Part 8

“not that theories are not beautiful, but that they are feeble”

C.D. Wright

Margaret Leng Tan performing in An Evening with Margaret Leng Tan, Valda Setterfield, and Forrest Gander. Photo: Michael DiPietro.

Installation
St. Marks Church (March 15)
D is for

Dance
Discipline
Devotion
Says Merce
Through Valda
An art process is not necessarily a natural process
Daily
The body, mind, and spirit act as one
Devastatingly impersonal
Flawless
An initial impress of the body on time
Dance memory
that single fleeting moment when you feel alive
Death and the plough man
Days of heaven
ValDa
hD
cD

Had some bad dreams last night
Buildings falling down into water
Husbands in closets

Behind the piano the loom
Behind Forrest
Eiko
Behind Valda
Eiko
Behind Margaret
Eiko
on film installed like perjured sails in the sanctuary

* * *

Imagine the beaches east of Fukushima
Imagine your beach
Imagine a beach
Imagine
Imagine the privilege of imagination

Part 9

The Final Solo at Middle Collegiate Church (March 16)

“wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses
let us lay aside every weight”

—written on the church’s southern wall

Eiko performing solo at Middle Collegiate Church. Photo: Lily Cohen.

9:00 p.m. Solo at St. Marks Church (March 18)

A strange, unserviceable thing,
A fragile, exquisite, pale shell,
That the vast troubled waters bring
To the loud sands before day has broken.
The storm arose and suddenly fell
Amid the dark before day had broken.
What death? What discipline?
What bonds no man could unbind,
Being imagined within
The labyrinth of the mind,
What pursuing or fleeing,
What wounds, what bloody press,
Dragged into being
This loveliness?

from “The Only Jealousy of Emer”, W.B. Yeats

Part 10

Talking Duets: #2 and The Final Midnight Solo (March 19)

Eiko performing outside of St. Mark’s Church. Photo: Ian Douglas.

Throughout these late winter days with Eiko and her friends I have had that song from the opening of Yeats’ “The Only Jealousy of Emer” in my head, a song  “for the folding and unfolding of cloth,” and those Trojan women—Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache—and also H.D.’s “Eurydice.”

I apologize, my book learning is clearly from that last century.

I feel about Eiko as
Lynne Tillman feels about Paula Fox or Susan Howe about Emily Dickinson or maybe the way Ana Mendieta feels about Ana Mendieta in her films showing right now at Galerie Lelong.
Eiko, Ana, and Maria all in town at the same time! This is certainly the royal eclipse of the son and all of us attendants will be able to say that we were here under this lunar shadow tidal in its affections.

Ultimately abstraction almost wins
No metaphor
No simile
No tragic Greek figure
remains

We are left with a woman of
no certain age
who has emerged scathed
from our new century
laden with some embodied
combination of warning
mourning
and sorrow

A woman who looks up and across the sanctuary
and sees       nothing
the nothing that remains after everything is lost

So endeth the Platform—
My thanks to Eiko and all involved for the journey.