The Pillow Book
Shakti
The Garage International at MRC
Sun 11 March
season closed


Mieko Nishimura's 'Women As Goddess' exhibition adorns the Mercury Cinema, a brightly coloured set of paintings depicting birds, mythical beasts and female figures. Yet the vast auditorium was not ideal for such an intimate performance. To celestial music, two handmaidens circled the stage with smooth control, their restrictive white kimonos limiting their movements to slow gliding steps and graceful, minimal hand gestures.

Bundled tightly in a heavy cream silk embroidered kimono, Shakti's movements were stately while her assistants groomed her hair. Revealing a many-layered red silk robe, the music changed to opera singing as she whirled, the silken layers flickered like a flame.

The two women bared their shoulders for Nishimura to daub their backs with Japanese characters, undulating demurely. Suddenly Shakti dropped her robe, standing nude and completely unembarrassed to be painted. This shock soon gave way to interest in Nishimura's lurid colours and urgent, swirling brushstrokes creating a winged goddess, a bird and flowers covering her breasts. Although this took a long time, it was fascinating to watch, reminiscent of a 1960s happening.

Shakti's naked dancing was sensually uninhibited, combining freeform modern movement with Kathak Indian dancing: stamping her feet, emphatically rotating her hands and moving her eyebrows fearsomely, a magnetic presence. Finally she spoke, describing Sei Shonagon's 'The Pillow Book', a frank diary written during a time of women's repression, and explaining that we must paint the canvas of our own lives: an anodyne feminist justification of her fierce and confrontational performance.

Rosie Clarke