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Allison Hsu

Last fall, I started working for Eiko as her assistant after having taken her Delicious Movement course at Wesleyan. Over the course of our working together, I have come to learn a lot about her life; while she has been alive for longer than I have and has seen much more of the world, we both agree that the current situation we are in today is something new for both of us.

The pandemic has posed many new challenges for artists. In our isolation, and with cancelled performances and engagements, it is incredibly difficult for us to work, collaborate, and experiment in the ways we have become accustomed to. When Jennifer Calienes from Wesleyan University's Center for the Arts invited Eiko for a virtual creative residency, Eiko was surprised and grateful. She wanted me and her Duet Project collaborators to continue working and conversing with her.

Recognizing that quarantine has affected every aspect of our lives and taken a significant toll on everyone's survival, Eiko and I propose we just take slow steps to communicate and reflect and hope that the process will create new works, thoughts, and encounters. While we are trapped in a disconcerting present and dwelling on a precarious future, there might be value in revisiting certain materials from the past and placing them within our current contexts, rather than rushing to create new works to address the "now".

Currently, Eiko is in Japan and I am on the other side of the world in Connecticut, but we have managed to come together virtually to have these conversations and collaborate on these revisited, re-edited media works for Wesleyan's virtual creative residency. We know these won't be useful to every single individual, but we are going into this process with hope that they might mean something to some. They have certainly helped me and Eiko in allowing us to reflect on the past and on the certain place and time we occupy then and now.

March 31, 2020

Performing artists have physically lost the time and place where they and audiences can gather, watch, and feel. Making the work accessible online and bringing more people into the conversation, engaging in reflections and dialogues with one another, is crucial to our current moment. In this way, you provide artists with an audience.

On The Duet Project

As Eiko and I constructed this Virtual Studio, I looked at many videos from Eiko’s The Duet Project. I was particularly drawn to her duets with Wen Hui and DonChristian Jones.

With Wen Hui, there is this tenderness in the way Eiko’s hands are touching hers (not quite holding each other but still providing support) that makes me feel very nostalgic. My relationship to touch is completely different now: I have not hugged either of my parents since I've been home for fear of any form of transmission, and I wish I could hold my partner even though my hands are dry from washing and sanitizing. I have come to realize that I express care primarily through touch, and because that is impossible now, I need to explore new forms of care—non-physical, non-bodily—which is difficult but necessary. I think back to all of the movement scores we did in Eiko’s Delicious Movement class and how so much of my understanding of my body, my history, and my relationality was contingent upon gathering with other bodies and sharing the same space with one another, moving together.

Photo by Qian Min

Photo by Ben McKeown

On Fish House

I first watched this while sitting outside in the sun. It was the first day since I've been home that it was warm enough to be outside, and so seeing the sun and the water in this video made me think of summer and warmer weather. That's also why when DonChristian is getting out of the water, he doesn't appear miserable to me, but tired/exhausted in the way that someone would feel after going for a long swim. When you finally get a clear view of his face, his eyes are closed as if he's contemplating something, but he doesn't appear to be in pain at all. Neither pain nor pleasure, but a feeling derived from both—maybe a sense of peaceful depletion?
The way he's extending his arm at reminds me so much of the way Eiko’s arm extends in Room with the red cloth. His arm is at the same exact angle and moving at a very similar speed, it's very eerie. I see this and don't think "Oh, he's copying Eiko!" but instead I imagine both in a duet across works: he's outside and Eiko’s inside. I see the house behind him and peer into the windows, half expecting to see Eiko (or her ghost, as Bill T. Jones would say) moving inside.
The angled camerawork is disorienting, at times I feel like the camera is about to fall into the water, but it makes me pay closer attention to the movement/texture of the water. I feel the waves coming towards me when DonChristian kneels down to touch the surface.
I love the water dripping off of him, leaving a trail as he makes his way towards the Fish House. Then when the camera moves in the opposite direction and there's that repeated shot of the boardwalk, the trail of dark wet spots on the boardwalk is gone, making me aware of the passage of time, those wet spots fading away in the sun.

On Your Morning is My Night

This reminded me of Eiko and Koma's earlier Dance for Camera works, where the shots of isolated body parts obscure the rest of the body and the orientation of the body in space. I find myself wondering "Is that an arm or a leg?" and then with both of Eiko and Iris side by side, it's amazing to see how these subtle movements translate onto two different bodies.
I found myself drawn to the sources of light. Like the title suggests, Eiko’s morning is Iris’ night, but the viewer has no sense of what time of day it is for either in the video. The only light is coming from artificial sources. The shot of Eiko’s lamp (turned on) and Iris' lamp (turned off) made me think of how our days aren't structured by the rising and setting of the sun but by when our lights are on and off. Because nowadays we are finding ourselves unable to sleep and staying up far later than usual, our indoor lights are often on long past the sun sets.
A little later, Eiko’s face is against this surface that I initially thought was a wall but then the camera turns and shows the rest of the room, making it clearer that she’s lying on the floor. It feels like an optical illusion. But also emphasizes that I have no idea where her body is in relationship to the room she occupies because I am not physically there.
It seems like Iris is talking at one point, but I have no sense of what they're saying. It reminded me of watching Attending and how I couldn't make out all of the writing on the papers scattered around you and read what they said. But as a viewer, I don't need to know what these words are in order to have my own interpretations of the piece. When Iris smiles, I see a moment of two friends talking casually and catching up with one another amidst these movements.
The shot of the underside of Eiko’s neck makes me think of her neck outstretched in Fur Seal and when we had to be seals in Delicious Movement. That extension of the neck with the eyes looking up is a movement that I distinctly associate with Eiko and that class. But I think about how in a live performance, an audience member could never see this movement from this particular angle unless they were directly underneath or very close to Eiko. So to a degree, there is another kind of intimacy that is achieved through Zoom that might not be necessarily be possible with live performance.

Over the past few months, as we’ve been working together on Virtual Studio, I have often looked to Eiko for direction, for some sort of guidance as her younger collaborator. In her Delicious Movement class where I was her student almost two years ago, Eiko implored us to learn from experience, from our own lived experiences but also from the experiences of those who came before us. We read works by Kenzaburō Oe and Kyoto Hayashi describing events that had happened on the other side of the world before any of us (including Eiko) were born, and we moved to bridge this distance, to expand ourselves across space and time.

As Eiko looks to writers that experienced the events which she lives in the aftermath of, I look to her. In her time as a New Yorker, Eiko experienced the AIDS epidemic and 9/11. I was alive during 9/11 but can only remember the stories that I have been retold by those older than me. When Eiko shares her lived experiences with me, they become embedded in my own memory, where I can reflect and draw my own connections. At the start of this residency, Eiko and I realized that despite our vastly different life experiences, we were experiencing the same event in real time. The virus and its global impact were new for both of us, and we each found ourselves struggling to grapple with its unfamiliarity from our different vantage points.

Eiko is in Japan and I am on the other side of the world in Connecticut, so we are separated by both time and space. In our different time zones, working together sometimes feels like we’re chasing one another, waiting for that short stretch of time after Eiko wakes up in the morning and before I fall asleep at night, or vice versa. To bridge our spatial distance, we continue to share and learn from each other’s experiences, and even though Eiko was once my teacher, our teacher-student relationship has never been unidirectional. I learn from Eiko’s lived experiences as she learns from my own. She recounts her memorIes of AIDS and 9/11, I write to her from coronavirus testing centers and Black Lives Matter protests.

Our constant correspondence, which started as journals written as part of her class and now take the form of email threads and Facetime calls, has allowed us to feel this distance and search for pathways through which we might cross it. I say “cross” rather than “collapse” because I believe this distance needs to be felt and acknowledged. Distance is malleable, as Eiko says, but we need to mark the points at which we feel the farthest or the closest in order to chart our course.

July 1, 2020