Dancing with and for the Dead: Site as Place

In my fifty-two years of working—forty-two of that as Eiko & Koma—I have always presented my performance as an act I am responsible for rather than a product I was asked to repeat.

When I began performing my solo project A Body in Places (2014–), I left theaters and danced, or rather lay down, in places like churches and street plazas. I regard these sites as “places,” characterized by its functions, habitats, and constituencies. I observe each place for as many days as available. I am a visitor/a foreigner, but at the performance, I need to feel I belong there.

At the announced performance hour, I sit in different positions to imagine how viewers will see me. I consider geographies, architectures, a range of possible weathers, sightlines, noises, directions of the sun or streetlights, and potential dangers (as a senior in the field, I would like to present myself as cautious not brave=reckless). I learn/imagine what happened there centuries or a year ago: a forest, river clean up, protesters’ arrests. A place is NOT static. It changes. I do not think of only the movement of my body. I think of movement of the place.

This helps me choreograph but also imagine during the performance how viewers see me. That allows me to betray my choreography.

I also think a lot about the place-ness—what is common between similarly named places. Libraries have books, and train stations are about transit. So, in A Body in a Library (2015–), I dance with books. In A Body in a Station (2014–), I dance with train announcements. Details differ.

Without theater lights or a sound system. I am exposed without a flare. I place my gaze on one person. If she accepts, our eyes directly converse. Other viewers see and feel that.

Some people just pass by me, while others notice me. Better that someone thinks, “Oh a strange person is doing a strange thing.” I want to live in a society that allows strange things to happen in everyday life. When the people go to that place years later, they remember the strange thing that happened there.

A Body in a Cemetery
(September 26 & 27, 2020. The Green-Wood Cemetery)

Performing in the cemetery during the pandemic, viewers sit far from me and from each other. I notice the graves are so much closer to me than the audience members. New dirt is brought in, a new grave is dug. I give water to gravestones and pronounce the names. I wet dirt and smear it on my body, thinking about people whose graves were never built.

You can’t really come to the cemetery and not think about death or the people who have died. And that’s a good thing. Thinking of death and the dead are “strange” but necessary things. We know more about living. But we all die.

It is hard to know about death because by the time I die, I might not know what is happening. When my death is completed, I will not be here to feel my non-existence.

Thus, I practice dying, but that is not dying. We learn about death by attending to other people’s dying. We also learn about death by missing the dead.

I am now seventy-two. Many friends who often came to see my performances have died. Others are dying and being killed. I dance not only for the audiences who are there but for those who are not there.

Once I became familiar to the “cemetery-ness” in the Green-Wood, I was ready to work in the Maplewood Cemetery, in Durham, NC and the Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Spring, CO. Noticing the differences gives me new details in choreography.

Now I am back in the Green-Wood Cemetery, creating a new site specific work in its Historical Chapel. I am observing stones. This June, I will project a video of a huge stone quarry in Sweden onto the stone wall of the chapel. Using my body as a conduit to connect stones and places, I am looking at this cemetery anew. My journey continues.