My Eiko journal: Part 2

Eiko's A Body in Places
Wednesday, March 2

11:30am Delicious Movement workshop

I arrived a tad late but slipped off my shoes, got down on the floor with everyone else and took part in the second of Eiko's weekly Delicious Movement workshops at St. Mark's Church, learning so much about the genesis of her work. I enjoyed her focus on words like "surveying" and "landscape." The thought of every part and every millimeter of the body being unique terrain to be slowly surveyed, with the aid of the floor or a partner's body, effortlessly liberates the imagination. For the first time, I understand why she calls this movement "delicious." And Eiko is wickedly, wickedly funny! If you have only seen her perform, could you have guessed that?

May she get her wish to go the UN and teach Obama and Putin Delicious Movement, the critical aesthetic of hesitation! I'm grateful to Danspace Project for giving all of us this chance to get to know her better.

3pm Eiko solo

Can Eiko just stay in the East Village indefinitely and continue to reveal it? Please secure funding.

Yesterday, we walked south on Second Avenue and turned on Seventh Street into the office entrance of Middle Collegiate Church. We found Eiko sprawled on the floor of a brightly-lit meeting room where crimson fabric spilled against cream-colored tiles.

Eiko at Middle Collegiate Church
photos (c)2016, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

In the past, I might have written that Eiko made achingly-slow, minute "adjustments." After taking her workshop, I found the idea of "adjusting" too brain-oriented and deliberate for something that arises from discovery in the complex, intimate relationship of surfaces--body to floor, body to fabric. When force or sudden movement arises, it's like a dash of strong color across canvas or spice dropped into the recipe.

She worked that red stream, burying her face in it, gently pulling it to her, reaching into it, giving a sudden tug that reduced it to a puffy triangle. She crawled a bit and then withdrew with the fabric cascading from her chin to the floor. She protected it, perhaps, hid behind it in another moment. She struggled, finally smacking it against a blank white space on the wall where a film could have been projected. At one point, I got a good look at the fabric and noticed holes and tattered edges.

Here's a moment of Eiko walking against the carpet of the church's sanctuary where she took us next:

Eiko in Middle Collegiate Church sanctuary
photo (c)2016, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Eiko's bits of business with a half-filled bowl of water, a sheet ripped from a presentation pad and the church's piano filled time in the church's handsome, empty sanctuary. That is all. But look at Eiko approaching light at the front door:

Eiko approaches Middle Collegiate's front entrance.
photos (c)2016, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Here, with the incipient emergence of her body into the light and rush of the street, the solo took on tension and poignancy.

Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect...and Eiko
photo (c)2016, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

*****

Read My Eiko journal: Part 1 here.

*****

Eiko's A Body in Places platform continues at Danspace Project and other venues through March 23. There's so much going on in this platform's programming, that Danspace Project is actually offering consultation with a docent to help you get your bearings. Really. For detailed information, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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My Eiko journal: Part 1

Flower from Eiko
(photo: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Eiko's A Body in Places
Tuesday, March 1 -- 12pm

For my initial engagement with A Body in Places--Danspace Project's massive, multifaceted new platform--I join a group of people assembled at the gate of St. Mark's Church and await word of where to meet dance soloist Eiko. At noon, Danspace staff guide us across Second Avenue to a corner by Liquiteria, the juice/smoothies emporium. And there is Eiko, perched on Liquiteria's outdoor bench, wrapped in clothing of thin, vulnerable fabrics and a small comforter, feet in flipflops, scant defense against the late-winter chill. I'm certain that if my neighborhood noticed her at all, people would assume her to be homeless and pay no mind.

Those of us gathered with a purpose, though, we're rapt. This is Eiko who inserts her dancing body into places and makes you think about things you usually do not see. Eiko whose way of creating a separate channel for time adds dimension to the everyday. Stop and think. Stop and feel. Stop.

We stop. Gaze at her. She gazes back. She rises, silently draws us around the corner. She curves her comforter up into the air; her reach is small, vulnerable. She crouches near the pavement, near a parked taxicab, its driver alert to the presence of a woman with claw-like fingers and comforter lined in royal purple. She bunches it up against the bark of a tree. She bunches it up against her face and appears to grieve.

Arching. Stretching. Twisting. Trotting. Sudden cracks of hard slipper heels against concrete and garbage cans. Pretty soon, drivers stopped in traffic are looking; pedestrians, stopping and looking.

Ha-hah! Made you look!

Her ultimate destination? Kathy Kemp's tiny clothing and jewelry design boutique, ANNA, at 330 East 11th Street. Eiko has placed a few white flowers on the ground by the storefront. Some flowers will end up in her mouth, their petals spit out and scattered. She's less squeamish than I would be on these seriously skanky streets. She staggers, flinging petals, a stem. She heads through ANNA's screen door, most of her audience in tow.

We arrange ourselves around a small, rectangular table draped with several gold necklaces draped across it. We file past a rack of clothes, wondering how Eiko chose this delicate site and negotiated its use. Kemp stands by with her charming little dog resting quietly in her arms, its neck wrapped in chunky pearls.

Eiko fits herself into narrow space between curtained dressing rooms. We watch her and her reflection in the mirror. Beneath a sheer, dark tunic, she reveals the pink and salmon print of her underskirt. She emerges from this slot in space, pushes past a rack of clothes, tottering backward, humming to herself.

She seems alien, her body language foreign to these parts, her regard of her surroundings a sorrowful one on its way to self-abasement and erasure since it cannot accept what it perceives. Anyway, that's what I get and, at the same time, I'm feeling the following: "These fabrics and colors are really kinda nice. I wonder how much...."

The solo winding down, Eiko draws us back out into the noise of school kids at recess. She holds a flower out to me, and I take it. I realize that I want it. Very much. I'm hoping I won't have to give it back. And, as it happens, I won't have to. That makes me inexplicably happy. I'll take it home, just around the corner, down the avenue.

Eiko looks into traffic, crosses the street, does what I expected she would do. At first, her presence at the schoolyard fence seems to make the kids drift off. But, after a while, they watch before Eiko turns to us and sort of shoos us away before disappearing eastward.

*****

My Eiko journal will continue with reflections on Eiko's Delicious Movement workshop today and another site-specific A Body in Places solo in an undisclosed location. Check back for more.

*****

Eiko's A Body in Places platform continues at Danspace Project and other venues through March 23. There's so much going on in this platform's programming, that Danspace Project is actually offering consultation with a docent to help you get your bearings. Really. For detailed information, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infinitebody