Is my body even mine? Installation performance revolves around that question We Are The House by the Dutch-Japanese pianist and artist Tomoko Mukaiyama, which premiered on Saturday at the Holland Festival. With abortion as a central motif, she investigates the autonomy of the women’s body. Who decides about it?
Mukaiyama says that she had an abortion when she was 22, which she has previously kept quiet. She only shared her story and feelings of guilt and shame when she met doctor and activist Rebecca Gomperts three years ago. Gomperts is the founder of Women on Waves, the organization that provides assistance with abortion in countries where it is prohibited.
The hall of the Music Building has been stripped of chairs and stage. There is a wing in the middle and large screens hang on three sides. Visitors shuffle through the space or sit on the floor, while performers Mukaiyama and Just van Bommel move between them. They approach the subject in different ways: musically, stylized as a theater text, in an abstract index of keywords projected on the screens and as Mukaiyama’s unadorned lecture, in Japanese, about her experience.
When Van Bommel launches into convincing and justified anger, aimed at Trump, among others, the text becomes somewhat predictable and therefore flat. The people who need to get this message across are not in the room.
Pianist and artist Tomoko Mukaiyama.
Photo Yoshikazu Inoue
Conjuring monologue
Nevertheless, it is convincing and moving We Are The Housebecause the makers usually opt for emotional complexity and the concrete and intimate. To the point of being strange: there is a wonderfully well-timed video about octopus sex in close-up, a sensual tangle of suction cups and tentacles. A highlight is the long enchanting monologue with which Van Bommel addresses a young woman undergoing an abortion in Japan, where a pregnancy test for home use only became available in 1990.
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The androgynous Van Bommel is a heart-conquering narrator who speaks almost subdued about the forces and laws that influence the female body, effectively supported by thunderous electronic crescendos.
Yannis Kyriakides composed strong new piano music with an obsessive, ritualistic character. While Mukaiyama massages rapid waves of notes from the keys, like an evocation of Women on Waves, individual words are stamped onto the screen to the rhythm of electronically distorted piano sounds: ‘Should the body be controlled, surveilled, commodified?’
Sometimes you have to keep repeating a question even though you already know the answer.