Writer, Artist and Critic
EIKO & KOMA at the Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia
Their stunningly conceived "Wind," performed at the Painted Bride Friday and Saturday, demonstrated this. This was the last offering in the Philadelphia Dance Projects' successful season, which also presented Steve Krieckhaus, Karen Bamonte, and New York's Movement Research.
"Wind" unfolds on a single set element, a stage-sized painted dropcloth filled with a blue disc covered by a whirlwind of clouds. When Koma and Shin Otake (Eiko and Koma's six-year old son) began slowly circling this space, they seemed to be walking on the sky. (On Saturday Shin's older brother Yuta performed the supporting part.) Feathers fell lightly around them, like snow or vagrant clouds.
Eiko's solo revealed her phenomenal control and physical expressiveness--her face a still mask of wonder or pathos, her body leaning at long angles, or crumpling in a long, melting fall. In a floor passage performed balanced on one hip and one elbow, she achieved a strange sense of disembodiment through the slightest shudders and jerks.
It takes a little while to retune your attention to the pace of such a performance. At the beginning I found myself second-guessing the meaning of each movement. But as the attention locks in, each gesture begins to live for itself, needing no interpretation, in the expanded awareness of each moment.
In the central duet, Eiko and Koma lay nude on the sky-cloth, their still or slowly turning bodies seeming large and mountainous, a chilly white. Lit by a raking light, the feathers lying around them took on more volume, appearing like tiny clouds seen from a great height. The harsh sounds of Bill Ochs's Irish bagpipes, added to the a capella vocals of Chanticleer, suggested the whistling of the jet stream. The rarefied state created here seemed to point to some farther reach of being, beyond humanness.
The final moment contained a small sense of rebirth: the child, carried out and laid down in an attitude of sleep or death, turns slowly toward the audience. Then this audience member and others filed out, slow, wide-eyed and quiet.
--Miriam Seidel