Dancer and filmmaker Megumi Eda and sound artist Reiko Yamada found an exciting common denominator for their collaboration on YORIDOKORO – Silent Anchor (4-6 June 2026, Dock11): volleyball.
I’m going to be honest. I don’t enjoy watching ballet. My reasons are personal, but I think I’m not the only one with these reasons. Of course my breath stops for a moment whenever someone twirls a pirouette in front of me. I, too, am fascinated by the physical control it takes for ballet dancers to stretch their legs incredibly high. It’s just that this admiration unfortunately always comes with a bad feeling about your own body, which feels like an unwieldy vehicle by comparison and performs inadequately, if at all. Of course I’m exaggerating. But that is essentially why I don’t enjoy watching ballet.
End of disclaimer.
Crossfade to piece.
Megumi Eda’s dance career began at the Hamburg Ballett, and in YORIDOKORO – Silent Anchor the artist integrates this language into her choreography. Interestingly, I don’t at all feel the way I described above for a change. Because in addition to the precision and virtuosity of a professional executing elements of ballet, Megumi Eda performs material that has the characteristics of clownery and movement research. Both contexts in which the potential for failure is greeted, from the get-go, with more kindness than in classical ballet. I not only find this appealing, it also, in this case, allows me to let down my guard against ballet – at least for tonight.
©Kai Bernstein
One example is a weirdly funny interlude where Eda attempts to run backwards in a circle for eight minutes. But she keeps cheating to breathlessly explain to the audience what her parents and teachers have always taught her: you have to finish what you started! Every once in a while, Reiko Yamada, who is doing a live sound performance for the piece, calls out the remaining time from the edge of the stage. Yamada is also the one who appears in larger than life video tutorials on the back wall of the stage to teach Eda how to play volleyball. This team sport, which Yamada appears to have mastered, ultimately serves as choreographic material for Megumia Eda with its receiving, passing, and spiking drills.
Sometimes Eda plays with a real ball, sometimes with a number of imaginary balls that are passed to her from the audience. In the end, she integrates the ball into a phrase that has, by that point, become far removed from the movements required for the game. Perhaps what impresses me the most about YORIDOKORO – Silent Anchor is how it stays on the ball. And by that I mean, first and foremost, the physical and metaphorical ball that Eda the dancer and Yamada the musician pass back and forth on the common ground of the volleyball court. Because it is through this act that a unique collaboration between choreography and composition arises that I have never seen before and will probably never see again.
English translation by Melissa Maldonado
YORIKODORO – Silent Anchor by Megumi Eda and Reiko Yamada was presented at Dock11 from 4-6 June 2026.