A Response to Eiko Otake in Four Movements

Abstract

A Response to Eiko Otake in Four Movements Tyran Grillo (bio) Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories. —Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000) 1 History is telepathy. It externalizes the internal, balancing affect and prescription. History is a performative enterprise, and as such requires the comingling of directors and viewers. It is a clash of ocean and continent so destructive that only relics remain to memorialize those who produced them. Few artists more acutely understand that history begins and ends with the body than Eiko Otake, whose dancing feeds on awareness that biographies are at once written across and erased from skins by frictions of possibility. Whereas history attempts to atone for violence, only to taint itself with illusions of seamless distraction, Otake finds herself profoundly dislocated. She upsets the dangers of universality, severing the tidal pull of wholesale philosophies. To place herself somewhere is to participate in the formation of collective experience. In her 2014 piece A Body in Fukushima, Otake traveled to post-3/11 landscapes before revisiting them in 2016. Her interventions undermined documentary impulses with quiet theory. When re-presenting this work to an audience, she treats herself as projection screen, reconfiguring the still image as it hugs itinerant surface, thereby challenging the notion of a stagnant archive. If the body is one link in a chain of scars, then history must be alive, bearing witness to deaths of things. Its choreographies necessitate languages of preservation; its decay slowed to rates undetectable except in retrospect. Otake removes a layer, and with it a barrier to personal experience. She drags her clothing, which like the past leaves her when she lets go. Otake's movements whisper, "I was never alone when I did not exist, for I was omnipresent." She is rescuing her own memory from this state of nothingness, using her comportment to delocalize the flesh. We are caught in her net. 2 History is an unfinished symphony. It thrives on thematic recapitulations, each divergent from those preceding it. History makes time tangible, slotting events into quantifiable sequences to be shaped and moved around in storyboard fashion. It reminds us that invisibility is vital to manifesting survivals of the visible. A flame needs oxygen to burn, and it's [End Page 77] all the body can do to flicker noticeably before its pilot light goes out. Human beings are tenacious when it comes to remembrance. In response, and unraveling any allegiances to the speed of thought, Otake engages with after-images of herself, bodily and spiritually plastic. She knows that depths of expression go as far as the technology of muscles will allow, and that memory is a traumatic clockwork of mortality. Birth is not the beginning of life, but the end of death. It is the resurrection in miniature of every event leading to it, a harbinger of things to come. Even as listening is a form of support, so is remembrance the scaffolding of motion. Things shimmer when recalled, internal organs rippling with the excitement of self-projection. If Otake flits at the edge of poetry, she also toes the line of exposition. Laying her body on a horizontal plane is akin to committing words to page. Both acts position her at a temporal crossroads where speech lets the blood of future compilation. (Even yesterday is drawn with pigments different from today's.) The idea of witnessing pervades nonetheless, as if one could stand beneath skies of the past and feel present in the making of future text. 3 History is an ongoing conversation within and around a body whose parts have tricked themselves into thinking they are independent. Otake has shown us that footprints are more distinct than fingerprints, because they are explicitly part of their environments—proof that ambulation is achievable only in tutti. Every gesture has baggage, its byproducts the indeterminate effluvia of politics. Our discomforts are inherited through shared awareness of finitude. Pressures of human contact are inherent to the voice. Simplicities of details beg for explanation by the very means of their production. We are our own informants, neurons in a greater brain, struggling to build the strongest pathways possible before we forget...