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Your Morning is My Night

 
 

4 minutes 40 seconds

This is an edited excerpt of Eiko and Iris McCloughan's experiment working over Zoom on May 5, 2020 as a part of Eiko's Virtual Creative Residency hosted by Wesleyan University.

Iris is both a dramaturg and a collaborator in Eiko's Duet Project. Iris is in their studio in Brooklyn, New York and Eiko is in a suburb of Tokyo, Japan 6761 miles away. Both are restricted under the emergency order due to the coronavirus pandemic. We are in a situation we could not imagine when we subtitled our project as “Distance is Malleable”.

Now already a month in quarantine in Japan, I realize I will be away considerably longer from New York, where many of my collaborators are. I proposed to Iris to continue our collaboration in moving in separate places at the same time to create material as a part of The Duet Project.

In this first experiment, we wanted to explore

  1. How do we use Zoom differently so that bodies and movements are captured?

  2. How do we fully recognize that we are in two different places?

  3. How can we work kinesthetically and feel each other?

  4. How do we make our physical distance malleable?

Like many other people working at home and engaged in Zoom meetings, I appreciate we have a tool to converse digitally and document these conversations through recording. But like others, I too feel increasingly frustrated with its default settings, with its default variations; we are reduced to our faces, front-sided, and at best usually only with our upper bodies (head and shoulders). Different walls or selected pictures (i.e., a forest that does not swing with wind).

In this first session, we tried to break Zoom's conventions by

  1. Placing our computers in different positions,

  2. Moving a computer itself with our bodies,

  3. Instinctively alternating times we move consciously with the screen composition or ignore what it captures and improvise imagining each other as a duet partner.

I edited the footage from the Zoom recording with the emphasis above. Working on this edit gave me a long time to watch Iris and myself, possibilities of connection I was not aware of while moving. So editing became also a process to be engaged and to learn how two artists deepen our selected encounters and are affected by each other.

While editing, I decided to play the music my dear friend David Harrington shared with me with this comment: "To me this performance is at it’s heart something beyond, way beyond normal musical experience and expression." I was surprised how it lifted my spirit. i have not danced to music for many years, and Iris and I certainly have not. But editing became my dance to this amazing music.

Music: Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis 244 performed by singer Kathleen Ferrier (1912-1953) with violinist David MacCallum