Worth the While: On Slowness as Presence in Performance

Since beginning her solo career in 2014, Eiko Otake has performed several projects all over the world. I was able to attend one at Green-Wood Cemetery back in 2023 entitled Mother, which took place inside of the Historic Chapel. The audience sat on two wooden benches that faced the center of the room. Between them laid a cloth printed with the last photo Eiko took of her mother the day she passed away, colorful flowers framing her face. Eiko moved slowly as a video of her addressing her mother echoed throughout the space. I remember how she looked into my eyes, so close I could feel the air make way as she passed. I kept my breath measured, my movement minimal. I was part of the audience, but, as Eiko moved around us, I was aware of how her performance required a level of presence that embedded us within it, as we were invited in to witness the mourning of her mother and be present in our own relationships to grief. Eiko moved as if she were taking in the space of the chapel for the first time, through the cool stone meeting her bare feet, the sunlight peering through the stained glass windows, reckoning with being a daughter in a world in which her mother was no longer living. The performance evoked the process of adapting to life in the wake of an unendurable loss, and Eiko was teaching us how to endure it with her.

Similarly rooted in the liminal space of transformation, PREMIERE was performed by Maria Hassabi and four dancers at The Kitchen in 2013. The work’s title highlights the ever-unfolding process of sharing a work for the first time. No performance of a show is identical, meaning that each is a premiere in and of itself. The recording of the show began when the doors opened and the audience entered the space, with the performers already in position facing them as they came in. The camera was positioned at the top of the bleachers, separated by rows of seating and looking from above. The seating and stage were switched for the show, causing the audience to pass the performers on one side or another to get to their seats. As the audience filed in, the markings of their footsteps surrounded the dancers on the floor like a school of fish that would circle them for the duration of the performance. Two massive light installations stood on either side of the room, so bright they washed out the features of the performers in the video and caused a woman to shield her eyes upon entering the room. The doors closed and the audience was immersed in the stillness of the performers, the space between movements so extensive at times that I didn’t notice when I accidentally paused the recording. Watching on my couch at home, I’d initially wanted to position myself as if I were seated in the audience. Not an easy task, and not one I was willing to do for long. The contrast between my own comfort and the positions the performers were assuming intensified as the minutes passed, as I could feel my neck stiffen and legs ache watching them hold a lunge or kneel for minutes at a time then shifting without the relief of momentum.

Hassabi’s work in particular highlights the limitations of performance archives and documentation. The show’s emphasis on how each night is distinct is at odds with the singular document in the archive. The video recording could only hint at the somatic experience of the performance, as I could see the features of each of the performer’s faces, but could not detect any subtle variance or movement. What gets lost in translation can be found in the reviews. Jowitt wrote about how crowded and urgent it felt while waiting to be let in on the other side of the doors, how hot it was in the room from the light installations, and how her eye grew more attentive to the most minute movements. (6) Dance critic Siobhan Burke observed the trembling of Hassabi’s arm, a contracting hamstring, then the “glow of exhaustion” on the performers faces at the end, all of which evaded the camera’s indifferent perspective. (7) The dancers spent the duration of the performance slowly turning around to face the audience in their seats. As they looked into the audience, I could imagine the jolt when making eye contact with one of them, a rare shared spectatorship between audience and performers. I realized how bracing and intimate it must have been to be in the front row, and recalled the feeling of watching Eiko pass as she also looked into my face.

Sheryl Sutton, Maria Hassabi, and Eiko Otake utilize measured movement in their work to stretch and bend time, releasing it from form and structure, while also demanding a level of endurance from their audience. Both Sutton and Hassabi are attentive to presence and the passage of time in performance, yet they have distinctions in how they relate to duration in real time, whether by showing the internal monologues of the dancer beyond the choreography, or by requiring the minds of the dancers to constantly count without rhythmic music to help them keep track. (8) Eiko Otake’s presence witnesses and honors the spaces she inhabits while performing, and invites her audiences to do the same. Akomolafe writes that slowing down means “lingering in the places we are not used to. Seeking out new questions. Becoming accountable to more than what rests on the surface. Seeking roots. Slowing down is taking care of ghosts, hugging monsters, sharing silence, embracing the weird.” Through slow examination of everyday movement, the liminality of new encounters, and engagement with enduring grief, each of the artists reminds us to consider how we are present with ourselves and each other in the midst of unfolding processes, both internal and external.