Performing History: Swallowing and Spitting, or Drooling (Perspectives from Contemporary Japanese Performing Arts)

The title of this dossier, "Swallowing and Spitting," comes from a passing remark made by the dancer eiko otake.¹ Sitting across a table from me by the window in her home, overlooking the streets of Hell's Kitchen in New York City, she was describing her thoughts on the idea of "performing history" over a bowl of cherries. As I understood it, the cherries nourish the body and delight the taste buds, but at times there are bad fruits that disgust. This is how the body performs history as a relationship between partial acts of incorporation and purgation, modulated by taste and other survival mechanisms. Performances do not merely represent history. They are also constituted by it. In karen shimakawa's words, "the stories of the past that we tell not only produce the present but produce the subject in the present; the way that you feel in your body is [also] produced by the story of the past that you come to tell."² History in this sense is not so much an account of the preserved past as it is an accumulation of social relations articulated through everyday practice, discipline, resistance, and flights of imagination.

Performance renders these history-making relations personal, precarious, and vulnerable. Eiko's analogy of swallowing and spitting outlines an understanding of history as an entanglement, that is, an unavoidable form of relations of "proximity and affinity," as Joshua Chambers-Letson has described it.³ To unpack how "swallowing and spitting" connects performance and history, it's important to first note that Eiko said swallowing and spitting, not swallowing or spitting. "Spit or swallow" characterizes a sexualized relation of dominance where spitting implies a form of violent rejection, while swallowing signals submission. By contrast, Eiko explained that in her analogy, "spitting is not so much a fast, violent act," but rather a kind of "drooooo-ling."⁴ Her description hints at the leakiness of historical transmission as a kind of elicit yet liberating entanglement, which betrays the false dilemma of "spit or swallow." Put another way, borrowing a phrase from Audre Lorde, the dual actions of swallowing and spitting transform the relations of power absorbed by an erotically vital body into a "replenishing and provocative force."⁵ Yet, the slippage between the two kinds of erotic affect present here are worth appreciating. Both "swallowing and spitting" and "spit or swallow" deal with the ways in which socially and historically legitimized power operates on the moving, performing, and listening body. Examining these relations of power through the lens of performance reveals how that same body may also resist power. From the acts of "everyday resistance" that Saidiya Hartman has described, to butoh, punk, kabuki, improvised music, and contemporary dance, performative practices have repeatedly demonstrated how bodily gestures channel both domination and resistance, often simultaneously.⁶ Through the idea of swallowing and spitting, with drooling in between, Eiko's analogy suggests that registering history (as both incorporation and selective rejection) in practice rarely presents an easy choice between one story or another. But where words fail, Eiko embraces the ambiguity, vagueness, and even meaninglessness that constitute the very gestures of her sense of performance as history.

This dossier foregrounds the work of dancer/choreographer Eiko, composer and sound artist Miya Masaoka, and experimental theater director Brooke O'Harra. Readers familiar with their practices may wonder about the juxtaposition of these three artists together, because, frankly, their approaches to "performing history" could not be more different from one another (Eckersall's essay in this dossier aptly describes their differences). Yet in grouping them together for the sake of this dossier, I draw on a methodology of "critical juxtaposing," Diane Wolf's and Yến Lê Espiritu's useful formulation for a purposeful juxtaposing of very different contexts or approaches in order to reveal interrelated points of connection that would otherwise have remained unregistered.⁷ Thus, the grouping of the three artists, while provisional, posits "performing history" both as a critical engagement with the past, and as the "history of the present"—in the sense of an ongoing...