3
Apr/11

NAKED: A LIVING INSTALLATION

3
Apr/11

Eiko and Koma’s mesmerizing NAKED continues at the Baryshnikov Arts Center through April 9 (photo by Anna Lee Campbell)

Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th St.
April 5-8, 6:00-10:00 pm, April 9, 3:00 – 9:00 pm
Admission: free with advance RSVP
www.eikoandkoma.org

Created during a three-month residency at the Park Avenue Armory and first presented at the Walker Art Center last year, Eiko and Koma’s Naked is an intimate, deeply personal experience about love and loss, time and space, birth, death, and rebirth. Part of their Retrospective Project that examines their forty-year collaboration, Naked takes place in the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Studio 6A, which has been transformed into an organic environment surrounded on three sides by scorched canvases with holes in them that people can peer through before entering the main area, where the two New York-based dancers are lying naked amid a nestlike mound of straw, feathers, and dirt, their bodies moving remarkably slowly. Small sculptures dangle from the ceiling lights, making rustling wind-chime noises and casting eerie shadows across the performers as water drips from above, each drop echoing through the room, along with sounds of what appear to be animal howls and a faraway foghorn. People can walk in and out during each performance, sitting on benches or sitting or standing on the scorched canvas on the floor, which makes slight noises as they shuffle their feet and move about. Even an accidentally slammed door doesn’t break Eiko and Koma’s concentration as they lift a finger, reach out for each other, interlock their legs, or turn away. Occasionally they open their eyes; whereas Koma’s are like a newborn bird’s looking out at the world for the first time, Eiko’s are filled with yearning, as if barely able to see what has become of the earth around her. That is part of what makes Naked so mesmerizing; it evokes birth and death at the same time, especially with the devastation going on in Japan, where both Eiko and Koma are from. The two can represent survivors and victims, lovers coming together or being torn apart, Adam and Eve starting life anew or a couple facing death. They are both prehuman and posthuman, living organisms emerging from the primordial ooze as well as postapocalyptic beings facing a dark future. Naked is a mesmerizing, beautiful work that is always evolving; if you let yourself get swept away in its gentle, tender movements, you’ll find your mind leading you through its own abstract narratives, making the experience different for each individual as time just slips away.

Naked is accompanied by a multimedia retrospective in the next-door Studio 6B that features eight videos of previous Eiko and Koma naked performances, including Night Tide, By the River, Tree, Rust, and Passage shown in video boxes you have to look down into, in addition to Lament and Undertow, which are projected onto the “White Cart” sculpture made of sea salt, sweet rice paste, postcards, water, wood, and other materials. Also, in the downstairs lobby “36 Works by Eiko & Koma” consists of thirty-six minutes of still photos and brief film clips from thirty-six of their earlier pieces. For more on Eiko and Koma and Naked, you can find our twi-ny talk with them here.