defiant body before us. Later, taking up Kyoko Hayashi’s call to perform as “a body without outlines,” Eiko showed that the corporeal boundaries we take for granted, formed by flesh and hair are in fact mutable. Her movement took her beyond her skin.

With Eiko only having a few days to understand the affordances of the space and reedit and condense her videos, this was a performance that coalesced and found its form only at the last minute. The final tech rehearsal was still a stop-start working-through of various cues and new ideas. Only during the event itself did things take concrete shape, but I was amazed to see how coherent and fluid everything was as these pieces came alive before us. As much as Eiko’s work challenges us to dissolve boundaries, it also has a remarkable moral clarity, and these three pieces brought the stakes of our bodily entanglements into stark relief.