A Place Is Performed: A Body in a Station by Eiko

by Daria Melnikova, University of Pennsylvania

“What if I dig a hole into this marble floor as if digging a well for water and that hole goes and reaches to Fukushima: then it is like a hole that is the passage to another world in Alice’s Wonderland.”[1] — Eiko

This quote best describes Eiko’s performance A Body in a Station (2014). I explore her work through the lens of a “place being performed” to address the question of space and its construction in relation to a particular site. How does her dance map the site of the station? To what extent does the performance and the everyday become mutually effected? How does her choreography "dig" one site and reach another to create spaces? These are questions that I would like to answer in my analysis of Eiko’s dance piece. The methodological approach of my research is based on the idea of site-adaptivity developed by Rosemary Candelario’s in her Ph.D. dissertation Eiko & Koma: Choreographing Spaces Apart in Asian America as well as on the theorization of site-specific performance explained by Nick Kaye in his book Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation. For the juxtaposition of site-adaptivity and site-specificity, I argue that the notion of site becomes central for “performing a place.”

[1]William Johnston with Eiko Otake, “The Making of “A Body in Fukushima”: A Journey through an Ongoing Disaster 「福島の身体」の生成過程　進行中の災害を旅する.” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 9, No. 4, March 9, 2015, accessed April, 30, 2015. http://japanfocus.org/-William-Johnston/4295