Eiko:  A Body in Fukushima; Photograph by William Johnston

Thirty years ago I took a Delicious Movement Workshop with Eiko and Koma at their home in the Catskills.  It was transformative, life changing.  I had just met them at a performance of Kazuo Ohno  at La Mama in New York.  That performance had blown open my ideas about movement, time, age and beauty.  Working with them for a week pushed me off any dancing vector I might have had into a world of possibility and poetry.  Eiko and Koma have threaded through my life since then, casually and profoundly.

Now Eiko is venturing into the wild waters of solo work at a time when I am doing the same. Her current collaboration  with the photographer William Johnston, “A Body in Fukushima”, is currently on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art in Philadelphia.  At the same time, Eiko is performing “A Body in a Station” in the Philadelphia train station.  Her courage and devotion are  boundless.

Last summer, I performed in front of my collaborator Pam White’s  camera in Bogliasco and Venice, Italy.  One day, we shot in front of some wild grafitti near a church as a group of students sat with a priest.  They never glanced at me.  Oddly, that was both unsettling and reassuring.  Most days, we would set out – me in costume – and then find a spot that beckoned – a series of narrow passages, a garden, a courtyard, a landscape of doors fronting a church.  We let the opportunity shape the material.  I love to improvise to let the confluence of sound and sight and whatever is arising from my own body in that moment shape what happens.  I am interested in the intersection of the performative body in public spaces, and then weaving those narrative, imagistic threads into the work both in the theater and on the street.   And the thing that drives me, has driven me for the past thirty-five years, is a lust for movement, a hunger to channel that volcanic urgency from the body into something that I can share.

I will keep you posted on my upcoming performances.  In the meantime, get to Philadelphia if you can to see the beautiful work of Eiko and Mr. Johnston.