A short review of Fumiyo Ikeda’s and Tim Etchells‘ dance performance “In Pieces” mentions that there was little joy in this piece, that is was boring. Utopia Parkway writes that the work quickly wears thin. I saw the piece this weekend and yes, there is certainly an element of boredom I had to overcome before I could take in Ikeda’s solo performance. But boredom is not what remains for me after having watched this fine performance. What remains is a sense of what happens between boredom and memory, between repetition and future things past and present. Let me explain.
First an impression of what I saw/what I took from it:
Ikeda’s/Etchells’ work titled ‘In Pieces’ starts with the voicing of a count. One. The count continues, stops, restarts again, repeats. The count is joined to a phrase. It can be embodied phrase, as in dance. It can be textual phrase, as in speech or it can be gesture, or a facial expression.
Vocal phrases are conjoined and repeated, constantly shifting contextually (the body, movement, position on stage/the use of space). Ikeda masterly varies what is repeated.Conjoined phrases are sequences. Sequences are repeated. (The boredom of following a count up to one hundred something is stunningly effective to focus one’s attention on structure.)
But there are more sequences. In the use of space between Ikeda and the wall, the only prop, besides a chair, a sense of repetition is constantly present. I got the sense that Ikeda painted the stage with movements in a geometric way. A pattern emerged. (The chair moved from left to front, then from the front, back to the wall but now to the right. It did not return to its original locus).
The count is not linear. Towards the end of the piece Ikeda switches to using the periodic table of elements to continue the count. But there is always the One. Always returning. The most powerful and risky part of the piece to me was when Ikeda explicitly joined the count to phrases consisting of memories: ‘something I like’, ‘something I forgot’, ‘the smell of Paris’, ‘the smell of London’.
Cultural analyst and philosopher Mieke Bal writes somewhere -echoing Derrida’s work on iterativity and performativity – that ‘memory as mediator between performance and performativity operates on a mixture of temporalities’. Thinking about Ikeda’s performance that resonates exceptionally true. Memory and repetition figure prominently in this piece not unlike how it is at work in minimalist music. In the soundscapes of for instance Reich, the Eternal Return of the Same is ever present. Reich’s music has no beginning, no end, all is repeated, all is the same, what constitutes the music then is not what is played but what psychoacoustically is generated in the in-between of attaque and decay. That is where memory is carried over. To some this allows for the experience of eternity (Kurzawa, Repetition und Vergesssen). The instant, the moment is simultaneously actual and virtual, here and there, coming and going. These sounds are a ‘revenant’, a ghost which returns to us from the future to haunt our past in the present.
Ikeda’s and Etchells’ work might be the first time this theme of memory and repetition has so effectively been put to work on stage using voice, dance and mime in a solo performance. To Mieke Bal what happens when memory is mediated, operating on temporalities is what she calls the ‘staging of subjectivity’. And yes, some sort of subjectivity is staged be it as a a failure to subjectivate. Ikeda’s voice sometimes turns into a demand, a command: “Go away!’. But nobody leaves. A successful staging of failure. Wonderful.