Eiko: A Body in a Station

Eiko, who usually performs with her partner as part of Eiko and Koma, transforms the North Waiting Room of the 30th Street Station into an art gallery and we sit there transfixed by her slow-motion exploration of space and time.

While I was there, more than 100 passersby had stopped to watch. Some hunkered down on the floor with cell phone cameras and sketch pads for the long haul, three full hours of watching almost nothing happen. Others were captivated by a lone woman with long dark hair and face painted white, wearing a pale yellow kimono and carrying a flowing length of red fabric, moving in the center of a large circle. They had stopped and watched and stayed probably longer than intended.

I’ve always thought that watching paint dry is underrated. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want to do, to sit and watch the infinitesimal changing landscape in front of you. That’s what it was like to watch Eiko move and not move and somehow get from one place to the other, from the center of the hall to the wall and back to the mat that was her starting point.

On her website, she says, “I saw that people at 30th Street Station are alone, going somewhere or waiting to go somewhere. Many are busy with cell phones. Sitting in the train station, I had an epiphany. I want to perform here alone. I want to exchange a gaze with viewers. A simple set. An odd, but beautiful costume. A body and mind very exposed . . . I want to embody the sense of nakedness, feebleness of a human and the solitude of an artist.”

Barely moving, struggling to get up, falling back, dragging the red fabric with her, Eiko never stopped trying to get from here to there, wherever “there” is, yet she never seemed to move. Nothing happening in real time. Her eyes stared out mournfully, seeking connection but never connecting — me on a bad day trying to get going.

Watching. Afraid to look away in case this is the moment she decides to do something. I blink, and there she is against the wall, and I don’t know how she got there.

Usually our waiting is filled with distractions. A TV somewhere shows us the latest disaster. A magazine, a newspaper, a cell phone game, a call to a friend. We are rarely in the moment, experiencing where we are and what is going on around us. Eiko’s performance calls us into the present. She shows us our waiting, our restlessness, our aloneness. Out of that crowd around her there was no connection, no conversation. It was a shared experience that no one shared.

This performance, which takes place in three-hour segments over four weeks, is coupled with a photography exhibit at PAFA. The photos, by William Johnston, show Eiko performing in abandoned train stations in Fukushima, Japan. These stations were so contaminated with radiation after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor plants that no one travels there anymore. Another kind of waiting in a place where no one will come.