Asuka J. Riedl: Someone disappears, a Collective appears – A Lament

The stage design, two large white papers unfolding from the ceiling to the ground, sets the stage for imaginative dimensions between heaven and earth, the actual and the virtual, the blank possibilities, and the odds of having it all (white colour holding all colours). The performance is also twofold to me: gestures and their disappearance. As a solo dancer, Riedl first travels through different scenes depicting plasticity in the scale of what gestures can be, how they communicate in a direct human-to-human way, and how they can reside and grow as more emotionally carried expressions. We see Riedl as a distant sole figure pressing the gestures to her own body, seemingly communicating to an invisible figure, and even (in my perception) turning into a dancer in a music box trapped in a positioned limbo of endlessly repeating the same gestures. However, as gestures are not only a means of self-expression but also communal, Riedl and the musician, Shinsuke Sugitani, at a point play a children’s game which allows a mutation of the already familiar gestures and softly grounds the audience to meet with Riedl at the end of the performance where she enters to be with the audience in a shared moment of silence, inviting us to reflect on our own experiences and emotions.
 
Before the collective contact and after the play of multiple variations on gestures, I find a moment in the work beautifully and powerfully containing Riedl’s answer to her starting question, “Where does the memory go when the body disappears?” In this scene, the gestures themselves begin to disappear – the sharp edges of her movements begin to blur as she becomes softer in her initiations and introduces more flow to the choreography. I am struck by the transformation of the gestures, which lose their form and become energetic currents that guide her body into more profound emotional expression, communication, and being. The anxiety, fear, and love that I feel from Riedl’s dance, which moves by releasing to build a new transformed system of sharp-edged movements, also triggers a physical transformation and release in me as an audience member. I feel tears begin to trickle down my cheeks.
 
The raw sensitivity of Riedl’s performance brings her work to the canon of laments in performative arts. In his book “Performing Mourning – Laments in Contemporary Art,” the Dutch Dramaturge Guy Cools suggests grief as solitary, whereas mourning is a collective and performative ritual. Performance is a ritual practice for Cools as it engages “one’s community into the role of a witness.” He argues that there is somatic and energetic potential in the witnessing role: the audience, by perceiving, can respond to someone’s personal grief and, by this, amplify and turn an individual act into a collective one. I agree with Cools, coming from my share of grief and, with it, the difficulties of expressing it and re-living it in tangent and sordid repetitions. So, Riedl’s work Karada becomes a gift for me where personal un-uttered yearnings and hauntings can be collectively witnessed, responded to, and transformed.
 
As an afterword, I wanted to end with a coincidence I stumbled on. After leaving the performance, I remembered the work of a Japanese Fluxus artist, Mieko Shiomi. Like Riedl’s grandmother, she also experienced the Second World War in Japan. In the 1960s, she created a performative series called “events & games,” where individual artists could perform tasks individually while contributing to a collective body of work.
 
For example, in Water Music, “1. Give the water still form. 2. Let the water lose its still form.”
Moreover, the spatial poem nr 9: “Notice the natural phenomenon that something is going to disappear – either suddenly or gradually.”
 
I chose these two works of Shiomi as they echo historical and thematic parallels of Karada poetically and across time. The two artists’ works are 60 years apart, yet connected through and as performative events, simple tasks, gestures, and games that change from an individually performed act to a collective experience. In the end, Riedl’s work shows how the topic of war that is alienating can be returned to a feeling and so to the body through shared collective witnessing. How even when the bodies of the victims disappear, they stay alive in us through gestures and emotions, as energies of haunting and yearning and, most importantly they bring us together.