“Water is in our bodies, rivers, sea, our womb, and our tears.”
So say Eiko & Koma, the Japanese-born performance duo, in an artists’ statement. Immersed for 45 beautiful, but bitter-cold, minutes in a Skirball Center lily pond, they encourage their audience to “remember and imagine the ancient water from which all living things came.”
“Water,” they write, is “both a source of life and of death — as recent disasters have reminded us all.”
Eiko & Koma’s special and intimate performance last night is captured in the haunting and true photography of Myra Vides, who told us after the show that she was “frustrated that she could not get in the water with them” [to take her photos]. The results are exceptional for a dark setting with no flash allowed.