“Pink Waves” is multiple things at once. As a performance art piece, Sawako Nakayasu’s newest poetic composition considers the shifting roles the reader, writer and spoken-word performer take on in relation to a piece of work; as a written recording of performance artistry, it offers a fresh and moving study on grief and otherness.
An artist working in translation, poetry and performance as well as a professor of literary arts at Brown University in Rhode Island, Nakayasu constructed “Pink Waves” in front of an audience over three days. The resulting work has been longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Voelcker Award for a poetry collection.
Divided into three interconnected movements, Nakayasu weaves in her many creative influences throughout the piece, including Black Dada by New York-based conceptual artist Adam Pendleton, the words of Australian writer and social activist Irina Dunn and nods to the turbulent years of the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Repeated phrases and borrowed lines entwine to form a raw, spontaneous response to her sources of inspiration and her audience. The resulting ebb and flow of words questions boundaries between genres of literature, between grief and acceptance, and between constraints of historical perspective, gender, race and time.
“The book is a structured improvisation: the form, the sentence, the microtranslation, the language from the sources, are the structures with which I improvised in writing, on stage, with others,” Nakayasu writes in the acknowledgments section. The artist also recognizes Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto’s avant-garde work “Waveform” as the starting impetus for “Pink Waves.”
The first page opens with a single sentence: “It was a wave all along.” From there, Nakayasu constructs the first movement, titled “A,” with each new canto of poetry unfurling as a free verse sonata, building and reforming from that single line. The second movement, “B,” starts with a single word, “snap.” This new section features blank pages interspersed among Nakayasu’s spiraling, continuous evolution of thought. The final movement, “A prime,” playfully combines the first two sections with the opening phrase, “it was a wave, would i snap.” The artist then proceeds to interweave words, phrases and ideas to mimic an undulating flow of water with a cacophony of combined meaning. It is a work that invites continuous reading sessions, like listening to an entire music performance, only to start from the beginning again without pause, slowing down to reabsorb the work and find new connections.
“Pink Wave” is a multilayered, deliberately avant-garde construction; it also offers an enjoyable reading experience. Personal, whimsical and relatable, many phrases beg to be read aloud. It is easy to imagine the words flowing out during intimate moments on stage as Nakayasu the performer strives to connect with her live audience in the moment of creation.
With that in mind, the work is a simple testimony to art's primary purpose: to communicate across time and space. All artistic efforts are inspired by the creativity of artists and thinkers who came before, and this truth gently repeats itself within the pages of “Pink Waves.”
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