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Eiko and Koma: Dance Philosophy andAestheticShoko Yamahata Letton

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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATRE AND DANCE

EIKO AND KOMA:

DANCE PHILOSOPHY AND AESTHETIC

By

SHOKO YAMAHATA LETTON

A Thesis submitted to the Department of Dance

in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2009

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The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of Shoko Yamahata Letton defended on

October 18, 2007.

____________________________________ Sally R. Sommer Professor Directing Thesis ____________________________________ Tricia H. Young Committee Member ____________________________________ John O. Perpener III Committee Member

Approved: ___________________________________________ Patricia Phillips, Co-Chair, Department of Dance ___________________________________________ Russell Sandifer, Co-Chair, Department of Dance ___________________________________________ Sally E. McRorie, Dean, College of Visual Arts, Theatre and Dance The Graduate School has verified and approved the above named committee members.

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Dedicated to all the people who love Eiko and Koma.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis would not have been completed without the following people. I thank Eiko

and Koma for my life-changing experiences, access to all the resources they have, interviews,

wonderful conversations and delicious meals. I appreciate Dr. Sally Sommer’s enormous

assistance, encouragement and advice when finishing this thesis. I sincerely respect her vast

knowledge in dance and her careful and strict editing which comes from her career as dance

critic, and, her wonderful personality. Dr. William Sommer’s kindness and hospitality also

allowed me to work extensively with his wife. I deeply thank Ms. Jennifer S. Bleill Calienes of

Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography who gave me the opportunity to work with

Eiko and Koma and Mr. Kenn Martin whose contribution to FSU Dance Technology Scholarship

made this possible. I appreciate Dr. Tricia Young’s, Dr. John Perpener’s, and Dr. Yoshihiro

Yasuhara’s assistance and advice. I thank my great friend and dorky–dancer, and my mentor,

Latika Young, who gave me invaluable assistance in brainstorming ideas and editing, supporting

me always with humor and kindness. I appreciate Ms. Irene Oppenheim’s generous acceptance

for interview. I thank Michael David Letton and Claude Jerome Smith III for their editorial and

translation assistance.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... vi

LIST OF VIDEOS ........................................................................................................................ vii

ABSTRACT................................................................................................................................. viii

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 1

1.1 Personal Story .................................................................................................................... 1

1.2 Methodology ...................................................................................................................... 4

1.3 Chapter Sketch ................................................................................................................... 7

CHAPTER 2. GROPING IN THE DARKNESS: THE EARLY PERIOD OF EIKO AND KOMA’S DANCE IN JAPAN ..................................................................................................... 10

CHAPTER 3. EUROPE TO AMERICA – ANALYSIS OF WHITE DANCE .......................... 32

CHAPTER 4. CROSS-CULTURAL INFLUENCE OF AMERICAN AND JAPANESE AVANT-GARDE ......................................................................................................................... 44

CHAPTER 5. EIKO AND KOMA JOIN AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE .............................. 54

CHAPTER 6. CULTIVATION OF THE STYLE – ANALYSIS OF GRAIN .......................... 62

CHAPTER 7. ARRIVAL OF BUTOH...................................................................................... 80

CHAPTER 8. CHANGING MEDIUM – VIDEO WORK: LAMENT ...................................... 92

CHAPTER 9. EVOLVING ARTISTIC IDENTITY IN COLLABORATION: LAND........... 103

CHAPTER 10. A SYNTHESIS OF PHILOSOPHY AND AESTHETICS – CAMBODIAN

STORIES 110

CHAPTER 11. CONCLUSION .............................................................................................. 121

REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 123

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...................................................................................................... 136

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Tohmatsu Shohmei’s Shashinshuh: Okinawa Okinawa Okinawa: Okinawa ni kichi ga

aruno dewa naku kichi no naka ni Okinawa ga aru (Photobook: Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa: Not that the bases are located in Okinawa, but Okinawa is located in the bases) (Tokyo: Shaken, 1969) ............................................................................................................................................. 11

Figure 2 Shiraga Kazuo performing Doro ni idomu (Challenging Mud) at the “1st Gutai Art Exhibition” held at the Ohara Kaikan Hall, Tokyo, Oct. 1955..................................................... 16

Figure 3 Saburoh Murakami’s Breaking Paper Screens, Gutai Art on Stage, Sankei Kaikan Hall, Osaka, 29 May 1957, or Sankei Hall, Tokyo, 17 July 1957. ........................................................ 17

Figure 4 Atsuko Tanaka wearing Denki-fuku (Electric Dress) at the “2nd Gutai Art Exhibition” held at the Ohara Kaikan Hall, Tokyo, Oct. 1956 ........................................................................ 19

Figure 5 Kazuo Shiraga painting with his feet at the “2nd Gutai Art Exhibition” held at the Ohara Kaikan Hall, Tokyo, Oct. 1956.. ................................................................................................... 20

Figure 6 Shohzoh Shimamoto making a painting by throwing bottles of paint, at the “2nd Gutai Art Exhibition” held at the Ohara Kaikan Hall, Tokyo, Oct. 1956 .............................................. 21

Figure 7 Natsuyuki Nakanishi’s Clothespins Assert Churning Action, at the “15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition,” Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 2-15 March 1963. Collection of Natsuyuki Nakanishi..................................................................................................................... 23

Figure 8 Natsuyuki Nakanishi’s Clothespins Assert Churning Action, at Hi Red Center’s 6th Mixer Plan event, Tokyo, 28 May 1963. Collection of Minoru Hirata ........................................ 23

Figure 9 Tatsumi Hijikata performing Hijikata Tatsumi to Nihonjin—Nikutai no hanran (Hijikata Tatsumi and The Japanese—Revolt of the Flesh) at the Seinen Kaikan Hall, Tokyo, 1968. Photographed by Nakatani Tadao and Doi Nori................................................................. 24

Figure 10 Ibid............................................................................................................................... 25

Figure 11 Ibid............................................................................................................................... 26

Figure 12 Tatsumi Hijikata holding an infant and running across a rice field, 1965. From Eikoh Hose and Tatsumi Hijikata’s Kamaitachi: Hosoe Eikoh shashinshuh (Sickle-toothed weasel: Photobook by Hosoe Eikoh) (Tokyo: Gendai Shichoh-sha, 1969)............................................... 52

Figure 13 Eikoh Hosoe’s Otoko to onna = Man and Woman (Tokyo: CamerArt, 1961) ........... 53

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LIST OF VIDEOS

Video 1 Excerpt from Breath. Conceived and performed by Eiko and Koma. Eiko and Koma: Media Dance. DVD. 1985. Eiko and Koma’s personal archive. .................................................. 66

Video 2 Excerpt from Grain. Conceived and performed by Eiko and Koma. DVD. 1983. Eiko and Koma’s personal archive........................................................................................................ 77

Video 3 Excerpt from Lament. Conceived and performed by Eiko and Koma. Eiko and Koma: Media Dance. DVD. 1985. Eiko and Koma’s personal archive. .................................................. 97

Video 4 Excerpt from Lament. Conceived and performed by Eiko and Koma. Eiko and Koma: Media Dance. DVD. 1985. Eiko and Koma’s personal archive. ................................................ 102

Video 5 Excerpt from Land. Eiko and Koma. Oregon, WI: ADF Video, 1995. ........................ 105

Video 6 Excerpt from The Making of Cambodian Stories. Directed by Eiko and Koma. 2005. Available online <http://www.eikoandkoma.org/index.php?id=1202> ..................................... 119

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ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the evolution of dance works by two Japanese-American

choreographers, Eiko and Koma. Growing up in the politically turbulent 1960s in Japan, their

entrance into the world of dance was motivated by philosophical inquiry into Japanese society.

Briefly trained under early Butoh pioneers in Japan, they traveled from Japan to Europe, and

eventually came to the U.S. Their dance career began in the early 1970s and continues to this

day. Using Janet Wolff’s concept of art as an expression of artist’s Lebenswelt, this thesis

defines Eiko and Koma’s dance works as a comprehensive expression. Lebenswelt is not

limited to representation of particular life experiences. Instead the artists’ participation in

different social contexts shapes the subjective meanings of the art they create. I chose five

works, White Dance: Moth, Grain, Lament, Land, and Cambodian Stories as the signature

representations of different phases in their career. These five works reveal common threads

which both represent Eiko and Koma’s aesthetics as well as encapsulate their philosophy

towards dance and, on the greater scale, towards life. This thesis serves as one of the first

scholarly research papers focusing on Eiko and Koma and their dance forms. It is the hope of this

author that the thesis provides the groundwork from which other scholarly research is conducted.

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CHAPTER 1.

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Personal Story

I was shocked when I first watched the video of Eiko and Koma’s Wallow. “Is this

dance?” I asked myself. I was astonished when I learned that they are highly regarded in the

American modern dance scene, listed among the top fifty contemporary dancers in the West.

As a result of this initial surprise, I was compelled to find out who they were, to research their

dance style, and to discover why they are so highly respected.

As my study continued, I became more eager to understand them and their style of

dance. What was particularly interesting was that they studied law and political science before

becoming dancers, then they had experienced an extremely active performance career in the U.S.

for over thirty years as a duo.

When I learned I had a chance to work with them, I seized the opportunity. Awarded a dance

technology scholarship in 2005, I began to work with Eiko and Koma on their documentary The

Making of Cambodian Stories (2006). As an editor I observed first-hand their singular forms of

art-making and everyday life.

These two workaholics live on the 29th Floor of Manhattan Plaza, in the middle of

Manhattan. The apartment complex is subsidized by the government to support artists in New

York City. I worked in their living room. From August through December 2005, I went to

their apartment almost every day, and at times, I lived there. As I fell in love with Eiko and

Koma, I decided to write my thesis about them.

From the beginning of Cambodian Stories I found their work style to be primordial and

performative. They eschew rigid structure in the initial planning, instead, leaving the beginning

phase open and flexible.

At first I worked closely with Koma. He is the visionary who perceives concepts as

images. He had recorded over 60 hours of footage in Cambodia but lacked any solid editing

plan. We discussed the structure of the DVD, and although I am not a professional editor,

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Koma listened to my ideas and opinions. It was completely surprising to me, as a Japanese

native who grew up in a society where the age/status hierarchy is clearly defined and strictly

followed, that Koma allowed me to collaborate and valued my ideas. According to Japanese

social conventions, younger people or people of a lower status must follow the wishes of their

elders or people of the higher classes. Since he welcomed my ideas I could speak freely, and I

became excited as I imagined how the DVD might turn out.

He allowed me to edit sections by myself. But after watching them, he responded with

candid criticism, saying, “This is not good,” then he had me rework the sections or gave new

directions. Sometimes it took several days to complete a five-minute scene. Koma never

compromised his aesthetics, tirelessly rewatching the cut and Mini-DV tape footage, pondering

what would best fit the next section. He also posted photos representing sections of the footage

on the wall to help us think about the sequences. Gradually the structure evolved. It had not

existed before, but our intense engagement and collaboration shaped the project.

Whenever we reached a dead-end, Koma said: “Let’s do a radical thing!” – a creative

idea came out of the crisis. “I want ‘Peace’ (one of Cambodian Stories main dancers) to walk

into the sun.” The effect was impossible since we did not have footage of the sun that could

overlap with Peace’s walking shot. But Koma would not acquiesce. So I experimented by

clipping the footage, reversing it, and magnifying its size. As a result, an upside-down sun

became the perfect sun for Peace to walk into and became, in fact, one of the most beautiful

shots in the DVD.

Before we completely finished making the DVD, Asia Society and Wesleyan University

asked us to present the DVD. Again, it was impossible. The incomplete DVD was far from

being ready to show. But Koma insisted. So we did it. We worked faster and harder. I

slept in their living room, woke up, edited all day, went to bed, and rose to work again. As a

result of our intense dedication to the project, he received warm feedback after the showing.

Koma taught me that despite constraints there are ways to make things happen. If one

way doesn’t work, alternative methods may be devised, or, one can invest more time and effort

to make it happen. “Impossible” does not exist for Koma.

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Koma seems to have limitless energy to spend on things he loves. Outside work,

Koma is a big tennis player. He trains by watching video series called, “You Certainly Become

a Great Player!” Although he works hard and long, he never misses a chance to play tennis. He

is also a big fan of Harumi Miyako, a middle-aged Japanese folk singer. As a devoted fan, he

has never missed any of her concerts in Japan. There is a shrine in Koma’s apartment where he

puts Miyako’s photos (to pray for) alongside two boxes of Japanese cigarettes called, “Hope,”

which Miyako’s father smokes.

From mid-November, once Koma and I finished the first several cuts of the DVD, I

worked closely with Eiko who is a logical and practical person. When the rough draft of the

DVD was complete Eiko watched it and said, “Let’s show people and get feedback!” She

started to telephone people and invited them over to watch it. While I was editing and working

on the details of the DVD, Eiko was cooking. As soon as the guests or test-viewers arrived, she

handed them a pencil and notebook to take notes with while watching the DVD. As soon as

they finished, she passed out food and eagerly listened to their opinions. We implemented the

changes, but if a change did not work, she immediately came up with an alternative solution. In

this way, she was the more practical one who created ways for the product to be publicly

viewable. When Eiko and Koma came to the U.S. in 1976, it was Eiko who wrote letters to the

staff of Dance Magazine to tell them about their work. Clearly the force of her personality is

essential to their success. She makes things happen.

Eiko involved everyone in the project: critics, writers, dancers, and even my ex-husband

watched the DVD and gave comments. Eiko and Koma’s sons, Shin and Yuta, also helped to

correct the language on the DVD. Both Eiko and Koma possess mysterious powers that

motivate people (helped by their delicious meals), making us curious about their work,

passionate to work with them. At dinner, sometimes with their sons, the conversation was

always casual and fun. Eiko liked to say that Shin was popular among American kids and how

they wanted to eat him because he looked so cute. Koma talked about his experiences in the

student movements and how poor he had been. At one point, he had to share a single egg with

his mother. He ate the white of the egg and his mother ate the yolk. For him, being able to eat

a whole egg is a great luxury.

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Eiko and Koma are uplifting. They tell jokes to each other and accumulate energy

from their laughter and divert it into the work. Working with them was an extraordinary and

pleasant experience. Like their dance, it was filled with joy, surprise, and challenges. If Allan

Kaprow idealized modern art as “lifelike art,” Eiko and Koma have demonstrated that there is no

boundary between life and art.

1.2 Methodology

Dance for Eiko and Koma has been a method of expression for their life journey. Their

dance style, like their personal lives, has evolved and progressed, always shaped by the changing

motivations and intentions of a society constantly in flux. While being involved in the student

movement during Japan's postwar period, they questioned their government and society, which

had absorbed Western ideologies of capitalism and consumerism. Dance appealed to them as it

symbolized the virtues of anti-materialism and anti-capitalism. After briefly training in Japan,

they traveled to Europe and arrived in the U.S. Their life experiences, as developed in different

cultures, fostered their practical, conceptual and technical skills which became the foundation of

their dance. Fueled by diverse influences, Eiko and Koma’s dance aesthetic gradually matured

to coincide with their political philosophies. As they adapted their style of dance in constantly

changing social circumstances, viewers kept re-identifying Eiko and Koma’s dance. Their

labeling changed from “Japanese avant-garde” to “American avant-garde” to “Butoh” and finally

to “Eiko and Koma.” As their ideals were updated and constantly reshaped their dance shifted

from rebellious and radical to a steady and gentle modality embodied in their slow, delicate, and

low-level floor movement. Discovering equal qualities in nature and human beings, and

treating their bodies as extensions of natural landscape, Eiko and Koma presented their

egalitarian beliefs through their dance.

The grounding theory for this thesis is rooted in Janet Wolff’s concept of art as an

expression of Lebenswelt “the world of lived experience.”1 Wolff argues that the origin of

1 Janet Wolff, Hermeneutic Philosophy and the Sociology of Art: An Approach to Some of the

Epistemological Problems of the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sociology of Art and Literature, (London; Boston: Routledge & Paul, 1975) 14.

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artistic knowledge comes from artists’ experiences in society. The artist subjectively finds

meanings in life experiences and then constructs subjective realities based on those experiences.

Yet these internalized realities are not univocal, as sociologist Alfred Schutz discusses. Schultz

writes about the simultaneous existence of multiple internalized realities, which indicate different

modes of consciousness and states of intentionality created for the different provinces of natural

attitudes in daily life. While accepting the existence of Schultz’s multiple internalized realities,

however, Wolff argues that experiential constitution of consciousness shows “a certain

congruence of all its aspects which becomes a coherent, meaningfully integrated total world.”2

Wolff consolidates her belief by using phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s words, “one

single experience inseparable from itself, one single ‘living cohesion,’ one single temporality

which is engaged, from birth, in making itself progressively explicit, and in confirming that

cohesion in each successive present.”3

Thus the Lebenswelt is “the accumulated coherent total world.”4 This integrated total

world then gets manifested within the art work. Wolff stresses that “the person’s art can be

understood only in the wider situation of his total experiential structure.”5

To deepen my own understanding of Eiko and Koma’s life experiences, I used various

interviews as primary sources. Selected interviews range from short ones incorporated into

reviews to lengthy interviews with Effie Mihopolous in 1983, with Leslie Windham in 1988,

Deborah Jowitt in 1998, and with this author in 2006 and 2007. As a native-born Japanese

speaker, I was able to understand subtle meanings of their words not expressed in English. In

addition, working as an editor of their documentary of The Making of Cambodian Stories from

July through December 2005, I was able to observe their working style and process, which

became the empirical materials for this thesis. Although Eiko and Koma reflectively talked

about their experiences, their purposeful choice of words revealed how they perceive the world,

2 Wolff 8.

3 Qtd. in Wolff 15.

4 Wolff 8.

5 Ibid.

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opening paths of analysis about their ways of thinking, which constructs their realities, and,

generates their works. Their perception of realties also became the tool by which they form

their own dance style, making an analysis of their beliefs and attitudes useful in describing their

style.

In this thesis, I parallel their life experiences and their dance works, as it is crystallized in

both spheres. In addition, the characteristics of each performance are analyzed through the lens

of different theories, including minimalism, close-up film technique, and fuhdo: the Japanese

concept of spiritual and internalized nature. This is explained more fully in Chapter 5. While

the theories I use vary, chronological description and examination of the work reveals the

progression and evolution of their dance style and their philosophy.

While it is true that Lebenswelt exists in an individual world, Wolff argues that it also

exists in the social world. Her claim is based on the fact that an artist exists in society,

interacting and socializing with others. This interconnectedness allows him/her to acquire

artistic knowledge and preexisting social meanings from which the artist’s own interpretations

are generated.

While the artistic meanings by the artist may differ from ones held by society, meanings

are still formed in light of existing, larger, meaning-systems. Wolff writes, “sociological (and

any other) study of art must include a formulated conception of the expressive qualities of art and

the pertinent respects in which the arts may be said to express or reflect extra-artistic ideas.”6

Once art is created, it has its own distinct meaning, different from its point of origin as society

imposes meanings. This is especially useful for understanding the relationships between

different artists and society, as one is able to more deeply appreciate the layers of meaning.

This thesis includes the examination of the Japanese avant-garde art movement and its

cross-cultural influences on the American avant-garde. The art world’s acceptance of and

familiarity with Japanese art movements readied American audiences to welcome and accept

Eiko and Koma’s dance – but also created a filter for how their works were perceived. The

artist’s subjective, and the public’s objective, meanings created crucial discrepancies between

6 Wolff 55.

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artist’s self-labeling and social labeling. In the early period of their dance career in the U.S.,

Eiko and Koma considered themselves to be part of the Japanese avant-garde movement, while

Americans did not. Then, in a strange reversal of social versus self-labeling, as they continued

their journey, Americans began to recognize them as American avant-garde performers – but

labeled them as “Butoh” dancers. Eiko and Koma opposed this categorization, clearly

expressing their own self-perception as artists, which expressed their attitudes for their art.

1.3 Chapter Sketch

Chapter 1 contextualizes the social background of Tokyo, Japan, during the 1960s and

1970s which pulled Eiko and Koma into the avant-garde dance world. Growing up in the

politically turbulent period of the 1960s, they had critical attitudes about Japan accepting

Western ideologies. Their involvement with the student movement signified their activist spirit

and physical energy which they translated into the world of dance. Their training with the

pioneers of Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, did not last long.

Chapter 2 deals with their move to Europe when they studied with Manja Chmiel.

Their first dance performance piece, White Dance, was selected as one of the top three works in

the 17th International Summer Academy of Dance in Köln even in the beginning their career.

Following a brief return to Japan, Eiko and Koma moved to New York City, where they

performed the American premier of White Dance: Moth, which brought another success,

allowing New York City to become their home and performance base.

Chapter 3 contextualizes the cultural background of New York City from the late 1950s

through the 1970s. New York’s avant-garde dance movement, accelerated by John Cage and

Merce Cunningham, revealed a philosophical influence from Japan. The cross-cultural and

artistic exchanges between Japanese and American artists, and the influences of Zen stimulated

the conceptual revolution for American modern dance. The “Judson” dancers who were trained

and influenced by Cunningham, Cage and Robert Dunn created new approaches towards making

dance, labeled as “post-modern.” As a result of this shift in the conceptualization of dance, the

definition of what was considered “dance” expanded, which affected how Eiko and Koma's

dance was accepted and even praised.

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Chapter 4 deals with an examination of the commonalities and dissimilarities between American

postmodern dance and Eiko and Koma's dance. Their similarities with other postmodern

performing artists, like Meredith Monk and theater-practitioner Robert Wilson help position and

contextualize Eiko and Koma within the artistic landscape of the period.

Chapter 5 covers the years 1981 to 1983 when Eiko and Koma escaped to the solitude of

Catskills to reassess their relationship and their art. Because their lives and art are inextricable,

they redefined how they might universalize and present their sexual relationship on stage, and,

they discovered a fundamental relationship between themselves and nature, which would alter

how they presented themselves and how they chose the overarching topics of their dances.

Their interest allowed them to internalize their perception of and relation to nature, explained

well by the Japanese concept of fuhdo. The piece created at the end this creative reflection was

Grain, considered by critics to be unique. Grain exemplifies the shifts made in Eiko and

Koma’s ideas about topics, which fused and questioned the relationship between human beings

and nature, and the strategies used in creating dance by this couple.

Between 1982 and 1984, Japanese Butoh was introduced to the American dance scene. Chapter

6 deals with how critics connected Eiko and Koma with Butoh, which drastically altered how

they as artists, and how their work, was perceived. They rebelled against these changing

identifiers. They strongly dissented by writing a letter of protest which they distributed to

various critics and presenters. Americans were just beginning to discover what Butoh might be

and their ideas about Butoh were constantly changing. Although there were several

characteristics Eiko and Koma shared with Butoh, there were also powerful differences in tone,

topics, and intentions. This categorization and pigeon-holing rouses questions about how

systems of generic categorization of art and artists get entrenched.

The 1980s witnessed the explosion of video technology for dance. Eiko and Koma became two

of the pioneers of making videodance works. Chapter 7 examines Lament, in which their

aesthetic visions and political philosophy is transferred from their stage works to their video

works. The close-up film theory explains how they realized this.

Chapter 8 examines Land, their first collaborative and intergenerational work, made with

two Native American artists, and including Eiko and Koma’s children in the performances.

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This shift from a duo to a family group signifies a profound conversion in their working style

and in their ideas, which would affect how they made work in the future. Land is a strong

example of the life/art paradigm described in Janet Wolff's concept of Lebenswelt and the

concept of fuhdo, an internalized nature, explained more fully in Chapter 5.

As an extension of collaborative work and their evolving political and artistic philosophy,

Eiko and Koma created Cambodian Stories in 2005. Collaborating with Cambodian

painters/students and merging dance with visual art, Eiko and Koma illustrated their concept of a

total living/artistic world. Chapter 9 locates Cambodian Stories as a hallmark of their artistic

career and examines the meaning and effect of this work, and the potent possibility of dance that

Eiko and Koma presented.

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CHAPTER 2.

GROPING IN THE DARKNESS: THE EARLY PERIOD OF EIKO AND KOMA’S

DANCE IN JAPAN

In the 1960s and early 1970s Tokyo was undergoing tumultuous social changes.

During these important decades, Eiko and Koma were involved in student protest movements.

Then,independently and as an extension of their activism,they entered into the new revolutionary

Japanese avant-garde “modern” dance world. They met in 1971 when studying with early

Butoh pioneers, but soon they left Japan to train with the German Expressionist dancer, Manja

Chmiel, a disciple of and assistant to Mary Wigman. This period culminated in the creation of

their first duet, White Dance: Moth, representing both an accomplishment and an accumulation

of their experiences.7

Eiko and Koma came to dance in reaction to the political turbulence of postwar Japan.

The revision of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (Nichibei Anzen Hoshoh Johyaku known as

ANPO) in 1960 ignited pent-up anger against both the U.S. and Japanese governments because it

gave the U.S. even greater military power and privilege on their military bases in Japan. Many

Japanese believed this treaty gave Americans control over the country, without Japan even

having its own independent defense system. Since the treaty also required Japan to support the

American army in the event of war in Asia, this alliance clearly defined the schism between

ANPO and Article Nine of the Japanese Constitution that renounced war. Many Japanese were

resentful of this contradiction and their weak-kneed government. Labor unions, women’s

groups, artists, cultural organizations and members of the Japan’s Communist (JCP) and

Socialist (JSP) parties organized radical political actions, which included massive strikes and

violent demonstrations.8 Anti-American and anti-governmental movements were most violent in

7 Chapter 2 is a close analysis of White Dance: Moth.

8 Alexandra Munroe, Avant-garde Art in Postwar Japan: The Culture and Politics of Radical

Critique, 1951—1970 (Diss. New York University, 2004) 6.

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Tokyo, where Eiko and Koma spent their youth. Eiko Otake, known as Eiko, was born in 1952

and grew up in a middle-class suburb of Tokyo. She went to Chuo University in Tokyo in 1970

and majored in law. Koma Takashi Yamada, known as Koma, was born in 1948 and grew up

in Niigata, a rural area in a northwest prefecture, and then moved to Tokyo in 1967 to study

political science in Waseda University.9 Both grew up in a period when the nation was

changing rapidly.

Figure 1 Tohmatsu Shohmei’s Shashinshuh: Okinawa Okinawa Okinawa: Okinawa ni kichi ga aruno dewa

naku kichi no naka ni Okinawa ga aru (Photobook: Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa: Not that the bases are located in Okinawa, but Okinawa is located in the bases) (Tokyo: Shaken, 1969) From Charles Merewether

9 According to Eiko and Koma, they did not graduate from the universities. Eiko was in the

university for only three months and Koma for three years. Currently (June 2007) Eiko is pursuing research on atomic bomb literature and designing her own graduate studies in The Gallatin School of Individualized Study in New York University.

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with Rika Iezumi Hiro ed., Art Anti-Art Non Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan

1950-1970 (LA: Getty Research Institute, 2007) 90.

Japan had experienced dramatic economic growth by its indirect involvement in the

Korean War and Vietnam War. The Japanese government aided the U.S. by providing

necessary supplies, ranging from medical treatment for the U.S. military forces that occupied

Okinawa, to weapons, fuel, and equipment.10 Many viewed this involvement as wrong since

the Japanese government had taken an oath renouncing war after the atomic bombs were

dropped. The government seemed far too willing to break its own oath in order to rebuild the

Japanese economy with American cooperation. As the Vietnam War escalated by the mid-

1960s, the growing presence of the U.S. military in Okinawa became more invasive, Japan

became the silent partner with the American military force (Fig. 1). This triggered further

hostility against the U.S., mixed with skepticism, doubt, and anger against the Japanese

government. Mass movements grew until the end of the 1960s when the most active

participants were students of major universities, including those attended by Eiko and Koma.11

The protesters directed their anger at schools, most of which operated under the

government’s aegis. Students’ resentments stemmed from their responses to disingenuous

Japanese political ideology to philosophical inquiries about the nature of college education.

The students worried that they would be indoctrinated to participate in the corporate system, as a

necessary consequence of the pervasive capitalist ideology, instead of furthering the

development of their humanity and individuality. Students demonstrated and boycotted

schools, demanding changes in the educational and institutional systems. Student revolts

became increasingly aggressive during the 1960s and, by 1968, medical students at Tokyo

University barricaded the auditorium in protest against the school system. Because of this riot,

the graduation ceremony and entrance examination were cancelled, forcing the university to

10 Although the U.S. occupation in Japan ended in 1952, the U.S. maintained Okinawa until 1972. “Okinawa, Japan,” 14 Jan. 2007 <http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/okinawa.htm>

11 Protests began at Keio, Waseda, Chuo, Kanagawa, Fukuoka, Nagasaki, Kumamoto, Nihon and Tokyo University, filtered down to high schools. In Edward R. Beauchamp, “Recent Developments in the Japanese Student Movement,” Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 48, No. 4. Jul., 1971: 321-324. 14 Jul. 2007 <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0161-956X%28197107%2948%3A4%3C321%3ARDITJS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B>

13

resort to violent action. The police were called to confront the students. The conflicts

intensified and violent protests quickly spread to other universities.12 In April 1969, 111

Universities out of 379 four-year universities had experienced student revolts led by a student

organization, Zengakuren (All Japan Federation of College Student Government).13

Demonstrators occupied schools, protested with Molotov cocktails, and made critical speeches

against the government and schools. Eiko and Koma were among those activists who

participated in the student movements. In one incident, Koma bound the professor with tape

and physically threw him out of the classroom.14 Radical protests expanded into the high

schools by 1969, and news reports described students who attempted to wreck graduation

ceremonies and to break school regulations.15 Eiko was in high school in 1969 and she joined

the boycotts and demonstrations at her school. Her participation in the protests was provoked

by her disapproval of the past generations’ misdeeds of war, and by the newly-imported

governmental “attitudes” that placed commercialism above college education.16 Eiko revealed

her frustration towards the authorities who directed the country into war, and the people of her

parents’ generation who were involved in the war in the interview with Leslie Windham in 1988.

[W]e had observed (in a basic social sense) our parent’s generation, which had suffered enormously from the Second World War. Also, they were responsible for the Second World War. It was interesting to me to see that they had to struggle so much, and they were hungry, and they did not have much to wear; all this made them work so hard that they did not have time to ask: Why had the war happened? How could it have been stopped? How could they not have apologized to those people who suffered more, especially in the countries which Japan invaded? I’m not saying that they could have. But it was frustrating to see that they couldn’t. As a result, we grew up wondering how we should be different from them so as not to repeat the war. When we were children there was the Korean War and there was a Cold War. So I felt the war was coming and I felt we did not know how to stop it if our parents’ generation could not stop it. Did we

12 At the end of the conflicts, all department chiefs in Tokyo University were forced to quit.

13 Beauchamp 321.

14 Koma, Personal Interview, May 31 2006 and May 28, 2007.

15 Such as the ban on long hair. In Beauchamp 323.

16 Eiko, Personal Interview, May 31 2006 and May 28, 2007.

14

have to go through the same thing they did? No, we should hate their value system. We should not be intimidated or carried away by the power of the authorities which helped cause the Second World War. So even though economically things were improving – people were working, et cetera – I always felt something was missing. That thing was justice.17

On the streets, policemen dealt brutally with demonstrators, spraying them with water

from high-pressure fire hoses, deploying tear gas, bashing protestors with nightsticks and

arresting hundreds. As the authorities began to use even more forceful methods to disrupt

student activities, the power of the protesting began to sharply decline. In addition, the renewal

of the ANPO treaty in 1970 signaled, in part, the disappointing ending of any effective protests.

Eiko and Koma, however, continued to protest in a different way. Both of them quit

their universities. Eiko spoke reflectively about her departure. “Graduating from Chuo

University was directly connected to gaining prestige, which contradicted what we were

protesting against. I decided to start by refusing the prestige that I may gain”18 (emphasis

mine). If society was permeated with activist movements as direct protests, art became an

equally strong yet indirect protest – a more discrete expression of outrage, disapproval, and

criticism.

In pre-war Japan, Dadaism, Futurism, and Surrealism were introduced from Western

Europe, inspiring the development of a specifically Japanese avant-garde art. After World War

II, this art movement represented violent revolt against the traditions of Japanese art, as well as

subversion of its institutionalized and established forms, and the new avant-garde also became a

symbolic form, representing the beginning of a new Japanese culture and self-reflection. Artist

Taroh Okamoto wrote in Konnichi no Geijutsu (Art of Today, 1954) that “postwar Japan must

peel off the heavy shell of the past and forge a new young culture as if being reborn, and venture

out into the world.”19 To accomplish this task, avant-garde artists began by working in defiance

of the traditional idea of art, geijutsu, “masterpieces” by career artists who dominated the art

17 Eiko, A Conversation with Eiko and Koma, Ballet Review, Summer 1988: 47.

18 Eiko 2007.

19 Quoted and translated in Bert Winther, Isamu Noguchi: Conflicts of Japanese Culture in the

Early Postwar Years (Ph.D. diss., New York University: 1992) 116-117.

15

establishment and organizations.20 Instead, they created the opposite of geijutsu (art), -- han-

geijutsu anti-art as (true) art. One of the avant-garde artists of the time, Yoko Ono, summarized

this idea:

Art [geijutsu] is not a special thing. Anyone can do it. Making art does not have to be so unusual. What I mean is that middle-aged men and house-wives, your neighbors, can also do it. Being an artist [geijutsuka] is not so unusual. If everybody were to become an artist, what we call “Art” would disappear. I think it would be fine if this were to happen and [what I have envisioned] becomes a reality.21

Writers, such as Kenzaburoh Ohe, Yukio Mishima, Shuzo Takiguchi, Katsue Kitasono,

and Junzaburoh Nishiwaki inspired the han-geijutsu movement intellectually with their

writings.22 Poet and literary critic, Takiguchi, was an advocate of avant-garde art who

organized over 201 avant-garde exhibitions, which included an exhibition of the “Yomiuri

Independants,” and an exhibition at Takemiya Gallery in Tokyo from 1951 to 1957.23

Unconstrained by the accepted conventional methods or ideas, artists explored expression

through experiments and collaborations. Takiguchi’s disciples formed a group, Jikken Kohboh

(Experimental Workshop) in the 1950s where fourteen members created experimental plays and

dance works.24 Other experimental groups included Zero Kai (Zero Society), Gutai-ha (Gutai

20 Reiko Tomii, “Geijutsu On Their Minds: Memorable Words on Anti-Art,” Art Anti-Art Non

Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970 ed. Charles Merewether with Rika Iezumi Hiro (LA, Getty Research Institute: 2007) 37.

21 Cited in Midori Yoshimoto, ed. and trans. “Some Young People – From Non Fiction Theater: Transcript of a Documentary Film Directed by Nagano Chiaki,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 17 2005: 99-100. Her philosophy overlapped with John Cage’s, who considered art connected with everyday life. “Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own account.” (Cage, John. Originally written in 1956 and appeared in “In This Day…” in Silence. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, The M.I.T. Press: 1971, 95). Yoko Ono and John Cage later collaborated in their Fluxus performances.

22 Having international backgrounds, Takiguchi Shuzo and Okamoto Taro became the leading figures of the Japanese avant-garde movement.

23 “About Shuzu Takiguchi,” TAMA Art University – Library Shuzo Takiguchi Archives’ Website 14 Jul. 2007 <http://archive.tamabi.ac.jp/bunko/takiguchi/t-st(E).htm>

24 Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) 159.

16

group), Vivo, Mono-ha (Material group), and Group Ongaku (Music Group).25 These groups

produced works that were subversive, filled with actions and physical demonstrations. A Gutai

ha artist, Kazuo Shiraga, presented a work called Doro ni idomu (Challenging Mud) in the Gutai

Art Exhibition in Tokyo in October 1955 (Fig. 2).

Figure 2 Shiraga Kazuo performing Doro ni idomu (Challenging Mud) at the “1st Gutai Art Exhibition” held at the Ohara Kaikan Hall, Tokyo, Oct. 1955. From Alexandra Munroe, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream

Against the Sky (Harry N. Abrams, Inc. New York: 1994) 118.

25 Alexandra Munroe’s dissertation, Avant-garde Art in Postwar Japan: The Culture and Politics

of Radical Critique, 1951—1970 includes detailed descriptions of experiments by these groups.

17

The half-naked Shiraga immersed himself in mud and then struggled against it as if it were a

person.26 At the same exhibition, another Gutai ha artist, Saburoh Murakami, dove through an

upright stack of kraft-paper screens in Breaking Paper Screens (Fig. 3).27 In yet another

exhibition, the female avant-garde artist, Atsuko Tanaka, wore a mass of blinking fluorescent

lights, covered with red, blue, yellow, and green enamel paint, in Electric Dress (1956) (Fig.

4).28

Figure 3 Saburoh Murakami’s Breaking Paper Screens, Gutai Art on Stage, Sankei Kaikan Hall, Osaka, 29 May 1957, or Sankei Hall, Tokyo, 17 July 1957. From Merewether and Hiro 70.

26 Charles Merewether, “Disjunctive Modernity: The Practice of Artistic Experimentation in

Postwar Japan,” Art Anti-Art Non Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970 ed. Charles Merewether with Rika Iezumi Hiro (LA, Getty Research Institute: 2007) 9.

27 Merewether 9.

28 Merewether 71.

18

Dramatists such as Juro Kara and Shuji Terayama wrote provocative plays, influenced by various

forms of Japanese culture, including folklore, juvenile literature, religion, television programs

and movies. Terayama’s unconventional use of various types of people – dwarfs, giants, naked

women, deformed men – brought his imaginative and often grotesque visions into reality.29

These avant-garde artists’ works became extensions of the now-diminished political physical

demonstrations, and they served as powerful tools to oppose authority.30 (Fig. 5-8) These

artists were so important that their influence spread out from Japan.31

29 Munroe 1994: 189.

30 See Fig. 5 to 8 for more Japanese avant-garde performance works presented in the 1950s and 1960s.

31 This will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3.

19

Figure 4 Atsuko Tanaka wearing Denki-fuku (Electric Dress) at the “2nd Gutai Art Exhibition” held at the Ohara Kaikan Hall, Tokyo, Oct. 1956. From Munroe 119.

20

Figure 5 Kazuo Shiraga painting with his feet at the “2nd Gutai Art Exhibition” held at the Ohara Kaikan Hall, Tokyo, Oct. 1956. From Munroe 121.

21

Figure 6 Shohzoh Shimamoto making a painting by throwing bottles of paint, at the “2nd Gutai Art Exhibition” held at the Ohara Kaikan Hall, Tokyo, Oct. 1956. From Munroe 120.

In this context, Tatsumi Hijikata’s dance works functioned to represent and express the

rebellious demands of Japan’s younger generation. Acknowledged as the founder of the avant-

garde dance form called “Butoh,”32 Hijikata was trained under Katsuko Masumura, a former

32 Originally Hijikata named his dance style “Ankoku Butoh” (The Dance of Utter Darkness).

As it was exported to overseas, particularly to France and America, Ankoku Butoh was shortened to “Butoh,” and has been developed by many successors. Butoh was shaped during the postwar period in Japan through experiments by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Reflecting their philosophies, present-day Butoh has characteristics ranging from Hijikata’s dark and Ohno’s light performative features. By opposing socially acceptable values, Hijikata used violence and eroticism in his dance. Ohno, on the other hand, believed that dance is life itself, treating dance as a healing medium. His dance is characterized by dreamy and wondrous ways of moving. Incorporating elements from Hijikata’s and Ohno’s dance, present-day Butoh dancers use gestures as a major source of movements, and putting white-make up, they transcend gender (usually male to female), metamorphosing from human to other forms in their dancing.

22

student of Takaya Eguchi. From 1931 to 1933 Eguchi had studied with the German neue

Tanzarin, Mary Wigman, the prime exponent of German Expressionist dance. Hijikata

premiered “Kinjiki (Forbidden Color)” at the Modern Dance Festival in Japan in 195933 in

which eroticism and violence commingled. Hijikata’s works both went against traditional

dance themes and embodied the new activists’ statements. The activists questioned the society

that accepted the governmental values and made people conform to the imported capitalist

ideologies.

33 It was presented as part of a series of performances organized by the All-Japan Art Dance

Association in 1959.

23

Figure 7 (Left) Natsuyuki Nakanishi’s Clothespins Assert Churning Action, at the “15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition,” Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 2-15 March 1963. Collection of Natsuyuki Nakanishi. From Merewhether and Hiro 19.

Figure 8 (Right) Natsuyuki Nakanishi’s Clothespins Assert Churning Action, at Hi Red Center’s 6th Mixer Plan event, Tokyo, 28 May 1963. Collection of Minoru Hirata. From Merewhether and Hiro 19.

While the activists were not successful in realizing an ideal social system in Japan, Hijikata was

able to create a dance performance that completely subverted existing aesthetics and presented a

new universe, in which what was once ugly became beautiful. He broke societal taboos

regarding physical modesty by exposing his naked body onstage, he focused attention on

grotesque human behaviors in order to draw attention to his radical beliefs about “forbidden”

human behaviors.34 In October, 1968, during the students’ riots in Tokyo University, Hijikata

performed Hijikata Tatsumi to Nihonjin - Nikutai no Hanran (Hijikata Tatsumi and the

Japanese: Revolt of the Flesh [Fig. 9 to 11]). In this piece, he was carried onstage on a

palanquin, wearing a kimono over his naked body, which he soon discarded, revealing that only

his penis was wrapped in golden cloth.35 Certainly this blatantly sexualized performance

protested conservative authority, making Hijikata a powerful representative for the activists.

By this time, Hijikata had attained fame and status among other avant-garde artists with his

radically unconventional dance performances.

34 Nanako Kurihara, The Most Remote Thing in the Universe: Critical Analysis of Hijikata

Tatsumi's Butoh Dance (Diss. New York University, 1996) 40.

35 Merewether 26.

24

Figure 9 Tatsumi Hijikata performing Hijikata Tatsumi to Nihonjin—Nikutai no hanran (Hijikata Tatsumi and

The Japanese—Revolt of the Flesh) at the Seinen Kaikan Hall, Tokyo, 1968. Photographed by Nakatani Tadao and Doi Nori. From Munroe 212.

25

Figure 10 Ibid. 211.

26

Figure 11 Ibid. 213.

27

Having participated in the student movements that included both dramatic and violent physical

actions, Hijikata’s dance appealed to Eiko and Koma. In reality, it showed them a new way of

extending and expressing their protests, and, Eiko and Koma joined Hijikata’s company (Eiko in

1971, and Koma in 1970). Although they both voluntarily quit their universities – leaving

school also meant they had forfeited their secured places in society – it made them anxious.

Hijikata was a person who could appreciate their political stance, their existence and meaning.

Increasingly, his dance company became a vessel for social outcasts like Eiko and Koma. In a

1998 interview Eiko spoke about her need for acceptance, validation, and recognition at the time

she met Hijikata.

I think I was reading much too beyond me, so when I started to write my writing wasn’t [at the level] where I was reading, and I get very depressed. I was kind of gaining time [for] myself. Also it was very hard for me to compare myself to the ones who had stayed in university because they were on career path. I wasn’t at all willing to go my life without a career, but I didn’t want to have a career in the establishment so I was very unsecure.36

Eiko and Koma met each other in Hijikata’s dance company in 1971, and their

collaboration began with nightclub/cabaret jazz-dancing, one of the training methods that

Hijikata implemented in order to have his dancers look at society from the opposite side.

Moreover, it provided an opportunity for them to gain some financial stability. Since the influx

of U.S. culture after the WWII, cabarets had become a popular form of entertainment in Japan.

Working as cabaret dancers at night, Eiko and Koma could shift their roles as artists, changing

into dancers who benefited from, while also manipulating, public pleasure. They could satisfy

the audiences while reversing the subject/object positions. Eiko talked about their experience:

“We liked work in the cabaret for a while because it was kind of exciting because we were

curious as youngsters [about] how those things works. And we were despising people, those

establishment and drunkens and middle-aged, ugly people.”37 At the same time, cabaret

36 Eiko, Interview with Deborah Jowitt, Oral History Project Dance Collection January 6 and 8,

1998: 19.

37 Ibid., 21.

28

dancing taught Eiko and Koma how to perform in a sexualized slightly “jazzy” manner in front

of viewers. This knowledge would become key in their foundational training.

If Eiko and Koma’s partnership was solidified by their participation in cabaret dancing,

in terms of dance training with Hijikata, their involvement with his group was limited to

observation. They could watch his movement-vocabulary as it was performed by other senior

students, and they could observe Hijikata’s choreography worked out on those same students.

Ironically, Hijikata’s institution was extremely hierarchal: authority was based on how long a

person had been a member in the company. This epitomized Japan’s traditional apprentice

system (totei seido). Under this system (usually applied to train craftworkers and artists) a

disciple lives with a master. But before being allowed to engage in any technical training, he is

required to do any kind of household chore as part of his preparatory training. During this

period, the apprentice studies techniques by observing the master’s work. After the preparatory

period, which lasts from one to three years, he is then allowed to undergo technical training.

Hijikata’s company followed this system. Company members lived together in Hijikata’s

house, where the newest members began by doing the household chores before they were ever

allowed to dance. Eiko remembered the miscellaneous housework she had to do, such as

scrubbing the floor with a cloth on her knees, washing dishes, and doing the grocery shopping.

Although she was occasionally included in the movement training using a barre, she could only

observe the process of Hijikata’s choreography and was never selected for any of his dances,

since he directed only senior students who had been training with him for several years.

Although Koma joined the company a year earlier than Eiko, in 1970, he too was not included in

the choreography. Instead, Koma recalls frequent visits to art galleries and museums with

Hijikata. Koma talked about the company experience, “particular[ly] I didn’t learn any kind

[of] technique, but I was [just] observing what this man [is] about.”38

Eiko and Koma admired the avant-garde experiments Hijikata created in the 1950s and

1960s; however, they strongly disagreed with the structured feudalistic system which Hijikata

used to direct his company. While Hijikata himself opposed the established traditional forms of

38 Koma, Interview 1998: 15.

29

dance, he paradoxically implemented the traditional established educational structures in his own

dance school. Eiko and Koma’s rebellious critical attitudes did not allow them to continue with

Hijikata. Furthermore, a tacit code of behaviors strictly restrained the dancer's individual

freedom of expression. Eiko and Koma’s clearest objection to Hijikata appeared in the title of

their first duet piece, White Dance. Named in polemic opposition to Hijikata’s Ankoku-Butoh

(The Dance of Utter Darkness), it was created in 1971 when they began training with Kazuo

Ohno.39

Frustrated with Hijikata’s atmosphere, Eiko and Koma knocked on the door of another

established Butoh dancer, Kazuo Ohno, in 1971. Ohno studied with Japanese modern dancers,

Baku Ishii, who had trained in ballet and Jaques-Dalcroze (Eurhythmics).40 As well other

teachers of Ohno, Takaya Eguchi and Misako Miya studied German Expressionist dance.41 As

Ohno considered “dance [to be] life itself,”42 he advocated the spontaneous creation of dance

from improvisation, which allowed the movements to come out naturally from his body.43 This

idea, which prized individual expression, seemed to fit with what Eiko and Koma were seeking.

They went to Ohno’s studio in a suburb of Tokyo for six months. For Ohno, a performance is

for giving life-energy to his audiences. As he once commented, “When I see a play I want

39 Koma said in an interview with Debora Jowitt about the title of their White Dance, “We can

call the same way Hijikata did, only opposite.” Koma, Interview 1998: 32.

40 Swiss born composer, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze developed a method of composing music using basic human movements such as walking, breathing, and skipping. Although he was using the bodily exercises for music, as with his approach made it clear the relationship between music and movements and the influence of music on movements, it was inspring to actors and dancers. Eventually his method was called Eurhythmics taken as an acting and dancing practice. (In Selma Landen Odom, “Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile,” In The

International Encyclopedia of Dance. Ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen and the Dance Perspectives Foundation, Oxford University Press, 2003, Florida State University, 27 September 2007 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t171.e0858>)

41 Both Takaya Eguchi and his wife, Misako Miya studied with German expressionist dancer, Mary Wigman. Eguchi and Miya are two of the first dancers who introduced Western modern dance to Japan.

42 Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis. Produced and directed by Michael Blackwood. New York: Michael Blackwood Productions, 1990.

43 Some of his well-known works included Admiring La Argentina (1977), My Mother (1981), and Waterlilies (1987).

30

spectators to say, ‘I am so glad to be alive. Watching this gives me the power to go on

living.’”44 Ohno sought a mutual exchange of shared happiness that he felt from watching

someone else’s performance, which he then transformed in his own way. This sharing, which is

like a healing medicine for both Ohno and the audiences, created a “harmonious cosmo[s].”45

Ohno also discussed his dancing: “It is not my intention to pantomime or make a copy. I have

to use my relationship with the cosmos as my motivation. I dance at the place where the large

cosmos meets the small cosmos. I stand in the large cosmos and everywhere my hand reaches

is the small cosmos.”46 As he described in his dances Suiren (Water Lilies) and Ka Cho Fu

Getsu (Flowers-Birds-Wind-Moon) for example, Ohno moves his arms upwards to the sky as if

searching the cosmos. According to Eiko, Ohno did not teach them dance technique but let the

students learn by doing individual dance improvisations. Ohno would come to the studio, show

and talk about his favorite paintings, then let the students dance for two hours.47 Ohno

described his instruction in an interview with Richard Schechner:

The first 30 minutes is talking. The class is about two hours long. Next they [my students] can dance about what I talk about or get the movement motif from a story--or from whatever they want. I never give any indication that the foot should be here or the hands here… I cannot tell them what to do or not to do. I can only show them my dances, what I do. I do not talk to them or lead them.48 There was no instruction on how to dance or what to dance. Yet the students

internalized what Ohno showed, talked about, and expressed physically. Eiko said that during

the improvisation Ohno would just observe the students, then after two hours he would leave the

students without giving any comments.49 Although Ohno gave no instructions or comments,

44 Kazuo Ohno, “Kazuo Ohno Doesn't Commute: An Interview; Kazuo Ohno,” The Drama

Review: TDR Vol. 30, No. 2 Summer, 1986: 169.

45 Ibid.

46 Ohno 165.

47 Eiko 2007.

48 Ohno 168.

49 Eiko 2007.

31

the students seemed inspired simply by performing for Ohno, and subsequently, they were able

to criticize themselves, based on their two hours’ improvisation. Eiko learned how to create

movements through improvisation without imitating Ohno’s movements.

Yet, the improvisation confronted them with another difficulty: a different attitude

toward their own bodies. For Eiko and Koma, Ohno always used his body with great care, and

he exerted a lot of conscious choices on his movements. Moreover, because he was well

trained he knew how to move beautifully. In stark contrast, Eiko and Koma had exploited their

bodies and had used their bodies as a form of assault in the student movements. Eiko talked

about her experience:

[B]oth Kazuo and Hijikata had a very serious dance training….they [possessed] dancer’s bod[ies] and they invested lots of their youth into the dance…we invested a lot in the student movement. And, in that [political movement], not that I was agreeing, but there were lots of sacrifice of the body [for a cause that] …[for] an idea. You know, when you work on the street you put yourself in danger.50

For Eiko, training or investment in the body meant she had to care for her body. And dancing

necessitated presenting their bodies beautifully with care. Eiko and Koma, however, had

presented their bodies in an untraditional, not-beautiful way and with less care. Eiko observed

that “[Ohno] could love himself. And I couldn’t love myself. There was a very big

difference.”51 Entering into the dance world from “street performance,” they lacked the solid

decision to train as dancers. Instead, they were looking for adventure and romance which the

Japanese avant-garde did not seem to have. Realizing their impossible gap in principles and

practice, and urged by desire for exotic experience, Eiko and Koma left Ohno’s studio.

50 Eiko 1998: 24.

51 Ibid.

32

CHAPTER 3.

EUROPE TO AMERICA – ANALYSIS OF WHITE DANCE

Although Eiko and Koma were zealous in dancing, and found their ideal explanation of

anti-establishment and anti-capitalism in dancing, they remained frustrated because they could

not find any styles that really corresponded with their ideals. They were not content with

Hijikata or Ohno, yet dancing in Hijikata’s and Ohno’s studios gave them the opportunity to

discover another source of inspiration. In both Hijikata’s and Ohno’s studios, there were

wonderful photographs of the soloists Dora Hoyer, Mary Wigman, and Harald Kreutzberg,

showing them as dignified and expressive figures, symbolic of their individualism. These

photographs evoked a strong desire in Eiko and Koma to go to Europe.52

[T]hey were like kind of romantic figures for our soul. We couldn’t romanticize our own teacher because we were too rebel ourselves. We were always questioning; and there was some senior students who look at Hijikata and Ohno like this [looking at them as if they were god] …. I just couldn’t get involved in that because we were always questioning. But those photos became instead my kind of romantic….where my romantic idea can go forth53 (emphasis mine).

They left Japan and arrived in Berlin where they performed wherever they could, at small halls

and cafés. They met people who told Eiko and Koma they should meet Manja Chmiel (a

disciple of Mary Wigman and herself a German pioneer of Neue Tanz). Wigman had

developed a style of movement that expressed individual emotion and validated the use of

gestures that allowed the solo dance performer to become as theatrical as her group-counterpart.

Wigman had also been enormously influential on the evolution of Japanese modern dance.

Manja Chmiel, Wigman’s assistant for thirty five years, was also a solo dancer, and Eiko and

Koma went to meet with Chmiel in Hanover, where they showed White Dance to her. Chmiel

52 Harald Kreutzberg and other German modern dancers came to Japan in the 1930s. German

expressionist dance became a big influence for the formation of Butoh. As well, Japanese modern dancers went to Germany to study with Mary Wigman, Harald Kreutzberg, and Kurt Jooss.

53 Eiko 1998: 26.

33

was impressed by their distinctive performance and encouraged them to continue to develop their

individual voice. Chmiel’s supportive attitude towards unknown dancers from Japan surprised

Eiko and Koma. This was radically different from Hijikata’s or Ohno’s attitudes or the

attitudes of teachers in Japan in general. First, by giving an opportunity for them to perform,

before even taking Chmiel’s class, Eiko and Koma felt Chmiel recognized their existence and

respected them as artists. Second, in contrast to the generally negative tone in the Japanese

education system, where students learn from negative remarks given by teachers, Chmiel praised

them. She praised their dance while simultaneously giving them constructive criticism. She

also noted that they lacked body strength, and offered them the use of her studio and access to

her classes so they could begin to build up their bodies.54 They took Chmiel’s classes, which

Eiko described as “very strong stretch[es].”55

Meanwhile, Eiko and Koma continued to work on White Dance. By presenting it as a

“work-in-progress,” they received advice from Chmiel. She taught them how to use fewer

movements in order to maximize the visual and emotional impacts. Eiko remembered Chmiel’s

teaching well: “Eiko, just slash those small things out!”56 Not only did Chmiel provide

technical skills, she also gave them critical counsel on their collaboration. It was Chmiel who

encouraged Eiko and Koma to remain and perform as a duo. Before working with her, Eiko

and Koma had intended to become solo dancers. Chmiel stressed the importance of lighting in

order to maximize the visual clarity and mood of their images, and as well as the subtle

movements. Her critical insights and advice became basic principles for Eiko and Koma’s

partnership and for their lighting strategies.57 Chmiel’s honesty and generosity impressed Eiko

and Koma. She became their model for dance training: her teaching methodology was

inspirational and free from the constraints of a feudalistic system and hierarchy.

54 Eiko 2007.

55 Eiko 1998: 34.

56 Eiko 1998: 41.

57 They are well-known and respected for the subtle beauty of their lighting, which became essential to their stage images.

34

After several months, Chmiel registered them for the “Siebzehn Jahre Internationale

Sommerakademie des Tanzes in Köln” (17th International Summer Academy of Dance in Köln)

in 1973. White Dance was selected among the best pieces along with other works by Canadian

choreographer, Anne Wymans and German choreographer, Susanne Line. The first prize was

not given to anyone, which surprised a writer (name unlisted) of Das Tanzarchiv:

The juries’ heads must have gone crazy. After the rejection of the first prize for White

Dance, the jury had to mull over the result for a while. The audiences’ candid bravos and boos proved that they were genuinely engaged. To me, these Japanese duo, Takashi Koma and Eiko Otake will long remain unforgettable.58 Eiko remembers talking with a judge, Kurt Jooss, who is one of the initiators of German

Expressionist dance along with the early modern dance pioneer, Rudolf von Laban. At the end

of the conversation, Jooss said, “By the way, my name is Kurt Jooss and I very much enjoyed

your dance.”59 Another judge, Jochen Schmidt, personally told Eiko and Koma that Kurt Jooss

hesitated to give them the first prize because he said it would cause “the death of our dance

community.”60 Apparently, Eiko and Koma’s dance was most striking among the top three

choreographers but because of their nationality, they were not selected as the top.

The juries were influential figures for German Expressionist dance. Eiko and Koma

danced with Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Hijikata and Ohno had both trained with

Japanese pioneers of modern dance (Katsuko Masumura, Takaya Eguchi, Misako Miya, and

Baku Ishii) who, in turn, had also studied with German Expressionist, Mary Wigman. For the

Japanese avant-garde, German modern dance encouraged them to acknowledge their roots while

expressing individuality, resulting in the development of unique modern Japanese dance styles.

Bred with German Expressionist dance but germinated in Japan, Eiko and Koma developed their

dance in a unique way, striking the audiences and juries alike. With their first piece, they

58 “Siebzehnter Akademie-Bericht Aus Köln” in Das Tanzarchiv (September 1973 Kielsberg,

Germany) 107.

59 Eiko 1998: 45.

60 Eiko 1998: 45. According to Eiko, the first prize was given to Pina Bausch, however, there was no mention of it in Das Tanzarchiv.

35

established an international presence, receiving recognition in Europe before gaining attention in

their native Japan.

Their success and subsequent fame gave them more opportunities to perform in Europe,

and exposed them to European and American artists. Many artists and intellectuals from

America who avoided the Vietnam War draft during the 1960s and 1970s had fled to Europe,

particularly to Amsterdam, where they participated in the city’s artistic life. Yet for these

immigrant expatriate artists, New York City remained the capital of performing arts. The surge

of American modern dance and jazz dance that blossomed during the 1910s and 1920s had

transformed New York City into the city of dance. Then Abstract Expressionism transformed

the city into a world-center of painting. As the American immigrant artists absorbed European

influences they were also being ambassadors for American art. As anti-war proponents and

fledging artists, Eiko and Koma shared both political and artistic ideologies with these

expatriates whose ideas and works were rooted in critical dispositions towards authority.61

Because of this, they felt close to them and heeded their advice. Some of them recommended

that the two should perform in New York City, although they initially were disinterested in

performing in America. Lucas Hoving, a well-known dancer in the Jose Limón Dance

Company, and the director of the Rotterdam Dance Academy, stressed to Eiko and Koma the

importance of going to New York City. Everything conspired to give them the impetus they

needed.

Eiko and Koma’s lives in the 1960s and in the beginning of the 1970s were filled with

rebellious energy. Actively participating in the student movements, they opposed authority and

the establishment. These attitudes propelled them into dance – a world farthest from the

governmental institutions – because dance appealed to them as another form of physical protest

and action. Although they briefly trained with avant-garde dancers, Hijikata and Ohno, Eiko

and Koma’s rebelliousness caused them to agitate against these company systems. Leaving

what they were against (the establishment, the universities) and what they had once idealized

(anti-establishment, avant-garde dancers’ studios), Eiko and Koma found themselves lost with no

61 Eiko 1998: 48.

36

place to fit in. They had to find this outside Japan. Under the mentorship of Chmiel, they

found artistic and personal liberation, absorbing the vitality of individualism. When they

earned the prestigious Cologne International Festival award, they realized what most post-war

avant-garde artists could only dream of. Eiko and Koma “venture[d] out into the world,” fully

realizing the ideal of han-geijutsu – anti-art – without enduring the conventional training. Yet,

in every phase of their dance experience, they absorbed the necessary practical skills. They

gained empirical knowledge about the nature of performance through popular cabaret dancing at

Hijikata’s, improvisation at Ohno’s, and the importance of intense emotional expression and the

principle of “less is more” at Chmiel’s studio. They learned to dance together. These

experiences gave them psychological and physical nourishment as artists, and laid the

ideological foundation of their dance career.

During their two-year stay in Europe, Eiko and Koma continuously refined White Dance.

They returned to Japan in 1974 to save money for traveling and performing in the U.S. For two

years, they worked in a Tokyo kindergarten where Eiko was employed as a teacher and Koma

was a bus driver. After the workdays finished, they rehearsed White Dance at the kindergarten.

In May, 1976, they flew to America. By the time White Dance was presented, they had spent

five years developing it since its initial conception during the last months at Ohno’s studio.

Adding the projections of a moth and a radical poem by Mitsuharu Kaneko, they renamed

the piece White Dance: Moth, and first presented it in the garage of a small private school in San

Francisco in May 1976.62 After a couple of weeks, they performed at Japan House of the Japan

Society in New York City. In this performance, they revealed the totality of their life

experiences up to this point.63

White Dance: Moth displayed their eclectic styles. Fierce and violent actions mirrored

their protests and resistance in the student movements. In the middle of the performance, Eiko

62 The school performance was arranged by a friend of Irene Oppenheim, a correspondent of

Dancemagazine at that time. Before coming to the U.S. in 1976, Eiko and Koma wrote a letter to everyone on the list of Masthead Dancemagazine. Oppenheim was the only person among the correspondents who responded to a letter from Eiko and Koma.

63White Dance: Moth (1976) was analyzed through observation of the video excerpt which is

archived in The Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library.

37

and Koma walked around, hunched like gorillas, opening their pelvises and walking clumsily

with legs turned outwards. In another brutish action, Koma slapped Eiko strongly, as if he were

whipping a horse to gallop faster. Upon being slapped, Eiko, without anger or reacting

aggressively, simply sank down submissively. Then Koma kicked her. Again, without

reacting, Eiko physically accepted his cruelty. Then she gradually came to a standing position,

her arms open, and suddenly made a fearful face. Opening her mouth widely, she again

gradually sank down to the floor silently voicing (artistically) resistance to dominant social and

political paradigms.

The students’ opposition to the revision of the security treaty which required Japan to

assist the United States in wars between the U.S. and other countries horrified Eiko and Koma.

Their fear that this would lead Japan back to the still-familiar horrors of war was underscored in

the poem, A Moth, which they chose to put in the program notes. It was written by the Japanese

poet, Mitsuharu Kaneko, famous for his “poem of resistance.”64 Born in 1895 in Aichi

prefecture in the southwest of Japan, Kaneko enrolled in the French mission school where his

outspoken Chinese literature teacher inspired him to criticize “political decay, attack moral

degeneration, and lament[ed] his hard lot in life.”65 He expanded his interests to include not

only Chinese literature but also Japanese novels, particularly early nineteenth-century Japanese

“light,” or popular, erotic novels that were banal, though realistic, in their depiction of everyday

life. Kaneko sympathized with those whose talents were repressed and whose efforts and

desires were crushed under the unjust system. “He was attracted more by the lives of the

characters…. The most significant goal in life seemed to him to enjoy life to his heart’s content

and to die at the peak of his youth.”66 After quitting university, he was stricken by capillary

64 Tadashi Ishiguro, Kaneko Mitsuharu Ron: Sekai Ni Mo Ichido Revolt O! (Tokyo: Doyo

Bijutsusha, 1991) 81, translated by Shoko Letton.

65 James R Morita, Kaneko Mitsuharu (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980) 21.

66 Morita 22. Kaneko thought authors of contemporary novels detested power and injustice. Although these writers were disrespected as many of them lived in the red-light district, they attained a high level of understanding of art and life. He learned that those who were politically powerful and socially successful were not always righteous or noble (Morita 21). During his school days, Kaneko could not focus on studies with the exception of literature. He went out to cities, preoccupied with activities outside of school just like the writers of the books he read. He felt uncomfortable staying in a university, so he moved from one

38

bronchitis. During this time, a lyricist named Hoizumi Yoshichika, introduced Kaneko to

poems. While confined to bed, he wrote a poem entitled “Opposition.” The last section of the

poem describes his perspective on life at the time:

To oppose is to live, A noble act, I think. Opposition is life The way to find my Self.67

His chosen occupation, considered to be ignoble by mainstream society, began Kaneko’s

conscious political resistance. In 1928 he traveled to China and Southeast Asia. He traveled to

Europe and lived in Brussels in 1931. Gradually he found himself “ugly, detested, and sinful,

but free and independent, and reflecting the sun.”68 At the same time, by being outside of Japan,

he could look at the Japanese society cynically and nihilistically. The Moth is in a collection of

poetry written towards the end of WWII in which Kaneko depicts the negative aspects of

humanity, such as fatigue, suffering, and disappointments in the cold of night under the sterile

light of the moon. Although Eiko and Koma used parts of The Moth for their White Dance:

Moth, the excerpt that Eiko and Koma inserted into their program illustrated the despair for the

war felt by Kaneko, Eiko, and Koma.

While most of human kind are in the sleep of slaves The earth runs on at full tilt, like a frightened thief, With every burden on its shoulders Looking for the chance to cast them off Only the few who cannot sleep so easily Know and await the coming punishment – The magnificent shipwreck on the promised land69

Kaneko personifies the earth witnessing the war, and Eiko and Koma’s gorilla-like walking

represented the earth “with the burden on its shoulders.” Although the following line is not

university to another.

67 Morita 22.

68 Morita 23.

69 The poem inserted in White Dance: Moth was translated by Eiko.

39

included in the program notes, Kaneko’s full text has a more direct line that addresses the grief

of war. “The land drank much of life-blood/ Stank like vomit”70 Kaneko anthropomorphizes

the earth as it passively drinks the life-blood pouring out of the war-dead, yet his depiction

retains a nihilistic tone because of the earth’s uncaring attitude. In another line, he expresses

his wishes that war would end.

Could you take me with you? Maybe to Florida, or the islands in the Tropic of Capricorn. To some place where war has not yet arrived.71

By saying “yet,” he suggests war will eventually occur, even in the most unlikely places.

Although he names Florida, directing his pessimism towards the U.S., which did not directly

experience the horrors of WWII on its own soil, his poem is not meant as specific criticism

towards America. Instead, he directs his anger broadly towards all parties involved in the war.

I am starting from a neutral place, and starting from that space my battle begins. To speak frankly, I am not writing to ensure poetry's future in Japan, nor is my prose to benefit proletariats. I may fight for the enemies of the community, in full cooperation with them in order to secure the war front. This is my own decision. If people don't like it, that is still acceptable. If they need to kill me, they should do so.72

Kaneko chose to fight using poetry as his weapon and expression of resistance, just as dance was

for Eiko and Koma. Like Kaneko, Eiko and Koma held a deep resentment against war and

those responsible for it. Eiko and Koma fought against the system and decided to continue to

fight by their dancing, including and echoing, Kaneko’s thoughts and actions as expressed in his

poetry.

Eiko and Koma’s defiance in naming White Dance in opposition to Hijikata’s Ankoku

Butoh (The dance of Utter Darkness) purposefully negated their teacher’s nihilism. Yet,

paradoxically, they incorporated movements and techniques learned from Hijikata. At one

moment in White Dance: Moth, Eiko makes a horrifying facial expression recalling an image of

70 Mitsuharu Kaneko, Kaneko Mitsuharu Shishu. Shinsoban (Tokyo: Hakuosha, Showa 50: 1975)

107, translated by Claude Smith and Shoko Letton.

71 Kaneko 113.

72 Qtd in Ishiguro 82, translated by Letton and Smith.

40

Edvard Munk’s “Scream,” a dramatic technique Hijikata employed to intensify his movements.

Eiko’s facial expression exists in stark contrast to the “no-face” expression at the beginning of

the work. Eiko seems emotionless, inhuman, showing no feeling. This makes her hyper-

dramatic silent screaming seem even grislier. Deborah Jowitt of The Village Voice wrote,

“Wide open mouth with the rest of face unmoved, crossing eyes, and quaking toes left a daunting

impression.”73 Hijikata’s movements, rooted in the spirit of han-geijutsu (anti-art) attempted to

reclassify the ugly as beautiful. His works were filled with ugliness – yet they were still

“beautiful.” Nanako Kurihara described this in her dissertation, “The paradoxical principle of

celebrating the negative permeated every aspect of Hijikata’s dance, with its taboo themes of

death and eroticism; its passive, masochistic, sacrificial body; its outsider-performer status; its

cultic group; and its sordid beauty.”74 Eiko and Koma used ugly actions (such as gorilla

walking, fighting beating and demented facial expressions) to contrast with the beautiful

movements that appeared at the beginning, middle and ending of White Dance: Moth. They did

not simply try to “re-classify” the ugly as the beautiful, but instead, used ugly and beautiful

movements together, celebrating the values of each.

Beautiful movements within the dance show the influence of Ohno’s principles and

techniques. In her arm movements, Eiko suggests the beauty of moth’s flight. When a

projector displays an image of a moth at the beginning, she seems to metamorphose into the

insect. Moving her arms gently and softly, she alludes to Kazuo Ohno’s mysterious, dreamy

style. Still, Eiko and Koma’s esteem for beauty derived from their idealization of individual

beauty they felt when looking at photos of Western dancers at Hijikata’s and Ohno’s studios.

Eiko and Koma, in fact, purposefully incorporated beautiful Western, modern dance modalities

into the middle section of their dance. Eiko extended one leg, high to the side, while placing

her arm in front. Described as a “Grahamesque pose” by Jowitt, Eiko’s slow, concentrated

73 Deborah Jowitt, “In Their Dance No Wind Blows,” The Village Voice, August 9, 1976: Dance.

74 Kurihara 40.

41

execution of this motion gave immense impact.75 As Manja Chmiel stressed, by reducing the

number of movements, Eiko and Koma maximized each gesture’s visual effect.

In addition to techniques learned from teachers, Eiko and Koma presented the spirit of

han-geijutsu shared by other post-war avant-garde artists. Avant-garde art in the postwar Japan

was filled with radical critiques of tradition that required a savage rejection, dissolution and the

negation of past and the beginning from a literal “ground zero.”76 Creating art in this period

meant to negate art in conventional ways because art was “commodified artifice, [a] religion of

antinature.”77 Art was “disassociated fragments of one’s lived experience.”78 Drawn to the

concept of han-geijutsu (anti-art), they attempted to connect art with everyday life and, by using

the daily commodities in the creation of work, anti-art became an “aesthetic assault” to

commercialism. Their use of everyday objects in an alien fashion was dramatically different,

but through the observation and participation of audiences, quotidian items became the medium

that reconnected audiences to the everyday values of their lives. In the middle of White Dance:

Moth, Koma brought several sacks of potatoes and emptied them abruptly. He then went back

to get another sack, and dumped it again, repeating this a few times.

By repetition and giving a new meaning to ordinary items – in this case potatoes – Eiko

and Koma asked their audiences to look at an ordinary item with refreshed vision. The

dumping of potatoes was shocking yet pleasurable. Robert Fredericks of Dance Magazine

wrote:

After recovering from the initial shock, I found it profoundly exciting. Not only the sight of those potatoes rolling around and spilling over the edge of the stage, but the dust that flew from them, the sounds they made as they slipped from the bags and thudded on the wooden floor, all contributed to the effect.79

75 Deborah Jowitt, “In Their Dance No Wind Blows,” The Village Voice, August 9, 1976: Dance.

76 Munroe 2004: 39.

77 Charles Baudelaire, “Selected Writings on Art and Artists” cited in Munroe 2004: 41.

78 Munroe 2004: 42.

79 Robert A. Fredericks, “Perspectives: New York,” Dance Magazine Oct. 1976: 69.

42

The effect was both visual and aural. The potatoes altered the look of the floor, giving it

a spotted pattern while amplifying the percussive sounds that reverberated throughout the

auditorium. The effect was intense, inexplicable and White Dance: Moth was transformed into

a mysterious event. Don McDonagh of The New York Times wrote:

During one of his (Koma’s) appearances, he left the area strewn with several bags of potatoes whose contents poured carelessly out. It was an occurrence without explanation or reference to anything that had preceded it. The thought persisted, however, that it probably did have some antecedents because the demeanor of the two did not hint at humor.”80

While Koma was dumping potatoes Eiko sat among them as if she were one of them.

This, in fact, corresponded to Kaneko’s poem, which uncovered the paradox of him criticizing

people who were involved in the war – while Kaneko himself was one of them. In the end of A

Moth, the poem reads, “And so I know now that I am nothing more / Than a tiny shadow in the

moonlit night.” The repetitive act of dumping the potatoes shifted (partially, at least) the

assessment of Eiko and Koma’s style from exotic to postmodern. In the presentation at the

garage at the school in San Francisco, Eiko and Koma surprised audiences by their spontaneity.

Irene Oppenheim, correspondent of Dance Magazine in San Francisco, remembers their

performance. In personal correspondence with the author she described Eiko and Koma’s

ability to illustrate the dichotomy and spontaneity as a “modern sensibility:”

(Towards the end of the performance) They [Eiko and Koma] opened the garage doors to the street. So there they were dancing among the potatoes in kimonos against a scene of cars and pedestrians. It was clear to me then (and has remained so) that these two people were the most imaginatively far-reaching dancers I had ever seen. They were unafraid and created a dichotomy not just of cruelty and beauty, but of maintaining a core of intense seriousness, of dignity, amidst absurdity (the potatoes).81

In its performative sensibilities White Dance: Moth blended the protests in the student

movements with the styles of Kazuo Ohno, Tatsumi Hijikata, and Manja Chmiel. During this

phase of their career, dance in this artistic statement of resistance, overlapped with Kaneko’s

80 Don McDonagh, “Eiko and Koma Are Enigmatic; Bold Dancers.” The New York Times 18 Sep.

1977: 67.

81 Email correspondence from Irene Oppenheim, dated on 7 July 2007.

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poem, The Moth, illustrating their skills in merging lives, politics, and art into a singular

expression.

44

CHAPTER 4.

CROSS-CULTURAL INFLUENCE OF AMERICAN AND JAPANESE AVANT-GARDE

Eiko and Koma’s White Dance: Moth was well-received and within the year of their

arrival they each received a green card and began to perform actively in the U.S. Eiko and

Koma’s sudden break in New York was not a coincidence. America’s growing interest in

Japanese culture, its underlying philosophies, and the subsequent post-modern revolution created

the perfect site for Eiko and Koma. The cross-cultural influence of Japanese and American

avant-garde arts, particularly in dance after WWII and through the 1970s, aided the development

of theories and practices of American postmodern dance in New York City.

The U.S. occupation of Japan after WWII created curiosity about Japanese culture and

profoundly influenced American art. Scholar Donald Keene translated Japanese literature

giving American people their first access to Japanese literary work. Japanese antiques and art

works were imported in great quantities to the U.S., attracting the attention of artists. People

became interested in Japanese art and aesthetics, and, particularly in Zen philosophy. Japanese

writer and painter Hasegawa Saburoh, who visited New York City in the early 1950s, was

amazed by Americans’ interest in Zen. Hasegawa reported:

In about a hundred days [In New York City] I was asked by about a hundred people about Zen and sometimes it was they who were telling me about Zen....When I went out to eat in Greenwich Village, invariably somebody young or old, painter, musician, or poet would get a hold of me and start talking intently.82 Zen was celebrated in the writing of Allan Watts and Daisetz J. Suzuki.83 Watts, an

autodidact who had studied Buddhism, became a member of the Theosophist-established London

82 Saburoh Hasegawa, “Nyuhyohku no inshoh” (Impressions of New York), first published in

1954 and reprinted in Tokubetsu-ten Hasegawa Saburoh (Special Exhibition Hasegawa Saburoh), exh. cat (Kobe: The Hyohgo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, 1977) 12, 14.

83 The interest in the revival of Buddhism began to grow in the 1880s. Suzuki, together with his wife, founded the Eastern Buddhist Society and contributed to spread Buddhism through his lectures and papers in the West. He taught at Columbia University from 1952 to 1957. Although his expertise ranged from Buddhism, to Zen to Shinto, he believed that Zen would be more suitable in the West and wrote books

45

Buddhist Lodge, where he met with Daisetz J. Suzuki. Suzuki founded the Eastern Buddhist

Society in Japan and introduced Zen philosophy to the West. Suzuki published An Introduction

to Zen Budhism in 1934 which was reprinted by demand in 1964. Influenced by Suzuki, Watts

wrote books on Zen, among them The Spirit of Zen (1936) and The Way of Zen (1957). Both

Suzuki and Watts gave lectures in Europe and the U.S. introducing Eastern ideas to the West.

Their writings and lectures on Zen became popular during a period when existing conservative

1950’s social values were collapsing. In the aftermath of WW II, Zen brought to the forefront

fundamental ideas that all things have equal value. In addition, accepting the value of illogical

and irrational experiences paralleled Zen’s enlightenment, satori; one’s consciousness, if

changed by satori, was considered to bring enlightenment and insight into the nature of

existence. Jung’s foreword for Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen Buddhism explains his

interpretation of satori.

It could be objected that consciousness in itself was not changed, but only the consciousness of something, just as though one had turned over the page of a book and now saw a different picture with the same eyes. I am afraid this conception is no more than an arbitrary interpretation, as it does not conform with the facts. The fact is that in the text it is not merely a different picture or object that is described, but rather the experience of a transformation, often resulting from the most violent convulsions. The erasing of one picture and its substitution by another is quite an everyday occurrence which has none of the attributes of a transformation experience. It is not that something

different is seen, but that one sees differently. It is as though the spatial act of seeing were changed by a new dimension.84

This way of thinking was soon brought into music and dance by the experimental

musician and postmodernist thinker, John Cage, who translated Suzuki’s ideas into musical

compositions. Cage sat in on D. J. Suzuki’s lecture at Columbia University in the 1950s and

became fully immersed in Zen philosophy. He not only revolutionized music with the input of

mainly on Zen. His An Introduction to Zen Buddhism included a thirty page commentary by psychoanalyst Carl Jung. His other works included Essays in Zen Buddhism (three volumes), Studies in Zen Buddhism, and Manual of Zen Buddhism. In addition, William Barrett compiled many of Suzuki's articles and essays concerning Zen into a volume entitled Studies in Zen.

84 Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism ed. Christmas Humphreys, (London: Arrow Books, 1959) 17.

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Zen, but he also became the most influential figure for American avant-garde dancers. His

relationship with Merce Cunningham marked the first and most important beginning of this

revolution. In 1949, Merce Cunnigham quit Martha Graham Dance Company thereby breaking

with narrative dance, asserting that dance did not need to communicate through emotional

expression. Cage and Cunningham collaborated with artists in many other fields. Cage and

Cunningham considered that art works from different fields c/should co-exist in their own right –

an idea directly derived and based on Zen, which found a connection to, and equal value among,

every existing thing.

In consequence, Cage and Cunningham’s work involved multi-disciplinary arts and

performances. For example, one performance might feature performed poetry, music, and

dance simultaneously. In addition they took away the barriers between performers and

audiences. This evolved into two art movements, “Fluxus” and “Happenings,” which were

commonly performed in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than performing on a stage, artists

performed in the same area as their audiences, allowing each group opportunities to watch and

share the experience of the others. In this way, audiences got involved in the performative

process. John Cage, Merce Cunningham and their collaborators performed Theater Piece No. 1

at Black Mountain College in 1952, which is considered to be the seminal performance of

“Happenings.” While John Cage recited poetry and read lectures, M. C. Richards read some of

her poetry, Robert Rauschenberg showed paintings, David Tudor performed on a prepared piano

and Merce Cunningham danced. Cage’s intention was to merge artists and audiences, and, on a

larger scale, to construct the unification of art and life and,

Zen’s influence was not limited to music. Some paintings and sculptures created in this

period also show a common ancestry; art historian Winther Bert claims that Jasper Johns, Robert

Rauschenberg, and Mark Tobey’s art works reveal the influence of Zen in their expression and

their underlying concept85. Having been influenced by East Asian philosophy, Tobey went to

China and Japan and studied calligraphy. While in Japan, he spent two months in a Zen

85 Bert describes the influence of Zen on American art in “Japanese Thematics in Postwar

American Art: From Soi-Disant Zen to the Assertion of Asian-American Identity,” Japanese Art after 1945:

Scream against the Sky edt. Alexandra Munroe (New York: H.N. Abrams 1994) 55-68.

47

monastery outside Kyoto and after returning to the U.S., he kept studying Zen by reading D. T.

Suzuki’s books. Later, he created a series of paintings that included, “Space Ritual No. 1” in

which he used sumi, black ink, a material used in calligraphy in East Asia. Without using a

brush to place strokes and swathes of ink upon the paper, Tobey splattered the ink over the

paper, transforming it into an abstract painting. Critic Bert Winther noted, “His spirited

splattering of ink in some of these works was a dramatic departure from his more customary oil

paintings constructed of delicate and luminous networking of calligraphic draftsmanship.”86

While American artists began to show their interests in Japanese culture and philosophy,

on their side, Japanese artists were cultivating their art by re-establishing their cultural identity in

the aftermath of the war. By the late 1950s, they began to focus on art from within Japan,

rather than mimicking Western art. Experimental art groups, such as Zero Kai (Zero Society),

Gutai-ha (Gutai group), Vivo, Mono-ha (Material group), and Group Ongaku (Music Group)

vitalized the avant-garde art scene in Japan. Although they performed on streets, and in parks

or any viable location, the annual exhibition known as the “Yomiuri Independant Work

Exhibition” became the major venue for their exhibitions from its beginnings in 1955 until 1963.

Japanese avant-garde arts, developed in the 1950s and 1960s, attracted attention from

Americans, spurring further interactions. By 1957 Gutai-ha had drawn attention in New York

for the events they staged in Osaka and Tokyo. In November 1964 William Liberman, of the

Museum of Modern Art in New York, arrived in Japan with artists Robert Rauschenberg and

Jasper Johns to select pieces for a show of contemporary Japanese art, which would travel to the

U.S. for the first time. The exhibition opened in 1966, under the title of The New Japanese

Painting and Sculpture.87 Japanese art was exported to the U.S., indirectly creating the fertile

ground and sympathetic attitude for Eiko and Koma’s White Dance: Moth.

In Tokyo, the newly reconstructed Sogetsu-Kaikan (Sogetsu Art Center) became the

center for Japanese avant-garde art and for its creative output and research in the 1960s. As in

America, music was one of the major forces for avant-garde art. The group of musicians who

86 Winther 60.

87 Tomii 47.

48

performed at Sogetsu Art Center formed “Sogetsu Music Inn,” and performed regularly.

Instead of showing the latest compositional techniques, they tried to address some of the

problems present in existing music. Problems were revealed by musicians for the audiences,

which allowed the musicians to discuss music then find solutions within their music-making,

which encouraged even more innovative creations. It was process-oriented, and required deep

communication among the musicians and between the musicians and audiences. These shows

were not limited to performance by domestic artists, and international artists were regularly

invited to participate.

The first foreign musician who performed at Japan’s Sogetsu Art Center in 1962 was

John Cage. He made music by using everyday Japanese objects such as a rice cooker, frying

pans, a seaweed box and an electric cooking stove as his percussive instruments. Cage’s impact

was so significant for the Japanese that they later called it “John Cage Shock.”88 Removing the

line separating the sacred world of art and the mundane, Cage’s questioning of long-held

concepts of music confused and intrigued audiences and artists.

Conversely, Japanese musicians’ experiments fascinated Cage. Tetsu Takemitsu and

Junosuke Okuyama created a piece of music using only water drops. Takemitsu recorded the

sound of a dripping tap, dripping water from a kettle into a bucket, and dripping water in a well.

Okuyama changed the quality of the sound by using a recording device and electric modulator.

Some sound gained a hard kick, like the sound of a hand drum, other sounds became like a bird

singing. Okuyama cut the recorded tape into one centimeter sections, then arranged the tapes

on players and re-recorded the sounds, creating a sound montage. The montage became an

interesting wave of sound creating an independent rhythm. Cage was impressed by Okuyama

and became curious about how Japanese avant-garde musicians were experimenting with music

and what they were creating.89

John Cage came back to Sogetsu Art Center again in 1964 with the Merce Cunningham

Dance Company. The company members included some American avant-garde dancers

88 Kuniharu Akiyama, Bunka no Shikakenin: Gendai Bunka no Jiba to Toshizu (Behind Culture:

Perspective and Map of Contemporary Culture) (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1985) 473, translated by Letton.

89 Akiyama 454.

49

including Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, and Barbara Lloyd. Music director, David Tudor, and

stage designer, Robert Rauschenberg, also accompanied the Cunningham Company. They

stayed and toured in Japan for six weeks and held a workshop at the end of the tour. Japanese

avant-garde dancers, including Tatsumi Hijikata, attended the workshop.90 Both the tour and

the workshop were successful. The impact was enormous. Kenzaburo Ohe, an avant-garde

writer, described Cunningham’s dance as giving a sense of “freedom and liberation.”

Their [American artists’] effort to relieve themselves from the archaic promise and meaning was impressive. I saw unconstrained and liberated people on the stage and I felt refreshing liberty. The feeling of freedom and liberation is the greatest effect that art can offer.91

Another artist, Hidekazu Yoshida, said the “Merce Cunningham Dance Company

presented in a pure form that the performing arts can communicate in a more liberated way, it

can create something deeper and bigger than everyday life which is surrounded by controlled

communication.”92 He also described Cunningham as a “genius to transform space as

organized liberty.”93

The American artists’ interest in, and influence by, Japanese art was echoed by the

Japanese. Hiroshi Teshigahara, who produced the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s

performance in Tokyo, remembered that other artists in the States were envious of Cunningham

and asked Teshigawara to invite them too; Teshigawara was impressed by the American artists’

aspirations and passion for performing in Japan.94 Steve Paxton, who toured in Merce

Cunningham’s Company, for example, talked about the enormous effects of watching martial

arts in Japan. He observed Aikido, and was surprised by its body motions, particularly by the

peripheral body motion, which had a totally different physical aesthetic from ballet. For him,

90 Other participants were Bonjin Atsugi, Yuriko Kimura, Takehisa Kosugi, Mariko Sanjo, Miki

Wakamatsu, etc.

91 Qtd. in Akiyama 476 and translated by Shoko Letton.

92 Ibid.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid. 476.

50

Aikido was characterized by the performer’s shaped and singled-out fingers, their arms extended

down and out which was so different from the rounded arms and tightly compressed legs of

ballet.95 Just as Jung had summarized about the shifting concepts of Zen, Paxton perceived

Aikido differently – considering it another form of dance. Returning to the States he began

taking Aikido lessons.96 The exploration of movement outside the traditional Western dance

technique broadened his horizons and the horizons of other dancers who followed him expanding

definitions of “dance.” Paxton encouraged other dancers to accept and praise other physical

movement forms that had not previously been considered dance.97

In the same year, Tetsu Takemitsu, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Takehisa Kosugi, and John Cage

were engaged in an important collaborative event in Japan, and subsequently, one of these

collaborators, Takehisa Kosugi, later became Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s music

director.

In this way, Sogetsu Art Center became a seminal cultural bridge between Japan and the

U.S. Sogetsu organizers sent letters to the American artists to invite them to Japan, and many

American artists responded. In fact, the Center received so much mail from America that the

Japanese post office sent any overseas mail with unidentifiable addresses to Sogetu Art Center.

As a result of these exchanges, Japanese artists such as Yoko Ohno, Ay-o, Takehisa Kosugi, and

Shigeko Kubota re-located to New York City.

Japanese artists saw liberty in the American avant-gardists’ music and dance, which

inspired their creativity and encouraged innovations in Japanese avant-garde circles. On their

side, American artists, influenced by Japanese art and the philosophy of Zen, incorporated those

ideas into their art projects. The exchange and communication was very lively and artists on

both sides of the world shared similar ideals and philosophies, founded on anti-authority/anti-

establishment sentiments, as well as an on eagerness to create a distinctive art style connected to

everyday life.

95 Steve Paxton VHS, ADF Video, 1996.

96 Ibid.

97 Steve Paxton left Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1964.

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But sharing did not encourage mere imitation. Japanese artists realized the need to

develop their artistic style and methods. Tatsumi Hijikata cultivated his Ankoku-Butoh as an

anti-Western dance, accepting his Japanese body and examining the culture in his hometown,

which provided moving and conceptual materials for his performance. In September 1965, a

year after the workshop by Cage and Cunningham, Hijikata returned to his hometown Akita with

a photographer, Eikoh Hosoe, for a photographic project to capture the “essence of disappearing

Japanese identity” (Fig. 12 & 13).98 The awakening of native home-culture was not limited to

art. Anthropologist Kunio Yanagida found a unique Japanese identity in the traditions and

cultures of rural villages and re-introduced the Japanese folklore, rituals, and oral traditions that

appealed to postwar generations. He claimed “the marginal elements of Japanese rural society

– women, the elderly, children, and the insane – were central to an understanding of the essential

character of Japanese culture.”99 Yanagida’s sentiment was echoed by American architect

designer, George Nelson, who strongly advocated for broadening the understanding of Japanese

design in the U.S. by using Japanese values as a starting point. He, however, emphasized the

importance of individual expression. “The lessons that can be learned from the house in Japan

have nothing to do with its superficial aspects... imitating an alien style always ends up with the

dead bones of a period... Any effort to reproduce the Japanese house, or its parts, would merely

result in a freak, because the Japanese way of life is not ours.”100 Such exchanges and

interactions between Japanese and American avant-gardists created mutual appreciation and

admiration while also influencing the distinct evolutions and cultivation of each. Certainly this

inclination to pursue individual art forms, unrestrained by former conventions, was the kind of

art-making that Eiko and Koma shared with others of their generation.

98 Kurihara 73.

99 Munroe 1994: 192.

100 George Nelson, Problems of Design, 2nd ed. (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1965) 131.

52

Figure 12 Tatsumi Hijikata holding an infant and running across a rice field, 1965. From Eikoh Hose and Tatsumi Hijikata’s Kamaitachi: Hosoe Eikoh shashinshuh (Sickle-Toothed Weasel: Photobook by Hosoe Eikoh) (Tokyo: Gendai Shichoh-sha, 1969). From Merewether and Hiro 93.

53

Figure 13 Eikoh Hosoe’s Otoko to onna = Man and Woman (Tokyo: CamerArt, 1961). From Merewether and Hiro 91.

54

CHAPTER 5.

EIKO AND KOMA JOIN AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE

American audiences were ready to welcome Eiko and Koma’s dance. Although their

style was completely different from American modern dance, Eiko and Koma shared some

similar principles that tied them to the avant-garde dancers – particularly a minimalist

philosophy of simple means, repetitions, everyday movements and objects, and the manipulation

of time. Avant-garde dancers’ challenge to the normative and well-established conventions of

dance expanded the scope of American “modern dance” so it was given a new label

“postmodern,” which followed the labeling used for architecture, literature, and music.101

This transition from old dance to new dance was being processed by the next generation

of dancers in the U.S. in John Cage’s classes, which were being taught by Robert Dunn in 1960

to 1961, to a group that included Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown,

Simone Forti, Steve Paxton. In 1962 at Judson Church they set up a dance-theater performance

space where they explored new structural possibilities of dance-making and presented

experimental works. The Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square was opened to

artists, thanks to a church’s ministers, Howard Moody and Al Carmines, who advocated for the

arts and considered them essential in creating healthy communities. Moody organized the

Judson Gallery in 1959, exhibiting works by such artists as Jim Dine, Tom Wesselman, Daniel

Spoerri, Red Grooms, and Claes Oldenburg, etc. Experimental theater groups came to hold

Happenings and to present plays. Young dancers soon realized the new location’s possibilities

and they began to practice and perform at the church, the perfect site for those revolting against

the dance mainstream. By 1964, they became the leaders of the young avant-garde dancers and

their identity became visible. The New York Times dance critic, Allen Hughes wrote,

101 According to Sally Banes and Noel Carroll, there is no unified or homogeneous meaning for

modern or postmodern dance. Instead it is useful to think of modernism and postmodernism by analogy with modernist and postmodernist movements, in which dance shares certain strategies and features. (Sally Banes and Noel Carroll, “modernism and postmodernism,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy, Oxford University Press, 2003, Florida State University, 3 May 2007 < http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t177.e2669>)

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This is the group of dancers, painters, actors, musicians, writers and goodness knows what else that calls itself the Judson Dance Theater when its adherents perform at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square. These are the avant-garde of the dance world, and if they are unified in any way, it is only by the belief that dancing must be dance, that anyone can do it, that almost anything anyone does qualifies as dancing, that it can be done anywhere, and that conventions of artistic thought and practice exist only to be smashed.102

The Judson dancers broke conventional definitions of dance, liberated and democratized dance.

Their ideas were expressed in Yvonne Rainer’s “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’

Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of

Trio A.”103 Her statement, which opposed conventions of modern dance, was meant to praise

minimalist ideals which were characterized by the use of space, movements, and compositional

strategies. Everything became smaller, including performance venues, the scale of the dance,

setting, lighting, and the number of audiences in opposition to the praised spectacular and

grandiose. The Judson dancers performed at churches, their lofts, and outside. Other small

performance venues, such as Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace at St. Marks Church and

Cubiculo were also made available for postmodern dancers.104 These new venues boosted

postmodern dancers energy for creation and presentation of diverse approaches to dance.

102 Allen Hughes, “At Home Anywhere:Avant-Garde Dancers Adjust to Anything,” The New

York Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 9 Feb.1964: X18, ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New

York Times (1851 - 2003) ProQuest, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, FL. 22 May 2005 <http://www.proquest.com/>

103 Yvonne Rainer created Trio A in 1966, which included both balletic and action-like movements. This was originally made for trio but could be danced as a solo or by any numbers of performers. The dance started from the leg extension to turn, then she crouched down and touched the floor. She extended her leg and stood up, then turned again with her leg lifted and bent. Her arms were stretched out wide. With the momentum from turning, she kept swinging her arms out in front of her horizontally while making a quarter of circle with her leg behind. She swung her arm again vertically. Then she grabbed her right ankle casually. She swung her arm and turned and hopped forward bending her torso. She sat down, then laid down. This example illustrates the kind of everyday movements that defined the work.

104 “Dance Theater Workshop was founded in 1965 by Jeff Duncan, Art Bauman and Jack Moore as a choreographers' collective devoted to the sponsorship and practical support of the work of colleagues and early career artists.” (Dance Theater Workshop, 14 July. 2007 <http://www.dtw.org/about.cfm>) St. Marks Church has supported art, including dance since the early 20th century. Pioneers in modern dance, Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, danced there and it became an important venue for emerging dancers. Cubiculo served as a place for experimental art, including dance since Maurice Edwards became a dance programmer

56

If the space they performed was small, the movements were transformed as well.

Rainer stated that the virtuosic dancing feet and the fully-extended body needed to be minimized.

To actualize this idea, postmodern dancers incorporated non-virtuosic movements of everyday

gestures that were not technically breathtaking. Dances by postmodernists brought attention to

movement, in detail, because energy was equally expended, and movements of different body

parts were neutralized. After a series of four Monday night performances by the Surplus Dance

Theater at Stage 73 (321 East 73 St.) by Judith Dunn, Lucinda Childs, Alex Hay, Robert

Rauschenberg, Deborah Hay, Robert Morris, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, The New York Times

dance critic, Allen Hughes wrote:

The paying public must understand at the outset that dance as it is generally thought of gets short shrift from the avant-gardists. There is movement in what they do and sometimes a lot of it – much walking, running, jumping, turning, and so on. But most of this is naturalistic rather than stylized, and occasionally it is so unremarkable or so slight that it goes almost unrecognized… At its best, this program makes one aware of movement detail we seldom take time to observe in daily life. Some of it is [boring], some silly and [boring], some only silly. At its worst it is merely tiresome. It is typical of the avant-garde dance people at work, however, and it may make more sense than you think.”105

Shifting ideas about dance, in turn, altered ideological constructs about body and performative

theories.106 Without performing technically demanding movements, the dancing body looked

until it closed in 1978. (In Jack Anderson, “Dance: Rod Rodgers at Cubiculo,” The New York Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 1 Dec. 1985: 84-84, ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2003) ProQuest, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, FL. 22 May 2005 <http://www.proquest.com/>

105 Allen Hughes, “Dance: An Avant-Garde Series Begins: The Surplus Theater Seen at Stage 73 Program Is Arranged by Steve Paxton,” The New York Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 11 Feb 1964: 45, ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2003) ProQuest Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, FL. 31 Aug. 2006 <http://www.proquest.com/>

106 This egalitarian democraticized idea about body and dance was further developed by another Judson era dancer and thinker, David Gordon. Gordon postulated that if there is no hierarchy between dance movements and non-dance movements, there should be no qualitative difference between movements performed by trained or untrained dancers. Quotidian movements were incorporated more, and sometimes dominated the entire dance. Steve Paxton made a piece about walking, Satisfying Lover (1961), where people in casual clothing walked individually, in their unadorned individual styles, across the stage. At different speed in various styles, the presentation of this simple movement shared by all people showed the idiosyncrasies and depth of qualities in simple walking.

57

more natural and relaxed.107 It also made a more human-scale performance possible. The

equal distribution of energy flattened theatricality, and presented the new postmodern dancers’

body as capable, without physical exaggeration or artistic pretentiousness. Their movements

were simple, task-like, yet by repeating simple movements, the dancers created the dynamics of

performance.

Repetition was one of the major strategies that postmodern dancers used in their

choreography. Trisha Brown created Accumulation (1971) in which she repeated and

accumulated simple gestural movements so Accumulation presented a gradual evolution within

the piece. Postmodernists used task-like movement, such as walking, running, and drinking,

and a variation of movement “samples” to create a bigger piece of dance. Without requiring the

interpretation of each movement, dance became object. Dance critic, Sally Banes wrote, “The

possibility is proposed that dance is neither perfection of technique nor of expression, but quite

something else – the presentation of objects [and bodies] in themselves. It is not simply a new

style of dance, but a new meaning and function, a new definition of dance, that has appeared.”108

Using the movements humorously, the postmodern dancers treated dance like a pleasing game.

In fact, humor was an important element in their dancing, and movements were sometimes

created spontaneously. Rather than intentionally creating or controlling movements,

postmodern dancers freed motion from preconceived restrictions. They believed that the body

can move and think as it desired. Spontaneity was one of the most important postmodernist

features that permitted mental and emotional liberty in the body.

As postmodern dancers freed movements from formality, they also freed the setting and

costumes from elegance and gracefulness. Mundane items, such as chairs, tables, and

cardboard boxes were used as part of a stage set.109 Their costumes naturally became casual.

107 Paradoxically, this more “natural” looking (yet difficult) movement evolved into “release

technique,” in which tension and responsive explosive qualities was hardly seen.

108 Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and Effervescent Body (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993) 49.

109 David Gordon’s Chair (1974) presented wide range of motion in using an ordinary folding chair. With his partner and a wife, Valda Setterfield, Gordon sat on the chair, stood, walked around, put his body through the hole, folded the chair, and laid next to it and crawled through it. Without doing anything

58

They did not wear spectacular costumes specially customized for dance but adapted various

everyday dresses and clothes. Some wore jerseys, sweats, T-shirt, or sneakers. Both male and

female dancers wore the same clothes to equalize gendering and each dancer was treated as a

soloist, an individual, having equal quality and value. This effectively eliminated the lines

separating genders and the hierarchy of soloist and corps.

Postmodern dancers liberated time and speed of the dance, by using actual time, or

stretched time, and/or slowness in their works.110 In modern narrative dances, two hours could

condense one day, a year, or an entire multigenerational Oedipal myth. Some postmodern

dancers showed motion using whatever amount of time it took to execute the action, without

giving a dancerly illusion. Dances lasted from several hours to several days. Theater directors

such as Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and Peter Brooks, and dancers, Steve Paxton, David

Gordon, Kei Takei, and Meredith Monk used time prolongation as structural techniques.

Eiko and Koma used some of the same principles of postmodern dance. They went

against virtuosity, making their movements small and contained, appropriating gestural

movements such as walking, caressing, slapping, kicking and butting heads, as seen in White

Dance: Moth. They also used daily items or mundane things for dance-making, exemplified by

the potatoes in White Dance: Moth, and common brown seal as a theme and symbolic subject for

Fur Seal (1977). They even used chickens for Before Cock Crows (1978). Eiko and Koma

employed repetition, constructing choreography by repeating everyday movements.

Another strategy was the effect of spontaneity, which was used differently. For

example, rather than creating movements from mere spontaneity, they used movement’s non-

sequitur quality in White Dance: Moth, giving the piece an unexpected tonality. When Koma technically hard, the natural bodies presented movements that were abundant, varied, and pleasing. Gordon does not consider himself dancer but thinks of himself as “nudist who deals with movements.” (qtd. in “Seven Postmodern Choreographers,” Making Dances produced and directed by Michael Blackwood, New York: Michael Blackwood Productions, 1997.)

110 The 1970s evidenced strong experiments with those post-modern two structural techniques: repetition and elongation of time. This trend was the result of borrowing performative and ritual techniques from those used in India, Africa, Japan, and Native Americans. This was first explored in musical compositions by such composers as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, and pianist/composer Charlamage. When translataed to other performative modes, it was employed in events that could last from several hours to several days.

59

dumped sacks of potatoes on the floor it surprised the audiences. Such an action did not seem

to have any relation to the work. Eiko and Koma did not limit the sites of performances: at a

private school, at a park (Battery Park when they performed Fission in 1981), at the beach (when

they performed Wallow 1984).

In addition to the postmodern characteristics discussed above, Eiko and Koma also

experimented with the use of expression, time, and imagery, tactics that were shared with

Meredith Monk, another postmodernist of the 1970s who was strongly influenced by Eastern

philosophy. Most postmodernists’ performantive modalities used consciously developed

inexpressive performance techniques. They used quotidian behaviors, as they were, without

emotional expression, because dance did not need to translate emotions or feelings. “The fully

conscious moving body is one that is fully alive. It is one that needs to work.”111 In stark

contrast, however, Eiko and Koma developed their gestural movements in a highly expressive

way. Still, their expression was not the same as the modern dancers’ who used both facial and

bodily expressiveness to construct particular characters or narratives. Eiko and Koma presented

“universal” feelings of pain, discomfort, and anger; yet their facial expressions often negated

what the movements seemed to express, thereby confounding any singular interpretation. They

expressed pain when they were caressing each other, discomfort when embracing, and anger

when walking. These expressions were also used in contrast to their “no-face.” When one

was violent, the other did not show emotion. As a result, they could present a broader

emotional range with many possible interpretations. Meredith Monk, also subverted singular

expression by using eccentric and hypnotic expressions, that created “eerie paradigm[s] of

contemporary angst” and heightened them by incorporating her voice into her dancing. 112 She

considered the voice to be “a direct line to the emotions,” and with the use of her voice, she

showed a full spectrum of emotion.113

111 Banes 54.

112 Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, “Beyond the Boundaries: Postmodernism (1960-1980),” No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) 416.

113 Banes 166.

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Both Eiko and Koma and Meredith Monk structured choreography poetically. This

was done by manipulating time and fragmenting the sections of a work. Eiko and Koma used

slow-motion as a way to distort ordinary temporal perceptions. While postmodernists might

extend time by prolonging the period of performance, Eiko and Koma stretched time by slowing

down movements. The effect was an increased awareness of prehensile limbs and a surreal,

fantasy-like experience. When slowed down, quotidian movements were no longer realistic,

but surreal. Eiko and Koma even created works in which time seemed to stretch from present

to past and even to the future. In combination with segmentation, the entire choreography

distorted the real-time experience.

Meredith Monk created similar effects with the use of slow motion and filmic

methodologies. Like Eiko and Koma, she took a long time to execute one movement; however,

she also used quick or real-time motions. She juxtaposed these along with the use of space.

Juice (1969), for example, took place in different spaces, starting at New York’s Guggenheim

Museum and then moving to other city locations including outside space and a proscenium stage

at Minor Latham Playhouse at Barnard College, and at Monk’s studio, over the period of one

month. This changed the audiences’ sense of space and time, by disrupting traditional notions

of the concert dance format.

While Eiko and Koma’s slowness was considered to be a part of their cultural

performative tradition, other postmodern dancers who used slow motion were often criticized.

Erick Hawkins and Barbara Tucker made a piece Here and Now with Watchers in 1962 which

was criticized by Allen Hughes:

How long is long? …Consider the Japanese theatre and its plays that go on and on for hours and hours. They move very slowly at times and very thoughtfully, too. Yes, they do, but we are not Japanese and besides, they speak in the Noh plays. No one speaks in “Here and Now With Watchers.”114

114 Allen Hughes, “Avant-Garde, or Dancing Alone Together,” The New York Times (1857-

Current file) New York, N.Y. 22 Jul 1962: 74, ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2003) ProQuest Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, FL. 31 Aug. 2006 <http://www.proquest.com/>

61

While the numbers of audiences who went to see avant-garde dance performances were small,

their support was as strong as the avant-garde dancers’ identities. By the mid-1970s New York

Times critic, Clive Barnes left his position. Two new critics, Anna Kisselgoff and Jennifer

Dunning, replaced him, supporting a greater range of dance forms which included foreign

dances. Surprisingly in 1977, Anna Kisselgolf wrote an article on Balinese dance comparing its

quality with the Western avant-garde.

One of the paradoxes of modern art—and this includes the performing arts—has indeed been the spell that such traditional forms from alien cultures have cast over the avant-garde in the West. …If the magic that dazzled Artaud can no longer strike us with such force, these Balinese dancers and musicians can impress us with something rarer—the artistry, in its communal nature, which is obviously still part of their lives… For such [American] artists, the temptation has been to transpose a basic concept of … [another] culture to their own. To fill a void in their own world of art, they have sought out the essence of their own discipline in another civilization.115

Deviating from the mainstream dance, American avant-garde dancers questioned the existing

definition of dance and the hierarchal systems within dance companies, making this statement

clearly visible in their performances. Equality was sought between trained dancers and non-

dancers and between dance and non-dance movements. Any movement was considered to be

valid material for choreography, and there was no need to interpret anything in any single way

that would limit dancers’ creativity and perhaps viewers’ mind, too. Such acceptance allowed

critics and audiences to appreciate foreign dance styles equally. Although Eiko and Koma’s

dance was at first considered postmodern, with the arrival of Butoh dancers from Japan they

were placed in another category of dance – Butoh.

115 Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance View: The Spell the Balinese Cast Over the Avant-Garde,” The New

York Times (1857-Current file) [New York, N.Y.] 4 Dec. 1977, 108-108, ProQuest Historical Newspapers The

New York Times (1851 - 2003) ProQuest, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, FL. 31 Aug. 2006. <http://www.proquest.com/>

62

CHAPTER 6.

CULTIVATION OF THE STYLE – ANALYSIS OF GRAIN

Beginning with their first performance in the U.S. in 1976 until 1981, Eiko and Koma

created and performed dance pieces each year. These included White Dance: Moth, Fur Seal

(1977), Before The Cock Crows (1978); Fluttering Black (1979); Nurse's Song (1981); and

Trilogy-Cell, Fission, Entropy (1979-1981). They introduced their work as “an avant-garde

dance in the Japanese manner” and impressed viewers with their emotionally-charged yet non-

narrative themes, their non-traditional and distinctive movements, a radically different sense of

time, and an inexplicably appealing and rich emotional ambiguity. Eiko and Koma made

American critics, who were suspicious at first of the duo’s claim to be “avant-garde,” accept

them as members of the American avant-garde.

Eiko and Koma, like other avant-garde dancers, were experimental in this early period,

drawing on various themes, subject matter, dance movements, and music. Subjects and themes

included moths, seals, Bible passages, Allen Ginsburg’s poems, and war. In Before the Cock

Crows, Eiko even incorporated belly dancing since she was taking a belly dancing class at the

time. They collaborated with experimental musicians like Glen Branca and involved audiences

in their dance, creating an atmosphere similar to the art movements prevalent in the 1950's and

1960’s called “Fluxus” and “Happenings.” This experimental period ended when they moved

to the Catskill Mountains in 1981.116

Eiko and Koma’s next important career phase was spent cultivating a distinct artistic

identity, particularly evident in the case-study of their performance work, Grain discussed later

in this chapter. Up until 1981 Eiko and Koma had thrived in the new environment of the

American city with its abundant artistic stimuli. Yet they began to feel exhausted because they

116 Eiko and Koma bought a house in the foothills of Catskill Mountains about one hundred miles

north of New York City.

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were following their passions without finding their own vision and aesthetic. Eiko remembers

this time in an interview between Eiko and Koma and Deborah Jowitt:

Later on, I kind of started to feel “What’s new for me?” It is not necessarily new. What’s new for me is not enough for me to share….[T]here is no reason for me to stick to that barrier of excitement….[W]e start to feel, “this is not what we really feel like doing it.” And when you’re trying new vocabularies you also feel it’s exciting but not really a familiar place. Your mind is not really lifted in the same way as you are doing your own. It is almost like sleeping with different people’s bed. You don’t have the same depth [of sleep].”117

The time had arrived to wake up from the stranger’s bed and to go back to their own bed.

They literally moved from the stranger’s bed – New York City – in search of their own artistic

ground. In the Catskills, they began to create their own place by generating new experiences,

reflecting on their path, and, envisioning their artistic goal. This process is similar to what

Clement Greenberg calls “self-criticism” through which “purification” is attained. Greenberg

says “The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every

effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby

each art would be rendered “pure.”118 By removing themselves from the environment in which

they were familiar, Eiko and Koma again were able to look at themselves more objectively. By

creating a physical distance from the city, they also created a distance from who they were,

enabling them to regenerate their experience, to reflect on their path and envision their unique

artistic goal.

They bought eighteen acres of land with two big barns in the Catskill Mountains and

lived there from 1981 to 1983.119 Here they enjoyed a country life, according to Koma's

recollection, “with eight chickens” while occasionally going back to New York City. In the

Catskills, they made pieces that would premier later in New York: Grain and Undertow.

117 Eiko 1998: 68.

118 Qtd. in Copeland 92.

119 Eiko and Koma 1998: 65. In an interview with Deborah Jowitt, Eiko and Koma reflectively talked about their experience in the Catskills. They said that they moved in 1981 and lived there for about two and a half to three years, the exact length was not clear.

64

What impressed them in the Catskills was the natural environment. In summer and

spring nature was beautiful and refreshing. Winters, by contrast, were cold and cruel. Koma

remembers that one day snow came up to the second floor of their house and locked them inside.

They had to survive with the food they kept in stock and stay indoors. The natural environment

decided what they would do and how they would live. After the brutal winter, spring brought

pleasant moments with fresh grass and delicate flowers. Nature felt closer to their everyday

life, and this gave them another inspiration for their dance works.

The three years’ experiment, slowly we start to realize instead of making a tree dance, or like flower dance – to move like flower – we are studying how we could be right by flower or how I could be right by tree without disturbing them” [emphasis mine].120

Koma’s words signaled a shift in their idea about dance, which paralleled a shift in the

understanding of space by minimalist artists in the U.S. Robert Morris, in particular, believed

that sculpture exists in exterior relationships between the sculpture, the space it occupied, and the

viewer. What was important were the exterior relations of sculpture and the viewer, rather than

the interior dynamics of sculpture.121 Another sculptor Carl Andre came to the notion that

sculpture is a work-within-space rather than a space-within-a-work.122

For Koma, dance did not consist of just movements that occupied the space

independently. Instead, movements existed in exterior relationships between their bodies and

the environments in which they put themselves as dancers. For Eiko and Koma, movements

were simply one of the elements of a whole performative event. Wholeness defined what the

movements could be. To create the wholeness, in an essential conceptual performative shift,

Eiko emphasized the importance of the scenography, by citing an example from the work, Tree

(1988): “It’s not so important whether we can portray ourselves as a tree but whether we really

can make people to feel the tree. And in the set of Tree (1988), we took ten times longer time

120 Koma 1998: 69.

121 David Batchelor, Minimalism Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997: 23.

122 Ibid., 26.

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to make the set than the movement, because once we made the set… we can believe in that set as

an environment” (emphasis mine).123 For them, “a human body [is] a part of a landscape and a

landscape [is] an extension of a body” (emphasis mine).124 Equating nature with humankind

parallels the Japanese concept of fuhdo as explained by sociologist Minoru Sonoda. Nature,

Sonoda explains, was internalized in the process of agricultural civilization in Japan. “In an

agricultural civilization, the natural environment ceases to be purely ‘natural.’ Transformed by

influences from human society, the environment becomes a ‘cultured nature,’ infused with the

spiritual culture of its inhabitants.”125 Humans, then, internalized the “cultured nature” that he

calls fuhdo: a concept originally developed by Japanese philosopher Tetsuroh Watsuji.

Although fuhdo literally means “climate or environment,” as it involves the process as described

above, Sonoda argues that fuhdo “denotes not only the external, natural climatic and geographic

features of a region, but also refers to an internalized nature, infused with a cosmological and

spiritual Lebenswelt construed by the people living in the region.”126 While Sonoda asserts that

this process happened in the agricultural civilization – Eiko and Koma maintained an

internalized nature, fuhdo, as it was awakened by American geography. Significantly, in 1998,

they created an art-installation piece, Breath, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, merging

visual art and dance. Their performance looked like a living painting rather than dance work.

They performed for seven hours a day, for four weeks, from May 28 to June 21. The

performance space depicted a natural environment of the ground covered with leaves.127

Somewhere in this landscape Eiko and Koma were lying, and were indistinguishable from the

landscape. At one moment, something moved slowly, which revealed itself as Eiko’s foot.

123 Eiko 1998: 76.

124 Eiko and Koma’s Official Website 17 May. 2005 <http://www.eikoandkoma.org>

125 Minoru Sonoda, “Shinto and the Natural Environment” Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami ed. John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, (Richmond, England; Curzon, MO; Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2000) 33.

126 Ibid.

127 The video version of this piece depicts a land that breaths at its own pace.

66

They kept their faces on the ground and rarely moved, yet when they did their subtle movements

encapsulated the feeling of breath on the land. (Video 1)

Video 1 Excerpt from Breath. Conceived and performed by Eiko and Koma. Eiko and Koma: Media Dance. DVD. 1985. Eiko and Koma’s personal archive.

Their relocation to the Catskills, their shift to a consuming interest in nature, and the

perception of environment or space in its relationship to the body, coincided with a larger social

and cultural phenomenon in the U.S. Since the 1960s, American society had been experiencing

a growing environmental movement.128 Mixed with skeptical attitudes towards the government

that were triggered by the Vietnam War, many individuals fled the urban areas and made

communes in the countryside. The self-supporting life style forced people to realize the

128 The concern for the environment turned into a movement in the 1960s, particularly after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring.

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importance of nature. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, in which she described

the impact of chemicals on the food chain, the environment and human beings.129 As the

interest in protecting the environment increased, organizations such as “Greenpeace” and

“Friends of Earth” were formed. The call for protecting the earth crossed national borders as

photographs of the earth taken from space allowed people to see the holistic image surrounded

by blue ocean and atmospheric clouds, appealing to the subliminal desire to maintain the earth.

Because “environment” has no borders, people respected environmental issues on a global level

and, as a result the United Nations held a conference on the Human Environment in 1972.

Then the oil crisis in 1973 and 1979 drew attention to the fact that natural resources were limited,

while unprecedented population increases posed an imminent threat to the extinction of

resources. The relationship between the environment, nature, and human beings became more

evident, giving impetus and rebirth to the new discipline of ecology.

As the awareness of nature was evoked by the apparent environmental changes, society

began to develop a renewed realization and an increased appreciation of nature. As Sonoda

noted, although nature is transformed into fuhdo as the society develops, society also “develop[s]

a shared appreciation of the natural landscape and build[s] a symbolical world inspired by the

landscape,”130 as seen in the myths and rituals that explain relations between humans and

environment. Artists were the leading presenters of their internalized nature which can be the

roots of myths and rituals. In the 1960s, working with the natural environment gradually

evolved into an environmental art movement and the subsequent birth of genres such as earth art,

land art, site-specific art, and installation art. In 1965, Alan Sonfist created a living forest in

Greenwich Village, in an attempt to bring “nature back into the urban environment and to

explore the historical dimension of natural, alongside social and cultural, life.”131 In February,

129 Research on the environment was active in scientific circles. With the publication of The

Population Bomb, Paul R. Ehrlich drew attention to the potential threat of an increasing population and its influence on the environment.

130 Sonoda 33.

131 The Center For Land Use Interpretation May 15 2006. < http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/index.html>

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1969, Willoughby Sharp curated the historic "Earth Art" exhibition at the Andrew Dickson

White Museum of Art at Cornell University in New York, in which works by Walter De Maria,

Jan Dibbets, Hans Haacke, Michael Heizer, Neil Jenney, Richard Long, David Medalla, Robert

Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, and Gunther Uecker were presented. Using the

characteristics of specific sites, both outdoors and indoors, artists, such as Robert Smithson,

Andy Goldsworthy, Christo, Richard Serra, Yumi Kori, Brandon LaBelle, Guillaume Bijl,

Christian Bernard Singer, and Betty Beaumont created site-specific works which dealt with

landscapes, architecture, and sculptural elements of buildings.132 Site-specific art was also

known as “installation art,” as artists installed works that were specific to a certain place or

space. Cathy Billian, for example, made Two Towers at Battery Park in 1981. Both site-

specific art and installation art appealed to visitors’ or participants’ experiences in space in

relation to the works. As the participants could move around, see, and experience the works

from their own perspective, site-specific art or installation art existed within the mutual dialogues

among artists, works, and participants.133 These art movements signaled the broadened concept

of environment as space, time, and experience. Artists in different fields in the U.S. created

fuhdo work drawing participants’ awareness to the natural environment physically and

intellectually. The artists presented their internalized nature and communicated with

participants. The participants, on the other hand, were pushed to think about their relations with

nature by experiencing fuhdo art rather than merely observing it. These art movements

encouraged them to individualize their idea of nature.

Certainly, Eiko and Koma were aware of these movements. However, their decision to

move to the Catskills, the inspiration they received from that environment, and their recognition

132 Other young artists includes Mark Divo, John K. Melvin, Lennie Lee, Luna Nera, Wrights &

Sites, Sarah Sze, Seth Wulsin, Ben Cummins and Simparch.

133 Art exhibitions with nature as a central theme were connected with other concurrent social concerns. For example, “Nature as Image and Metaphor” in Syracuse University in New York, in 1982 was tied to female empowerment, presenting works by female artists. Featured artists were Carolee Thea, Mary Beth Edelson, Ana Mendieta, and Beth Ames Swartz whose works were inspired by nature. (In Ruth Ann Appelhof, “Nature as Image and Metaphor (in Views by Women Artists),” Woman's Art Journal Vol. 3, No. 1 Spring - Summer, 1982: 15-16. 15 May 2005 <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0270-7993%28198221%2F22%293%3A1%3C15%3ANAIAM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6>

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of the environment as a co-existent space for human beings and nature must be seen as a

reflection of the social ethos.

While the experience in the Catskills allowed Eiko and Koma to find different subjects

for their works, most certainly it also clarified their approach to making work. They made a

practical decision based on their condition and situation. Eiko said:

[I]n a sense, by virtue of we are working together, we are bound to find a theme that we both feel we are part of it….We haven’t invested like other dancers in a particular style of training so we don’t have a vocabulary to choreograph from A to E. We really have to work on a theme. And we intended to make the pieces that can last and live with our life. It means we are choosing something that we like to be with for a long time. Tree, river, [these are] some things we don’t get tired of thinking [about]. Also, because it is only two of us, we are all.”134

As Eiko implied, they did not train in mainstream dance institutions nor train with any

other dancers. This important, simple realization became their central aesthetic. The

limitation of their codified movement vocabularies was not, however, a defect. Eiko and Koma

took this fact as a springboard that shifted them to focus on themes. As a result, the movements

within their dances had a great similarity, yet none of their works was identical to any other. “It

is a difference between hayashi rice and curry rice.135 It is a matter of whether we put on a

different sauce or not.” The basic ingredients in both dishes are similar. If the ingredients are

equated with movements, then the sauce can be equated with the context. Eiko explains:

Our movement is basically same. They are embarrassingly same. But, for example, Death

Poem and Cambodian Stories are very different. The atmosphere is different and the collaborators are different too. Our concern is different. Land and Wind are different. If we say, Land, it is about Land, and if we say Death Poem, it is about death. And about Cambodian Stories, it is about the meeting with Cambodian people. So these concerns are more important. So it would be a problem if viewers don’t smell Cambodia when they watch Cambodian Stories. But if they smell it… Even though the movements are not so different, I think the smell is more important.136

134 Eiko 1998: 63.

135 Hayashi rice is a popular Japanese dish, resembling Japanese curry. Koma 2006.

136 Eiko 2006.

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By “smell” they mean that the atmosphere they create depends on whether they can fully

get into the works as performers, “into the concept.”137 When they successfully do it, then they

are assured that the audiences will “smell,” – in other words, the audiences can say, “Oh this is

the thing Eiko and Koma really wanted to do.”138 To have audiences reach this point, they

create works from the audience’s position. Before they premier their works, they show their

works to close friends who honestly comment and criticize. They take their words into

consideration.139 Working together, they watch each other’s movements, commenting on what

did not work and suggesting alternative ideas. This process is part of their regular working

style.

Their working style has developed through their long career as a duo. Since the very

beginning, they had worked as a duo but they consolidated the decision to remain as a duo while

living in the Catskills. Although many choreographers form a company with other dancers,

Eiko and Koma were not interested in working with others.140 Their disinterest in making a

company was based on both their principles and rebelliousness. In an interview with Effie

Mihopolous in 1983, Eiko said:

There is much that we can explore between us, and I and Koma have shared a lot already, just by being in, coming from the same culture, same generation and also experiencing numerous stages just the two of us. We speak the language, that nobody else can share, so I would like to go deeper in it first.141

While Eiko’s comments imply the fear of possible misunderstanding when working with

non-Japanese dancers, linguistic or cultural differences are not the primary reason for not

working with other dancers. They had collaborated with American musicians and lighting

137 Ibid.

138 Ibid.

139 When I observed their process of making Death Poem to document the performance in 2005 at St. Marks Church in New York, it was not until the day before the premier that they finally decided the movements. Until then, they were working on the setting, lighting, and the music.

140 Eiko, Interview with Effie Mihopolous, 1983.

141 Ibid.

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designers before 1980 and have kept working with artists of various nationalities for lighting and

music until the present (2007). What Eiko’s words suggest, then, is that their shared experience

and partnership as a married couple, that is, their life, is the essential and inevitable element of

their creations. In fact, they talk about the next piece when they are waiting for an airplane,

cooking in the kitchen or eating dinner.142 Everyday life merges with dance-making, and

dance-making becomes a part of everyday life. “Go[ing] deeper” can be equated with the depth

of their life as well as the depth of their dance making. Together they find topics that interest

them, through which, as Eiko says, they “are really trying to find [themselves], what [they] really

want to do.”143 Their works are the expression of their search for themselves and their journey

and discovery of life.

Their decision to remain a duo also came from their ideas about the importance of giving

worth to the smaller-niche positions in the dance world, importance to minorities in the real-life

world, and, to the value they put on themselves as essential elements of human life. Eiko equates

this with poetry. “The poetry is not selling well. But it is necessary for our life.”144

While Eiko and Koma acknowledge the value of big dance companies, they are critical

about the marketing these companies’ need. Marketing exists as a business strategy, and since

businesses operate for the profit of the organization, marketing automatically positions viewers

as buyers, and dance as products. The products are developed to meet buyers’ demands, and

the products are sold for the profit of the organization. Marketing changes the dance company

into a corporation in which the dance is turned into a commodity. By remaining a duo, they

have protected themselves from becoming a corporation. This continues their life-long ideals,

dating back to the student movement in the late 1960s in Japan. A primary goal of their life has

been to renounce capitalism. Eiko and Koma have kept that anti-establishment spirit alive in

the form of their dancing structure as a duo. They are honest in saying that the foundational

principle for their life was formed during that period. Eiko said,

142 Eiko 2007.

143 Eiko 1983.

144 Eiko 2006.

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[T]he eyes with which we work as adults definitely came from the students movement, in some way. Definitely. So we have no desire to be a president of a company, or lawyer, or if an artist, to be famous. This kind of mind-set is completely missing.”145 While they kept their fundamental policy since their twenties, their visions for work, their

working style, and their interests have evolved as their life progressed. Correspondingly, their

dance, as a part of their life, evolved while retaining the primary foundational base. Grain,

which premiered in 1983 after their return to New York can be seen as the revelation of their

evolving life and unchanging principles.

In 1983, after returning to New York, they premiered Grain, at the Kampo Cultural

Center146. According to Eiko, for this piece they studied 20 to 30 Japanese folk tales and used

images from them.147 They were fascinated with “sort of primitive and accessory cultures”

(signifying, in a sense, the bed in which they felt comfortable) and in studying Japanese folk

tales they went to “the depth of sleep.”

However, in order for the work not to be limited to Japanese culture, they “deliberately

made the piece abstract.”148 In this performance, although rice was used as part of the stage

setting and as their props, the title, Grain, kept the subject generic. Rice was a symbol for all

essential grains or foods so audiences could associate with their own culture. As Eiko

remarked, their intention was not for the audiences to know Japanese culture but to share the

“essential part of primitive people or primitive culture – which is very direct… and very harsh,

145 Ibid.

146 Kampo Cultural Center is located at 31 Bond St. New York, NY 10012. According to the brochure by Kampo Cultural Center (undated), it was established in 1976 to maintain a calligraphy center for educational purpose designed by Kampo Harada, world renowned artist, calligrapher and humanitarian. The center expanded the mission so that it becomes the “a full scale cultural center committed to the promotion of international understanding and communication by fostering all forms of art.” As part of the promotion, the center provided a first floor loft space as a rehearsal studio and performance presentation space in 1983. Eiko and Koma’s performance of Grain was one of the first performances presented at the loft. (Kampo Cultural

Center undated.)

147 Eiko 1983.

148 Ibid.

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too.”149 Their dance had a harsh moment when Koma sat down, and holding Eiko in front, he

forced her to eat rice.

In this piece, Eiko and Koma appeared nude for the first time. While the time they were

nude was short, the nudity was symbolic. It signified a detachment from the costumes, and, the

depth of trust with each other and with their audiences. Costumes entail multiple associations

for the viewers. But they are also limiting because they specify nationality, age, preference,

and style. By taking off costumes, Eiko and Koma removed the limits of associations. Still,

to be naked for the first time required much effort, as Eiko describes.

I remember how scared we were to be naked at that point. Really dancing naked. That’s the first piece we were naked. Kind of music that is not really a music we were using. And really the time sense of letting go of what’s next. That was a break, so to speak. Also, by then somehow living together only the two of us in Catskill[s] made us the partnership. I think we were more committed to each other.150 Strengthened trust gave them courage. Eiko and Koma sprawled far apart, naked, faced

down on a white platform. This impressive opening was followed by a sudden blackout, then

by the sound of falling rice. The performance was divided into segments with blackouts in

between sections which, according to Eiko, was a device used to destabilize time. Without

making a story, each image segment connected to different images of ancient times. By

experimenting with multiple temporal frames, Eiko and Koma allowed viewers to connect to the

different periods. The music also removed the specificity of time since Eiko and Koma used

Japanese, Tibetan and Indonesian folk music with no lyrics. Since lyrics can reveal the period

when the writer lived, the lack of lyrics made the music neither contemporary nor classic, and,

together with the segmenting of images, audiences were freed from specific associations. In an

interview with Leslie Windham, Eiko expressed their disinterest in specifying the time.

Not only going through the past. Nor the future. After all, there are two of us. So I don’t make a piece from my childhood memories only. And I don’t know what the future is… Therefore, the time we share in the performance should not be mine or his or somebody’s. It is rather neutral “no time.”151

149 Ibid.

150 Eiko 1998: 67.

151 Eiko 1988: 48.

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Eiko and Koma’s manipulation of time was not limited to the use of music or to the

piece’s structure. They also slowed their movements. In part, this was because they did not

have many movements to “show off,” as Eiko calmly explained. But, they were also questioning

the meaning of speed. Eiko said, “what are you going to do by rushing?”152 With the

slowness, they altered even more the time-sense that the audiences would experience. It

completely changed all perceptions and all awareness of motion. The snail-speed desensitized

the watchers’ eyes, making it more difficult to catch the gradual shifts. By the time the

viewers’ brains registered the difference, Eiko and Koma were no longer apart. Paradoxically,

slowness made the progression feel bigger. Slow-motion also focused attention on the

movements of the bodies and to other details. In Grain, while Koma rolled over and crouched,

putting his buttocks up and his face down, Eiko, standing up, wove her body and arms delicately

in the air, twisting and bending. Jowitt wrote in The Village Voice, “What ever idea Eiko and

Koma may be working with – and I’m not always sure exactly what that is – the idea seizes and

transforms their bodies.”153 The attention to detail broke the body down, allowing each body

part to become almost a sort of independent creature. Tobi Tobias stated, “The hands, with

their long, flat fingers, are not quite dextrous human hands, while the feet seem prehensile.”154

Because of increased attention to motion, the slowness heightened viewers’ interpretation of

non-bodily movements. Since the rice falling down from Eiko’s hands took on equal

significance to her bodily movements, Eiko and Koma heightened the audiences’ awareness of

other natural things like grain.

One of the important explorations for American avant-garde dancers since the early

1960s was an attempt to alter audiences’ perceptions. Pioneer Anna Halprin sought to initiate

perceptual experience by making performers incorporate the essential actions of breathing, lying

152 Eiko 2006.

153 Deborah Jowitt, “Crawling into a Womb of Rice. February 22, 1983” The Dance In Mind –

Profiles and Reviews 1976 – 83 Boston: David R. Godine, 1985: 185.

154 Tobi Tobias, “… In the Recent Work of Eiko and Koma—Image is Everything. Almost…” New York Food For the Eye 14 Mar.1983: n. pag.

75

down, and leaping through space, which “had the effect of loosening the mind’s anticipatory

schemata so that the body could relax into a state of naturally responsive actions.”155 The

increased “body consciousness” was illuminated in her works because Halprin situated these

movements in a stage-environment, along with other objects of daily life in Five-Legged Stool

(1961).

Eiko and Koma were doing something similar to Halprin. They used familiar objects,

grains, and incorporated simple actions. They let the audiences have sensory experience by

pouring the grain on stage. They merged object, body and environment. The slowed motion

made Eiko and Koma conscious of the relationship of grains to their own discrete movements; a

shared consciousness existed with the audiences which transformed the experience into

something less rational and more sensory. They enacted, and the audiences witnessed, a ritual.

The difference between Anna Halprin’s performance and Eiko and Koma’s was that Halprin

incorporated everyday movements that simply co-existed with the environment created for the

performance. But Eiko and Koma created movement inspired by the environment they

created.156

Another important element of Grain was Eiko and Koma’s use of sexual elements and

implications. In one section Eiko and Koma’s interactions reflected sexual interplay. They

did not stay explicitly erotic, but piqued the audiences’ imagination. Eiko and Koma appeared

again with clothes on, staying on the spread futon. Koma reached Eiko’s toe, then caressed her

foot, calf, and thigh. His hand wandered blindly over her body and face, and he buried his face

in her genitals. Then Koma held her by the neck. As she suffered from pain, Koma put his

head strongly into her groin and cried out in a high voice which critic Tobi Tobias described,

“The audience witnesses this post-coital tableau, in a blinding glare, as it enters.”157 The

mating gestures between man and woman were sexual – not beautiful but rather shocking, and

155 Qtd. in Janice Ross, “Anna Halprin’s Urban Rituals,” The Drama Review 48, 2, Summer 2004:

51.

156 They shared the interests of “body consciousness” and later collaborated in Be With (2001). This was one of four Eiko and Koma’s rare collaborations through their artistic career.

157 Tobias 1983: n. pag.

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rough at the same time. They were paradoxical and ambiguous, because even though they had

physical contact with caressing and touching, their physical expression subverted expected

associations. Even when Koma caressed Eiko’s foot, calf, and thigh, Eiko stayed unexpressive,

neither happy nor unhappy. As a result, their movements did not suggest a single association

but opened up many associations.

At another moment, Koma made Eiko, who was sitting on his lap between his folded

legs, eat rice. With the action of Eiko’s being force-fed rice, more questions came to mind.

Why was she forced to eat rice? Are we forced to eat rice? Or do we want to eat rice? The

very fact that we take eating rice for granted allows one to forget that grain is essential for life.

Deborah Jowitt wrote, “pondering the slow, beautiful, violent, shocking images we can

understand them all as aspects of fecundity, of nourishment.”158 The effect of Eiko and Koma’s

gestures was to question things or actions taken for granted. The dance created a lasting

resonance. “Instead of fading as time passes after the performance, it grows stronger in memory,

its multiple, half-inchoate implications becoming more and more resonant.”159 The ability to

invoke multiple and changing associations made Eiko and Koma’s dance more complex, rich,

and deep. (Video 2)

158 Jowitt 1983: 185.

159 Tobias 1983: n. pag.

77

Video 2 Excerpt from Grain. Conceived and performed by Eiko and Koma. DVD. 1983. Eiko and Koma’s personal archive.

78

Because of Grain and their following work, Night Tide, Eiko and Koma received a New

York Dance and Performance Award BESSIES in 1984. These works revealed distinctive

performance characteristics not seen in any other American modern dance. As Jowitt said in

her article, “When you go to a performance by Eiko and Koma, you know for sure you’re not

going to be seeing an evening of ‘American Modern Dance.’ For sure.”160 Anna Kisselgoff

identified Eiko and Koma’s aesthetics in these works:

With sustained and slowly changing images of inexorable pain on the threshold of ecstasy, a strange ability to identify the grotesque with the beautiful, their startling sexuality and nudity and the use of allegories identified with nature, both pieces now reveal the origin of Eiko’s and Koma’s esthetic.161

Elizabeth Lee also found it difficult to explain Eiko and Koma’s work. “They are

beautiful to watch, without having any of the conventionality that usually goes with that

perception.”162

Although Grain was highly valued, some reviewers, of course, opposed it. Michael

Mott made a strong negative criticism in the Richmond News Leader:

What it serves to show us is that we have reached rock bottom in modern dance, if this be dance at all, and that we must re-examine what is paraded before the public in the name of art… The most worrisome aspect of it all is that this duo is booked solid for the next two years across the country and is being financed, in part, by state arts councils and the National Endowment for the Arts – in other words, the taxpayers.163

While his comment is severe, it brought forward one core component of Eiko and Koma’s

dance: Questioning “what is dance?”

160 Jowitt 1983: 185.

161 Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance: Eiko and Koma In a Durham Premiere,” The New York Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 24 Jun 1984: 46-46, ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York

Times (1851 - 2002) ProQuest, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL. 24 Jan. 2006 <http://www.proquest.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/>

162 Elizabeth Lee, “Dancers Eiko & Koma Beautiful To Watch,” Durham Morning Herald 20 June 1984: A Review.

163 Mott, Michael Richmond News Leader, 1985: n. pag.

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Eiko and Koma’s Grain marked the beginning of the new phase in their careers as shaped

in America. The move to the Catskills gave them time to think deeply about their artistic

vision. As their vision became clearer, they found their own path. Grain signifies Eiko and

Koma’s artistic fuhdo and represents what Eiko referred to as “comfort in bed,” meaning, a

return to parts of their own culture. However, this return did not mean that they returned to the

same place from which they came. It meant “going deeper” into topics with which they were

familiar, but, they went back with different insights. They developed more profoundly into

their relationship as a duo and as a couple. Grain signaled the turning point of their personal

life and artistic career, and it would determine the direction they took from that moment onward.

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CHAPTER 7.

ARRIVAL OF BUTOH

Following their performance of Grain, Eiko and Koma continued to make pieces at a

pace of two premiers a year.164 They expanded their performance venues from New York City

to other cities, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pennsylvania, Durham, North Carolina, and

Boston. They were invited to one of the most prestigious modern dance festivals, the American

Dance Festival (ADF) in Durham, N.C., in 1983 and 1984, performing Fur Seal and Beam, and

Grain and Elegy respectively. Their two consecutive appearances in ADF cemented their status

as important postmodern dancers in the American scene. In addition, their Choreographic

Creator Award from the BESSIES for Grain and Night Tide (1984) marked national

acknowledgement of their innovative achievements.

While Eiko and Koma’s journey continued, the internationalizing of American modern

dance changed things also. One aspect of this was an altered classification given to Eiko and

Koma’s dancing by American critics which would shift perceptions of their dance. With the

arrival in America of Japanese Butoh performers, Eiko and Koma found they had to negate and

confront a newly-imposed and unwanted categorization of their work.

Crucially for Eiko and Koma, who had been performing in the States since 1976, ADF

invited Japanese modern dance groups, Dai Rakuda Kan in 1982 and Sankai Juku in 1984.

ADF is the oldest modern dance festival established in 1948 and building upon the ideas and

practices that Martha Graham began at the Bennington School of the Dance before the WWII.

Along with Jacob’s Pillow Festival and the Purchase Pepsico Summerfare, ADF became a

gateway for young dancers to receive financial support and public recognition. Providing

exposure of up-to-date modern dance to over 30,000 viewers, dancing at ADF meant more than

just dancing at the festival. It meant a seal of approval.

164 By this time they were able to focus on making dance, putting an end to the part-time job.

They began to pave a way for the dance career in the U.S.

81

In 1980 the director of the American Dance Festival, Charles Reinhart went to Japan.165

In an interview Reinhart said, “Twenty years ago, American modern dance was more appreciated

in other countries than it was in our own. So our point was, let’s see what has happened in

those countries by bringing some of them here.”166 In 1982, two years after his visit, he planned

an exchange program with Japan, bringing Japanese companies and taking American dancers to

Japan. Four Japanese modern dance companies, Dai Rakuda Kan, Bonjin Atsugi and Dancers,

the Miyako Kato Dance Company, and the Waka Dance Company were invited. Among them,

the unconventional style of Dai Rakuda Kan most surprised and shocked the audiences.

Dai Rakuda Kan (Great Camel Battleship) received the most acclaim with their

performance of Sea-Dappled Horse. Anna Kisselgoff reviewed them with astonishment:

Mothers fled out of the theater with their children. Wide-eyed adults sat – occasionally – on the edge of their seats. Imagine a Japanese version of the Living Theater with a touch of Hieronymus Bosch, and you can almost pin a label on the Dai Rakuda Kan company or envisage its exuberantly received American debut at the American Dance Festival here.167 American audiences’ shock and awe were conveyed by the reactions Kisselgoff

described. Their dance was equated with the Living Theater, whose performances broke the

social taboos and the conventional styles of theater. Both female and male performers of Dai

Rakuda Kan danced in G-strings, wearing only white and gray body make-up, which surprised

the audience and “made some mothers take their children outside of the theater.”168 Then the

performers made a “deliberately grotesque” image that Kisselgoff associated with Hieronymus

165 ADF began a commission as a result of the wave of progress in the various institutions. The

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) organized the Dance Touring Program in 1968, awarding grants to companies and supporting scholarly organizations such as the Dance Notation Bureau and the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library. Private sectors, such as Ford Foundation and Guggenheim Foundation, also benefitted dance companies and individual dancers. They began to recognize the artistic and academic value of dance and systematically supported artists and scholars alike.

166 “A Taste of Japanese Dance,” The New York Times 4 July 1982: Sunday, Late City Final Edition, Section 2: 14.

167 Anna Kisselgoff, “The Dance: Japanese Dai Rakuda Kan at Festival,” The New York Times, July 12, 1982, Late City Final Edition, Section C: 14.

168 Ibid.

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Bosch paintings.169 Bosch’s paintings had been an inspiration for the 20th century’s Surrealist

movement, including the Japanese avant-garde movement in the 1960s. The choreographer of

Dai Rakuda Kan, Maro Akaji, was in the middle of this movement, along with with his mentor,

Tatsumi Hijikata. Not surprisingly, his work manifested a similar grotesqueness that the

viewers quickly associated with their original sources. The resulting visual effect was so

intense that Kisselgoff described the dance as “visionary theater.”170 At the same time, this

visual effect of the dance was so confusing that it was described as a “dream and nightmare.”171

The impact of Dai Rakuda Kan was so strong that they made the other Japanese companies look

less impressive, less dramatic, less theatrical by comparison. In contrast to Dai Rakuda Kan,

the rest of the companies were described as having “a middle-level respectability, lacking a true

creative spark but earnest in their attempt to keep up with an all-purpose modern-dance formalist

approach. The fact that there were no surprises is in itself no surprise.”172

The other three dance companies’ performances were not surprising because their

approaches to dance were already familiar. Jennifer Dunning wrote, “With one exception, the

work of these Japanese modernists had the look of an arbitrarily and diffidently – assembled

collage of borrowed bits.”173 In fact, two of the choreographers, Bonjin Atsugi and Miyako

Kato had studied modern dance in the U.S. Atsugi studied two years at New York City’s

Julliard School and spent the late 1960s influenced by Antony Tudor and Yvonne Rainer. Kato

was drawn to the styles of dancers such as Trisha Brown, Laura Dean and Meredith Monk. As

could be expected from their experiences, Atsugi’s and Kato’s choreography used postmodernist

approaches of 1960s’ and 1970s’ avant-garde dancers, featuring minimal and repetitive

169 Hieronymus Bosch, a 14th and 15th century Dutch painter, used images of demons, half-

human animals and machines, to portray the innate evil nature of human beings.

170 Kisselgoff 1982: C14.

171 Ibid.

172 Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance Festival Enjoys Visit of Japan’s Moderns,” The New York Times 10 July 1982: Saturday, Late City Final Edition, Section 1: 14.

173 Jennifer Dunning, “Dance: 3 Modern Troupes from Japan at Purchase,” The New York Times 19 July 1982: Late City Final Edition, Section C: 12.

83

movements. Another choreographer, Shigeka Hanayagi, who did not study in the U.S.,

presented a work in which the traditional Japanese dance “Buyo” was blended with modern

movements. However, it did not garner particular attention as it was not an inspiring merge of

the two. In Snow Don’t Be Stopping, a woman in a kimono encounters a man with tights, then,

snow falls on the stage. Reviewer Kisselgoff wrote “The hidden story is too hidden and

suggests the risk in combining highly symbolic and straightforward art.”174 From the reactions

to the modern Japanese dance companies at ADF, American audiences’ expectations for

Japanese dancers and their proclivities were set.

However, Eiko and Koma at this point were viewed differently. According to Anna

Kisselgoff, they “have familiarized local audiences with the idea of marrying postmodern

American sensibilities with a time sense inspired by Japanese classical theatrical conventions.”

Eiko and Koma were a model for a cross-cultural dance to which postmodern attitudes could be

applied.

Following ADF in 1982, as part of the exchange program, American dancers went to

Japan to teach American modern dance techniques. These workshops fostered interaction with

Japanese dancers and observations about the dance scene in Japan, resulting in their exposure to

the Japanese underground dance movement called “Butoh.” One of the American teachers,

Bella Lewitzky said in an interview, “The avant-garde movement in Japan is very different from

that in the United States and in some ways better... Our postmoderns tend to be very abstract, but

[Butoh] is postmodern expressionism.”175 She mentioned the formation of different dance

styles of Butoh within the development of the avant-garde movement in Japan. Still, at this

time, the link between Dai Rakuda Kan and Butoh was not understood by the critics.

Consequently the term “Butoh” was not fully understood. Soon, with the arrival of the

Japanese company, Sankai Juku, Butoh sparked even greater public interest within the U.S.

When Sankai Juku came and performed Johmon Sho (Tribute to Pre-History), first in

Toronto then at ADF in 1984, their “visual effect of spectacular,” “grotesque expressivity,” and

174 Kisselgoff 1982: 14.

175 Terry Trucco, “U.S. Modern Dancers Spread Message in Japan,” The New York Times 28 Aug. 1984: Late City Final Edition, Section C: 13.

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their “indescribable appeal to senses” captured the attention of American audiences. Kisselgoff

wrote their critical introduction:

Friday’s outdoor event was sensational. As the four men, with shaven heads, were slowly lowered from the top of the building by ropes at their ankles, a fifth in a skirt-like robe rose up on the roof to blow a huge conch shell. Like a distant colossus glimpsed from afar, this archaic living statue appeared like a god in the sky. Myth and megalopolis converged into one striking but daring image. Modern technology – a glass building whose elevators were visibly moving up and down in their transparent shafts – counterpointed the slow descent of bodies involved in equally visible human risk. The ordinary below met with the extraordinary above – the image of unfamiliar Japanese gods desceneding from the heavens to create the world we know only too well.176

Rather than movement, it was the physical appearance of their hanging bodies from the

high building that surprised the audiences. Hanging by the ankles, and the risk such an act

involves, was astounding. While the individual performers did not move significantly, the

action of lowering the bodies on ropes for hundreds of feet created a stunning visual contrast to

the stationary building behind them. Sankai Juku created a spectacular effect, demonstrating a

“shrewd sense of spectacle.”177

Sankai Juku associated themselves with Butoh, yet, at the same time critics were just

learning and expounding on the history of Butoh. As a result, the characteristics of Sankai

Juku’s performance represented all Butoh in the eyes of the less informed American critics. In

her review Kisselgoff wrote, “Sankai Juku – a Japanese avant-garde dance group that is part of a

controversial anti-Establishment movement called Butoh. Typically, Butoh remains an

underground phenomenon in Japan while in Paris, where Sankai Juku has now moved, it is all

the rage.”178 Their performance of hanging by the ankles from the building was understood in

176 Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance: Japanese Group in Toronto,” The New York Times (1857-Current

file) New York, N.Y. 19 Jun 1984: C15. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The New York Times (1851 - 2003). ProQuest. Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, FL. 22 May. 2005 <http://www.proquest.com/>

177 Kisselgoff 1982: 14.

178 Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance: Japanese Group in Toronto,” The New York Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 19 Jun 1984: C15, ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2002) ProQuest, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL. 24 Jan. 2006 <http://www.proquest.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/>

85

the line of the avant-garde social movements, as explained by Stephen Holden: “Sankai Juku has

developed the antitraditional style of dance called [Butoh] in which dancers with shaved heads

and chalk covered bodies resemble powerful moving sculpture.”179 The most striking features –

their physical appearance and the distinctive movements – represented Butoh. Kisselgoff said,

“Butoh favors the lower body…it uses the concentrated stillness and distillation common to

Japanese classical theater dance…extraordinary physical control and concentration.”180 The

impact of Sankai Juku was so monumental that the next year, Kazuo Ohno, one of the pioneers

of Butoh, was invited to perform at the Joyce Theater and another young Butoh dance group,

Muteki Sha, made their American debut at the Asia Society. After their performances, Kisselgoff

stated Butoh’s general principles as “The concept of metamorphosis and transcendence –

visualized through the human body – is crucial again, as is the use of the grotesque and a

distillation of energy to convey a heightened emotional state.”181

This definition was re-written by other critics. Margarett Loke said that “it sets out to

assault the senses. The hallmarks of this theater of protest include full body paint (white or dark

or gold), near or complete nudity, shaved heads, grotesque costumes, clawed hands, rolled-up

eyes and mouths opened in silent screams.”182 In 1987, photographs of Butoh dancers by Ethan

Hoffman were exhibited at New York’s Burden Gallery. In this exhibition, the focus was put

on the founders of Butoh, Hijikata and Ohno, and Butoh was introduced as having the

characteristics of “subversiveness.”183 After Ohno’s performance, Jennifer Dunning introduced

Butoh as a dance form that “seeks simply to turn away from the techniques of traditional

Japanese and Western modern dance and look inward. Butoh is grounded in the life of the

179 Stephen Holden, “A month of Summerfare from Bach to Zarzuela,” The New York Times 13

July 1984: Late City Final Edition, Section C: 1.

180 Kisselgoff 1984: C15.

181 Anna Kisselgoff, “The Dance: Montreal Festival,” The New York Times 23 Sep.1985: Late City Final Edition, Section C: 17.

182 Margarett Loke, “Butoh: Dance of Darkness,” The New York Times 1 Nov. 1987: Late City Final Edition, Section 6: 41.

183 Ibid.

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mind and memory and in the personal ‘biographies’ that exist within a universal history.”184

Because the definitions of Butoh were continuously modified and expanded, they enveloped

Eiko and Koma and identified them as Butoh dancers.

In the same year that Sankai Juku first performed, Eiko and Koma also performed Elegy

and Grain at ADF. While Eiko and Koma received a commission as resident New York artists,

reviews of their work established a link with Sankai Juku’s Butoh. In The New York Times,

Kisselgoff wrote:

With sustained and slowly changing images of inexorable pain on the threshold of ecstasy, a strange ability to identify the grotesque with the beautiful, their startling sexuality and nudity and the use of allegories identified with nature, both pieces now reveal the origin of Eiko’s and Koma’s aesthetic. This is the Japanese Butoh movement in dance, exemplified recently by the Sankai Juku group. Tatsumi Hijikata, the father of the movement, headed a company in which Eiko and Koma once performed… There is a refinement about Eiko and Koma’s work, however, that is not found among the others. This is disturbingly true even when their sexual images are brutal, as in ’Grain,’ seen previously in New York, and whose rice-planting fertility rite finds a counterpart in a violent sexual encounter.185

On one hand, Kisselgoff acknowledged the originality of Eiko and Koma; but, on the

other hand, she located them in the same genre as Butoh. Because of the fact that Eiko and

Koma once studied with the founders of Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, performance

characteristics, such as “sustained and slowly changing images,” “grotesque with the beautiful,”

and “allegories identified with nature” became the link to connect Sankai Juku and Eiko and

Koma. Kisselgoff further connected them.

Butoh could give us the creation of the world after a cataclysm – Eiko and Koma or Sankai Juku made a body resemble matter that changed organically into more human form… Butoh likes to start out in the primeval ooze and, within its highly cyclical aura, suggest we will wind up there again. The creation of the world, through metamorphosis and transcendence, is the key Butoh theme.186

184 Jennifer Dunning, “Birth of Butoh Recalled by Founder,” The New York Times 20 Nov. 1985:

Late City Final Edition, Section C: 27.

185 Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance: Eiko and Koma in a Durham Premiere,” The New York Times 24 Jun. 1984: Late City Final Edition, Section 1; Part 2: 46.

186 Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance View; Transformation Comes Naturally to Mummenschanz,” The

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Thus Eiko and Koma were located within this flexible concept of Butoh. American

knowledge of Butoh changed how Eiko and Koma were viewed. When Eiko and Koma first

arrived in the U.S. they identified themselves as “avant-garde dancers in a Japanese manner,”

and American reviewers used this quote when discussing them. However, as they increased

their performing presence in the U.S., reviewers began to consider them as members of the

avant-garde dance movement in America while simultaneously separating them by praising their

dance as “original.” But, with the arrival of Japanese Butoh dancers their association with

Butoh was entrenched.

Eiko and Koma vigorously challenged this categorization. According to Eiko, in 1985

they sent letters to critics and presenters claiming they were not Butoh dancers. In their

letters Eiko and Koma explained the values and meanings that the term Butoh has, and expressed

their quest for individual values, while acknowledging the similarity of their dance with Butoh.

One letter reads:

In English the term “Butoh” has no historical meaning to the general audience, it gives no explanation other than the fact that it is foreign. Since we started to work as Eiko & Koma in 1971, we have never billed ourselves as “Butoh,” not in Japan, Europe nor in America. We have always given credit to two wonderful dancers we studied with, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, who started calling themselves Butoh dancers in the early ‘60s. We respect them as strong, genuine artists and feel fortunate to have studied with them. However, we feel just as indebted to our German teacher as well as other performers we have seen and other teachers we have studied with.187

Allowing people to call them “Butoh” dancers meant complying with Butoh’s history,

heritage and hierarchy which also meant “worshipping” them.188 They moved out from

Hijikata’s studio partly because they were against the traditional system that allowed one-person

rule. Using Butoh, therefore, meant for them to go back to the system they were against.

New York Times 4 May. 1986: Late City Final Edition, Section 2: 24.

187 Eiko and Koma’s note to presenters.

188 Eiko 2006.

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They were also aware of the different meanings that Butoh projected in the U.S. As

written in their letter, for Eiko and Koma, Butoh in the U.S. was equated with “foreign.”

Although critics and reviewers began to research Butoh (as seen in Anna Kisselgoff’s and

Jennifer Dunning’s articles about Butoh in 1984 and 1985) Eiko and Koma were afraid that

many audiences would judge Butoh only as a foreign dance.189 Consequently their dance

would only have those connotations too. When they first arrived, U.S. reviewers recognized

Eastern and Western influences on Eiko and Koma’s dance, as seen in the articles by Deborah

Jowitt and Jack Anderson.190 Labeling their dance simply as “Butoh” would detach their

audiences from the genuine experience of Eiko and Koma’s performance.

Eiko and Koma strove for individual value and the assessment of individual viewers. In

the letter, they said:

Many people may think the outcome of our work looks like Butoh, this we do not deny. We, by all means do not think of ourselves as new or original in what we do. We are, however, individualists belonging to no party, responsible only for what we do. We would like to present our work as such and not as a part or example of something like Butoh, which we feel may draw an audience of people curious about an exotic oddity or with a scholarly interest in finding out “What is Butoh.” In our work we question our own and the audience members’ individual concerns. This questioning creates a direct relationship between individuals so that if they dislike us, they dislike us and not Butoh.191

They made it clear that their distance from Butoh was not because of their uniqueness,

but because of the possibility that their dance would be limited as Butoh. Eiko once talked

about this experience. In a discussion following one of their performances, the audiences was

189 Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance View Japanese Avant-Garde Dance Is Darkly Erotic," and Jennifer

Dunning, “Birth of Butoh Recalled by Founder.”

190 Jowitt reviewed White Dance and said, “You can see in the sparseness and fastidious precision of “White Dance” the influence of Japanese tradition. It’s also possible to detect slight hints of an influence from German and American modern dance,” in “In Their Dance No Wind Blows,” The Village Voice 9 Aug. 1976: Dance. Anderson described the work as “a curious admixture of Eastern contemplation and Western expressionism” in “New York Newsletter,” Dancing Times London, Nov. 1977: 87-88.

191 Eiko and Koma’s note to presenters.

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so eager to know about Butoh that Eiko could not talk about their performance.192 Butoh

derailed attention from their work, redirecting it to Butoh itself. For Eiko and Koma, Butoh

was “the disturbance.”193 Butoh widened the distance between audiences and their works.

Butoh also meant a strictly taught, codified dance technique, which Eiko and Koma did

not conform to. While they admitted that their movements might be similar to those of Butoh

dancers, they did not consider their movements “technique.”194 The similarity, Eiko assumed,

derived from post-war culture, which affected various aspects of life for the youth in this period.

Consequently it created common characteristics in their body movements.195 While Tatsumi

Hijikata, in his later years, focused on developing techniques, Eiko and Koma’s dance came

from their social and political backgrounds. They were afraid that the perceived connection

between their work and Butoh made people see their movement as a derivative of a codified

technique. In the last paragraph of the letter, they said:

We’ve lived in New York since 1976 and periodically have taught workshops we call “Delicious Movement.” We are not qualified to develop or protect any particular technique or heritage, “Delicious Movement” is designed to be an occasion to share what little we know and not to teach the Butoh technique.196

Eiko and Koma attempted to protect themselves against incorrect expectations that

participants might have had. If the audiences considered them to be Butoh dancers, they might

think that Eiko and Koma were teaching Butoh technique. On their website, they clarify that

they do not teach vocabulary but encourage the participants “to acquire personal taste and

flexible discipline to suit their own moving body.”197

192 Eiko 2006.

193 Ibid.

194 Ibid.

195 Ibid.

196 Eiko and Koma’s note to presenters.

197 Eiko and Koma’s Official Website.

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The effect of Eiko and Koma’s attempt to deny the labeling of Butoh was successful, and

it began to appear in the press biographies and reviews written by dance critics in America.

While the critics referred to Hijikata and Ohno as influences upon Eiko and Koma, the use of the

term Butoh for Eiko and Koma was deliberately avoided. In Fifty Contemporary

Choreographers, Robert Greskovic honestly said, “No mention is made of Butoh, even though

this form of Japanese ‘new’ dance is closely associated with both Hijikata and Ohno, who are

sometimes thought of as the founders of Butoh.”198 In the non-dance specific journal, Current

Biography, the distinction between Butoh and Eiko and Koma was clearly defined when the

writer, Hope Tarullo, said, “Although their work is rooted in Butoh, it has none of Butoh’s

apocalyptic overtones; it is neither pessimistic nor optimistic.”199 Yet in Japan, where Eiko and

Koma’s dance is not as well-known as in the U.S., they are introduced within the category of

Butoh, as evidenced in a book, Buto Butoh Taizen: Ankoku To Hikari no Okoku (Complete

Butoh: Realm of Black and Light) by Hiromi Harada.200 While Eiko and Koma’s response to

the labeling of Butoh represents the discrepancies between artists’ recognition of themselves and

that of the viewers, it also raises an issue that resides in creating a genre. Philosopher Kendall

Walton argues that one of the benefits of categorization is to find the best value of the artwork,

which is otherwise hidden, in his essay “Categories of Art.”201 According to him, the best value

is given by the people who categorize – reviewers and critics and not by the viewers. Artists of

the post-war era in the U.S. strove to refuse any unified way of perceiving art by claiming their

own dance values, or, by making works that allowed an individual to have his own perspectives.

Freedom was given to the viewers to appreciate the work in original ways and simple

categorization was made impossible. As Roger Copeland says, “There are, after all, an almost

198 Greskovic 97.

199 Hope Tarullo, “Eiko and Koma, Dancers and Choreographers,” Current Biography Vol. 64, No. 5. May 2003: 21-24.

200 Tokyo, Gendai Shokan: 2004.

201 Kendall L. Walton, “Categories of Art,” The Philosophical Review Vol. 79, No. 3. Jul. 1970: 334-367. 15 May. 2006 <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108%28197007%2979%3A3%3C334%3ACOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5342>

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unlimited number of ways in which individual dancers might be classified.”202 Copeland

suggests that finding commonalities is a possible way to classify a genre while also recognizing

the difficulty of deciding “which sets of shared characteristics constitute genre.”203

Calling Eiko and Koma’s work “Butoh” may stabilize one way to perceive their works.

But, it is not an appropriate strategy for understanding their work. While examining all the

multiple ways to classify Eiko and Koma’s work is beyond the scope of this thesis, the resistance

by Eiko and Koma towards labeling revealed their strong personal artistic identification and the

larger issue of classification within the dance world.

202 Qtd. in Shu-Lan Miranda Ni, The Development of a Genre: Pina Bausch and Late Twentieth-

century Dance Theater Diss. Texas Tech University, 2002: 226.

203 Ibid.

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CHAPTER 8.

CHANGING MEDIUM – VIDEO WORK: LAMENT

For Eiko and Koma the changing identifications from Japanese avant-garde to American

avant-garde to original, to Butoh indicated the evolution and progression of their performances

under changing social circumstances. In their struggle to keep themselves as independent

dancers despite the discrepancies between their personal perceptions and public recognition, they

continued to make dance works. After Grain (1983), they created Beam (1983), Night Tide

(1984), Elegy (1984), Thirst (1985), and The River (1986). They also made videodance works,

which included Tentacle (1983), Wallow (1984), and Bone Dream (1985). During these years

two important life events occurred: marriage and childbirth. In 1984, they were married and in

1985 Eiko gave birth to her first son, Yuta. These events influenced their artistry and gave

them inspiration in creating stage works and in their video work.

As Eiko and Koma continued to move towards more depth in their works, American

society was moving towards peace and stability. After the social movements in the 1960s and

1970s, many sought inner contentment rather than societal change. Finding peace in a family

and quality of life was valued. The “Baby Boomer” generation reached adulthood, triggering

the large population growth that became the force for corporate business under Reaganomics.

In corporations and society, people gained more moderate attitudes towards people of different

races and sexual orientations, and this expanded to include and encourage multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism was seen in the American dance world as well, and beginning in the 1980s,

many foreign companies toured the U.S., celebrating the multi-nationality of dance.

The growing interest in nature, issues of the natural environment and ecology became

social interests, acknowledging that human beings are dependent upon and influence nature. Its

preservation, restoration, and improvement affected society and each individual, a realization

that was expressed on the personal level when more people became concerned with individual

health. Sports activities, consumption of healthy food, and spiritual enrichment attracted

attention to the Asian practice of yoga, Tai-chi, Kung Fu and meditation.

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Current social issues reflected on dance practices and the dance world flourished as a

multicultural and multidisciplinary field, as European Dance Theater, Butoh, and folk and

national dances from Asia were introduced to American audiences. The production of the

Hollywood feature film, White Nights (1985) was symbolic, unsettling the dance hierarchy, since

the film contrasted Mikhail Baryshnikov’s “classical ballet technique with the tap dancing of a

black dancer, Gregory Hines.”204 The film emphasized the equal significance of concert dance

and social/street dance that represented economic and racial differences as well. In this

atmosphere the barriers between high-art and low-art began to be questioned and social dances,

such as ballroom and club dancing, were brought to the concert stage. The arrival of Tango

Argentino in 1985 highlighted the artistry of social dance, while revealing the changing nature of

the dance form.205 Other social dances, such as salsa and hip-hop, were developing rapidly.

With the launching of MTV, street dance forms were commercialized, popularized, and spread

rapidly throughout the world. The new home devices like the VCR and walkman also added to

the speed of the popularization of American music and dance. Concurrently, television helped

concert dance to be recognized and avant-garde dancers in the 1960s and 1970s had their own

television series, Alive from Off-Center, co-produced by KCTA/Minneapolis-St Paul and the

Walker Art Center.

The use of media, particularly video, led to the advent of a new hybrid form of dance:

videodance. Dancers choreographed works specifically for film and expressed their aesthetic in

the styles of camera-work and editing they chose.206 As video became more available to

consumers, artists experimented with the device as a source of “subject matter and stylistic

devices,” that expanded the potential of both dance and video in such a way that it contributed to

204 Susan Au, Ballet & Modern Dance New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1988, 192.

205 Tango Argentino created by Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli, was the tango revue that came to City Center in New York in June 1985 following the opening in Paris.

206 Douglas Rosenberg defines videodance as “work made for the camera using the contemporary medium and practices of video technology” (Douglas Rosenberg, “Video Space: A Site for Choreography,” Leonardo Vol. 33, No. 4 2000: 277, 15 May. 2006 <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0024-094X%282000%2933%3A4%3C275%3AVSASFC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P>). It was born in the history of “dance for the camera,” pioneered by Maya Deren.

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the creation of a new art form.207 Douglas Rosenberg emphasizes the nature of the autonomous

status of videodance because “the representation of that dancing is filtered through the

compositional and esthetic strategies of the camera operator or director and, at a later point,

through the editing process. It is a work of art we are viewing within which dance is the focus,

though the rigors of time, gravity, geography and the performers’ physical limitations are

suspended in a void or virtual space.”208 Videodance can be seen as a collaborative product,

reflecting each artist’s aesthetics and choices.

Between 1983 and 1988 Eiko and Koma made several videodance works. For each,

they choreographed, designed the space, chose the costumes and music, and were “hands-on”

involved in the videography and editing. Their video works are yet one more powerful

statement of their aesthetic visions and philosophies. In 1985, Eiko and Koma created Lament.

This was their third videodance work, following Tentacle and Bone Dream. The first two

works were experimental pieces, posing a question to the American modern dance world.

At that time, dancers such as Alvin Ailey created dance pieces in which dancers jumped from right to left. By watching those energetic dances, I thought there should be other type of dances. For example, just by watching tentacles of octopus, though they don’t go right to left, they kind of look like a dance. Also, if you look at fish fins for a long time, they kind of started to look like a dance.209

As Koma expressed it, long shots on close-ups of body parts became a signature motif in

Tentacle and Bone Dream. But it was with Lament that close-ups are used skillfully and

meaningfully. Lament later became the first piece they chose to be included in their

compilation DVD, Media Dance (2006). Lament was filmed in July, 1985 at the Triplex

Theatre in New York by James Byrne, and edited by Byrne, Eiko, and Koma. Eiko and Koma

kept everything minimal as they danced naked in shallow water with slow movements. As Eiko

states in their biographical DVD, “I fantasized being a dancer only needs a body and nothing

207 Noël Carroll qtd. in Douglas Rosenberg, “Video Space: A Site for Choreography” Leonardo

Vol. 33, No. 4 2000: 276, 15 May. 2006 <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0024-094X%282000%2933%3A4%3C275%3AVSASFC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P>

208 Ibid., 277.

209 Koma 2006.

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else. I thought that would be the least materialistic way of living.”210 Lament clearly reveals

their ideas about what dance is. In this seven-minute video, Eiko and Koma are nude. Set in

water, the empty black background contrasts with Eiko and Koma’s beautiful moving bodies,

which create a moving landscape. As Roland Barthes discusses the beauty of photographs in

his terms of the “habitable,”211 Eiko and Koma’s image of bodies can be examined in the same

way. For Barthes, photographs of landscapes must be habitable, not visitable. He states they

should not be extravagant or practical, but need to make him feel as if he was certain of having

been there or of going there. Barthes quotes Freud’s notion of the maternal body to discuss

what habitable is. In the habitable landscape “one can say with so much certainty that one has

already been there.”212 While Barthes does not concretize what kind of landscape photography

can be habitable, it is possible to draw a hint from words expressed by Frank Stella, who was

also interested in habitable landscape in the field of architecture. Stella said in his article in

1992 titled “Critique of Architecture:”

Freud said the mother's body is a primal landscape. It's a good guess that our attempts to create a habitable landscape express our wish to recreate the primal landscape. For us, architecture is the tool for shaping a habitable landscape. The desire to be independent of the mother's body and the urge to master it have altered our initial vision of the habitable landscape. That is to say, these feelings, shaped by biology and gravity which commit us to an upright and erect posture, have obscured some very necessary goals of architecture. What I have to say today is simply an attempt to bring to our attention the value of the romantic, fanciful, organic architecture of the past and to suggest that technology can do something positive to improve our now barely habitable landscape.213 Stella criticized architectures of “upright and erect postures,” and proposed the primal

landscape which is relaxed and human-like, “romantic, fanciful, [and] organic.” Eiko and

210 Eiko in My Parents: Eiko & Koma. Dir. Eiko and Koma Otake, DVD, Eiko and Koma, 2004.

211 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography translated by Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 39.

212 Qtd. in Barthes 40.

213 Cited in Schulze Franz, “Frank Stella as Architect,” Art in America Jun. 2000, 22 Jun. 2007 <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_6_88/ai_62685215/pg_3>

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Koma actualized the habitable landscape in Lament with their body movements, and the filming

technology – the shots composed by camera works and editing.

Eiko and Koma’s nudity depicts the contour and texture of body and skin, and their slow

movements stimulate the viewer’s imagination. In the beginning, an image appears on the

screen in a shape like a peach. A few seconds later, it is revealed as Eiko’s back. Her legs are

folded in front of her and the curves of her back along each side of her spine and hips

emphasizes the beauty of her body. Her back tips over on one side, into an inch or two of

gleaming water in the center of the screen – but far away from the camera. The water is

reflecting her back, making a mirror image. As she slowly unfolds her body, her spine moves,

and it looks as if she is making small continuous hills on her back. Soon, another shape appears

from the right side in an angle. It looks like a mountain slowly moving into sight. This is

Koma’s torso, which slowly falls into the water. Koma’s wet back makes his body seem alive.

Eiko and Koma deliberately avoided frontal presentation. By showing their backs to the

viewer, they transform the bodies into a landscape that changes its shape as they move.

Throughout the video, Eiko and Koma stay low, without defying gravity. They push up their

hands, with the front of their torsos floating in the water, while the camera films from a low side

point of view. They make a gesture, an attempt to stand, but fail. Eiko and Koma keep

distance, never touching each other. The movements suggest a constant struggle, yet one

without pain. Although they do not have any physical contact, they look connected through

their shared experience of struggle and space, while their nude bodies and the water keep the

landscape primal, yet the movements express life-like qualities. Eiko talks about what their

body signified in Lament after the 2006 screening at Wesleyan University:

The beauty of body and life of the body is clearly visible. In these days, you hardly see the naked rump on the huge screen. Well various artists do, as a shock method, but I don’t think there are many pieces from which you really feel that the body is the place where life resides.214

214 Eiko 2006.

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The life they injected in their bodies kept their bodies from being either extravagant or practical.

The curves of their backs and slowl changes created a vision of a natural landscape – the image

of “habitable” body. (Video 3)

Video 3 Excerpt from Lament. Conceived and performed by Eiko and Koma. Eiko and Koma: Media Dance. DVD. 1985. Eiko and Koma’s personal archive.

While Eiko and Koma move in a low space, the camera also is held low, at the same

height. The shots keep the “natural angle,” which is “found along the central axis of the

subject” or “nearer to the center of the body.”215 Eiko and Koma are not filmed from above,

denying the audience an overhead view. Nor are they filmed from below, denying the viewer

an upward view. By maintaining the natural angle, Eiko and Koma stay away from being

215 Nicholas Seare and Rod Whitaker, The Language of Film (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970) 59.

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dominant or recessive, creating comfortable and intimate relations with the audience. Eiko

talked about this:

[I]f you look at old Japanese movies, the (camera’s) eye was always placed in a low position. Japanese people slept on a futon (floor), ate at the chabudai (low dining table), and crouched down to pee. So we didn't go high up like equestrians. Japanese people in the past had these basic daily routines. Though we worked standing, other daily routines like slept, ate, and went to the bathroom were done in a low position, and infused daily life with aesthetic meaning. Like the beauty of body or when you see a kid crying, looking at him from the same height, from riding on a horse, or while walking, it makes a whole a lot difference. You miss seeing tears dropping if you look from above.216 Inspired by old Japanese movies, Eiko discovered meaning and beauty in the low position

and applied the technique to their own video work. For Koma, the low position meant seeing

things from a richer perspective. He said, “The world that beggars see and the world those who

always looks from above, are different.”217 This view point echoes his political attitudes:

So politicians nowadays, ordinary politicians don’t go to the site of war. They have to go before the war starts. Then it’s fine if they reach the conclusion after thinking by themselves. But they don’t usually do that…One cannot go (to a place) by airplane, (get there) and stay there for an hour to eat a turkey, like some countries’ presidents, that is out of the question.218

Eiko added further, by recalling the student movement:

[T]here’s a hierarchy in society like this (Eiko makes a gesture of triangle). We try to flatten it. In the past we tried, like this. (Eiko makes a gesture of making the triangle upside down) And that was revolution. But we no longer do things like that now. We are not attempting to destroy the people in the upper class, instead we are trying to flatten the triangle and meet them in the same place.219

Certainly the unusual and purposeful aesthetic of the low camera angle corresponded to

their political views and can be interpreted as a more mature and silent attempt at social

revolution than first originated in the student movement. Lament presents this in an undertone,

216 Eiko 2006.

217 Koma 2006.

218 Ibid.

219 Eiko 2006.

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with the cover of comfort and intimacy that the natural angle affords. The natural angle became

Eiko and Koma’s fundamental aesthetic throughout many of their videodance pieces.

In addition to the natural angle, Eiko and Koma maneuver the viewer with a blind field,

evoking the viewer’s imagination and emotion. Manipulating their bodies’ positions in relation

to the camera, they create a “blind field,” because the viewer never sees their genitals. Nor

does he see their facial expressions, which assist the spectator to be sympathetic to the

performer’s emotional state. With the desexualized and dehumanized bodies, Eiko and Koma

manipulate the shapes of the bodies to create a changing environment. Barthes argues that the

blind field launches the viewer’s desire beyond what it permits us to see: “not only toward ‘the

rest’ of the nakedness, not only toward the fantasy of a praxis, but toward the absolute excellence

of a being, body and soul together.”220 In Lament, the blind field launches a desire, but it

triggers a question since Eiko and Koma could transform their human bodies into a suggestion of

other forms. But the viewer knows that it is Eiko and Koma – i.e., human bodies who are

moving, and so it poses a question: what is body? The preexisting recognition of body is

shaken.

In addition to the blind field, editing allows the viewer to be imaginative, because the

body is flexible to any interpretation. Onstage, the exaggerated slowness of their movements

played this role. In videodance, the duration of the cut and close-up takes over. Duration is

“the period of time the shot seems to persist” and “[a] scene is not ‘long’ or ‘short’ because of

the number of minutes it lasts; it is long or short because of the felt length of each of those

minutes.”221 Although the actual duration of the cut is long in Lament, the cut does not seem

long because Eiko and Koma’s movements are so slow that the duration of the cut corresponds to

their movements. The cut does not interfere with the sense of duration, and the prolonged

exposure of the content draws on “viewer’s experience, memory, or imagination.”222 Eiko’s

back, first looking like a peach, slips from one image to another as the cut is long enough to elicit

220 Barthes 59.

221 Seare 43.

222 Seare 44.

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imagination. Another effect of slow-motion and close-ups is that it draws the audiences’ eyes

into the body’s detail. In a live concert dance, an audience has a choice to re-direct his/her

eyes, whereas in the videodance, the director guides sight. Film critic, Béla Balázs writes:

“Close-ups are the pictures expressing the poetic sensibility of the director. They show the

faces of things and those expressions on them which are significant because they are reflected

expressions of our own subconscious feeling.”223 In Lament, after Eiko and Koma’s mid-long

shot,224 a close-up of a flower-like creature appears: It is Eiko’s wet hand, the palm of her hand

is facing down, the fingers moderately open, and from her fourth finger, a drop of water falls.

Critic and poet Mindy Aloff described this image, “what appears to be a branch beaded with dew

is discovered to be a hand with water drops descending from it. The branch, like the pear

shape, is visually engaging but ultimately unreal.”225 The close-up draws attention not only to

Eiko’s hand and fingers, but to the drop of water. A peripheral part of her body is transformed

into something other than body and highlighted – by a drop of water. In animating a drop of

water Eiko and Koma express the aliveness of water. During this shot, Eiko’s hand moves

upward at a snail’s pace – then it suddenly falls into the water. As Balázs says, close-ups are

also high“dramatic revelations of what is really happening under the surface of appearances.”226

In Lament, two moving bodies change from one figure to the other while struggling to stand up.

When Eiko and Koma lie on their backs as they uncomfortably push down with their hands in an

attempt to stand on their feet, the water splashes. Then suddenly, the close-up of Eiko’s

beautiful non-human-looking hand appears, suspended in the air. Until then, a hand had never

stayed in the air. But, in the close-up, for ten seconds, the hand floats in mid-air as it gradually

223 Béla Balázs, “From Theory of the Film,” Film Theory and Criticism; Introductory Readings

ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York, Oxford University Press: 1974) 289.

224 The definition of the film terminology is referred to Nicholas Seare and Rod Whitaker’s The

Language of Film. The mid-long shot is “a shot that accents the environment of a passage, but that also puts the partakers of the environment into their surroundings.”

225 Mindy Aloff, “Dance,” The Nation 14 Jun. 1986: 835.

226 Balázs 289.

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moves upward. The sudden plunge into the water is shocking, surprising. Among the shots that

draw on feelings of struggle, the close-up of the hand exists as a revelation.

By means of close-up the camera in the days of the silent film revealed also the hidden mainsprings of life which we had thought we already knew so well… The camera has uncovered that cell-life of the vital issues in which all great events are ultimately conceived; for the greatest landslide is only the aggregate of the movements of single particles. A multitude of close-ups can show us the very instant in which the general is transformed into the particular. The close-up has not only widened our vision of life, it has also deepened it.227

Hands are practical and functional parts of the body used every day and are known so

well they usually command little attention. By focusing on what we know best and depicting it

as if it were an independent creature, Eiko and Koma gave it a separate life. The hand is a

living creature, covered with water drops – the necessary element of life. The drop of water

from the fourth finger looks like a tear or sweat. Given life, the hand is capable of

experiencing, illustrating mental states, such as lamentation, and a falling hand uncovers the

body’s ability to perceive and express emotions. Our body is not a single entity but the

aggregate of many different particles which are alive and capable. Attention to detail

transforms heart and emotion into each particle of body. This is “the hidden mainsprings of

life,” expressed by Eiko and Koma’s sensitivity about the depth of life. (Video 4)

227 Ibid., 288.

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Video 4 Excerpt from Lament. Conceived and performed by Eiko and Koma. Eiko and Koma: Media Dance. DVD. 1985. Eiko and Koma’s personal archive.

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CHAPTER 9.

EVOLVING ARTISTIC IDENTITY IN COLLABORATION: LAND

Eiko and Koma premiered Land in 1991 at the Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn, New

York. As a collaborative venture Land marked a shift towards being more narrative-oriented.

Until the debut of Land they had not performed with other artists. In this piece, however, they

shared the stage with two musicians from Taos Pueblo, Robert Mirabal and Reynaldo Lujan,

who sang and played the flute, shakers, and drum. The background of the stage was decorated

with a painting by New York/Taos artist, Sandra Lerner. At various times, one of Eiko and

Koma’s sons -- Yuta or Shin -- also performed in Land.228 As in their other works, new aspects

of Eiko and Koma’s lives as well as their evolving artistic identity informed the work.

A few years before, Eiko and Koma had gone to Taos Pueblo, the northern-most Pueblo

in the north-central region of New Mexico. They already had the idea to make a work called

Land but lacked any concrete ideas for the piece. In the late 1980s, in exploring the relation

between nature and Native American culture in Taos, they found a oneness that existed through

the continuum of history. This became their inspiration. For Koma, Taos was a beautiful and

noteworthy example of American history. “People say this [America] is the New World, but

land is very old. In Taos, I sensed [the history of America] for the first time.”229 In Taos the

land is covered with ocher-colored sand and Koma said: “The texture of the land there is

different, like newborn babies' skins. You want to touch it.”230 In this arid land, Eiko was

impressed by the flowers on fruit trees that grew in the only strip of land where they could

survive along the side of Rio Pueblo (Red Willow Creek). These flowers reminded her of a

story from childhood: “How for each tree to bloom is a lot of effort. How the roots find the

228 Eiko and Koma’s second son, Shin also performed in later years.

229 Koma qtd. in William Harris, "A Rare Talent For Spotting Fresh Talent," The New York Times 23 Oct. 1994: H35.

230 Ibid.

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water.”231 The flowers, however, bloomed beautifully, showing no effort, as if enjoying their

fate, and they seemed no different from human beings – which embodies her egalitarian and

ancestral philosophy. “We don’t have to be human beings…I (just) happened to be a

human.”232 The flowers were plants by mere chance. Koma added, “Mountains, trees, and

flowers, they know that they are beautiful. But that beauty, they don’t make by themselves.

They inherited from their ancestors.”233 This anthropomorphosis of nature also reflects the traces

of stories in Kojiki, the oldest book in Japan. Stories in Kojiki portray the creation of earth

equated with deities which metamorphose from/to various elements in nature. Folktales in

Japan originate with Kojiki. Provoked by the landscape in Taos, Eiko remembered a folktale

that described the characteristics of mountains: “Some mountains are males, and others are

females. These mountains make love at night and they separate before we know what

happened.”234 The images in Taos fused with beliefs and Eiko and Koma’s ancestoral stories

became the fundamental concept for Land. Land begins with Eiko and Koma depicted as

mountains in the desert. They are far apart, put their faces down on the floor. They seemed to

merge with the landscape because the color of their costumes was the same claylike shade of the

sand spread over the stage floor. They slithered towards each other. Eiko, lying next to

Koma, her back to the audiences, her slightly raised buttocks looked like two small mounds of

sand. Then as Eiko gradually spread her body over Koma’s, her breasts were revealed. After

she passed over Koma, he then pressed his face into Eiko’s breasts as if returning her affection.

Then they separated. The sound of a drum, beating regularly, represented the mountains’

heartbeat and then, in the second scene, as if symbolizing the birth of another mountain, their

young son Yuta appeared on stage, his back to the audiences, very slowly walking upstage.

Then he remained still. (Video 5)

231 Eiko in “Land,” Eiko and Koma. Oregon, WI: ADF Video, 1995.

232 Ibid.

233 Ibid.

234 Eiko in “Land.”

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Video 5 Excerpt from Land. Eiko and Koma. Oregon, WI: ADF Video, 1995.

Another clear mythological reference depicted the killing of Mother Earth in scene three.

Japanese myths contain many stories in which the earth is equated with a female deity, whose

dead body produced precious crops. Eiko emerged as an evil figure, clawing the dirt and

clutching at dead branches. Then she stood slowly, opened her arms and bent her elbows and

moved her arms behind her torso, as the drum beat underscored her unvoiced singing and her

agony. She sat down and pushed her body aggressively on her back, going to the far corner of

the stage. Slowly her anger was soothed and she quietly stood up. Then abruptly, Koma

rushed over from stage left and assaulted Eiko, representing the killing of the earth for food.

In addition to the continuous interest in the expression of fuhdo in their dance, succeeding

from Grain, Land also marked Eiko and Koma’s new investigation of collaborative work. In

Taos, they met two young men who became their collaborators. Robert Mirabal and Reynaldo

Lujan are Native American musicians as well as farmers. Mirabal was raised by his mother and

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grandparents, and spoke his native language, Tiwa, at home. Since his youth, he played the

clarinet, saxophone, piano, and drums, but found his true musical voice in the traditional Native

American flute.235 Reynaldo Lujan collaborated with Mirabal on many different projects.

When Eiko and Koma first met Mirabal in Taos they “fell in love with him”236 and

visited him in Taos a couple of times before the “work-in-progress” premier of Land in Japan (c.

1990) when Eiko and Koma, and Mirabal traveled to Japan together. Although Mirabal and

Lujan are skilled traditional Native American musicians, Eiko and Koma claim they collaborated

with them not because of their musical talent or skills, but because of who they are. William

Harris wrote about their encounter with Mirabal “who shares their love of nature and thinks

about life in a manner similar to their own, as an accumulation of real and imagined experiences,

linking all people and places in a continuum.”237 This worldview238 was deeply influenced by

the pueblo’s culture that values ancestral legacies. These legacies are kept in their rituals which

strongly reveal their idea of fuhdo. As the ethnologist Sylvia Rodríguez writes, “pueblo ritual

and worldview are conceptually fixed on the eternal rhythms of nature.”239 Among pueblos, the

Taos tribes are secretive and conservative, retaining their traditions, relatively unaffected.

Many pueblos suffered structural changes after the 1900s because of governmental pressure to

modernize pueblos, and suffered because of the destructive tourist curiosity about ethnic

minorities. This caused an even greater distinction to develop between the secular and sacred.

235 He met the renowned Native American flute player, R. Carlos Nakai, who greatly inspired him. Mirabal recorded his first independent album in 1988, featuring traditional music of Native American flutes and percussion. He then earned a contract with Warner Western and, later, Silver Wave Records.

236 Eiko 1998: 92.

237 Eiko qtd. in Harris H35.

238 I use “worldview” defined by ethnologist Alfonso Ortiz. According to Ortiz, “A world view provides a people with a structure of reality; it defines, classifies, and orders the “really real” in the universe, in their world, and in their society” and world view is not religion (Alfonso Ortiz, “Ritual Drama and the Pueblo World View,” New Perspectives on the Pueblos ed. Alfonso Ortiz, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972) 136).

239 Sylvia Rodriguez, “The Taos Pueblo Matachines: Ritual Symbolism and Interethnic Relations,” American Ethnologist Vol. 18, No. 2. May, 1991, 235-236. 20 May 2007 <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0094-0496%28199105%2918%3A2%3C234%3ATTPMRS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E>

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Taos, however, did not suffer as many radical changes and its people managed to keep their

rituals contextualized within their lives. Some of the rituals in Taos include Deer, Snake, and

Turtle dances enacted to bring rains, and to pray for animal fertility and thanksgiving.240

Ceremonial dances are related to “a general identification with nature. As the ceremonial cycle

is carried out, the natural forces in turn will carry out their functions – the rain will come, the

crops will be plentiful, and the animals will increase. If it is not done, the end of the world will

come.”241 These dances function to celebrate and respect the animals. Pueblos in general

have a conception of causality in which everything, including living and nonliving things, have a

place in the cosmos and everything exists within a structured chain. Therefore humans,

animals, nature, and spirits are interchangeable.242 In one section of Land Koma appeared with

a head of a buffalo. He carried it, mauled it, then nuzzled it. Eiko was lying down at the side

of the buffalo, then Koma took her leg and dragged her across the stage, and she stood up as if

reborn. While Eiko and Koma did not imitate the pueblo ritual dance they referenced a ritual

that distilled a worldview with which they sympathized.

Eiko and Koma performed with both of their sons, Yuta and Shin, for the first time in

Land in 1991. Yuta had performed it for the first years, then Shin took over later as the older

Yuta grew taller. They continued to collaborate with Mirabal and Lujan because of their

emotional attachments rather than for their technical skills, and, they decided to work with their

sons because of the psychological and emotional ties. Eiko said:

We were in Mexico and I left [my] kids and I was missing them… And in the Mexican landscape I saw kids and the landscape for kids [by which she means, where the children played] They had the same skin shade of the land. Native people…And I told Koma, “Can’t just be Eiko and Koma in Land.”243

240 Donald N. Brown, “The Development of Taos Dance” Ethnomusicology Vol. 5, No. 1. Jan.

1961, 33. 20 May 2007 <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0014-1836%28196101%295%3A1%3C33%3ATDOTD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J>

241 Brown 36.

242 Ortiz 143.

243 Eiko 1998: 96.

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Yuta, who likes helping his parents, accepted the request. Both sons performed in the following

piece, Wind (1993). While these two pieces did not make Yuta and Shin enthusiastic about

dancing, the collaboration started a kind of family ritual where parents and children respected

each other. Koma talked about how he began to see his children after the making of Land:

We (Eiko and Koma) happen to be together. Me and Eiko on the stage and in this life too, but kids I think the same things. I think not a single parent can claim, “They are my own kids. Our own kids.” I don’t think they can say that. They happen to be our kids. You cannot own them. You cannot control them.244

For Yuta and Shin, it was the direct experience and knowledge about how they were raised.

They saw their parents work in theater, where “nobody’s making money” and where everybody

puts in considerable time and effort, caring about the details of lighting, putting cables, and

taping. As Koma observed:

I think they understand when you say not only dancer and choreographer are creating dance, [they] are creating art. Everybody support. Making serene moment.245

Although Yuta and Shin have not performed together with their parents since Wind, they have

continued to support their parents in their artistic endeavors. Shin, in fact, made a biographical

DVD about Eiko and Koma, My Parents: Eiko and Koma, in 2005. For the performance of

Death Poem in summer 2005, both sons helped design and set the stage, do movement checks,

and other miscellaneous tasks.

Land was the debut of Eiko and Koma’s collaborative venture that manifested their views

about nature and humans interrelating across a greater span of time. And by including their

sons, Yuta and Shin, the piece also became a concrete manifestation of this generational

Zeitgeist. While using Taos rituals that reflect a symbolic world, Eiko and Koma deliberately

avoided imitating, or, bringing the ritual itself to the stage. They appropriated culturally-

specific myths and rituals, but altered them to fit their own style so that audiences could

(re)discover the nature/human interdependence and not objectify it as folk dance. Their goal

was not to “dignify” an Indian ritual or Japanese myths – but to illustrate beliefs about the multi-

244 Koma 1998: 97.

245 Ibid., 98.

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generational interconnectedness of all life to nature. Theater was the space where each

individual in the audience could participate by witnessing a part of the “religious cosmos in

which they can feel spiritually at ease.”246

246 Sonoda 33.

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CHAPTER 10.

A SYNTHESIS OF PHILOSOPHY AND AESTHETICS

– CAMBODIAN STORIES

Cambodian Stories (2006) signified a major change in Eiko and Koma’s artistic career.

It was their most recent collaborative work with eleven young painters from Reyum Institute of

Art and Culture in Phnum Penh, Cambodia (the “Reyum Collectives”). Touring eleven cities in

the U.S. in 2006, Cambodian Stories was made on a grand scale, incorporating dancing, multi-

disciplinary, multi-cultural, multi-generational dancing, action painting, theater, and biography;

it was a social work as well, and a traveling art exhibition and market that sold the students’ art

works, earning $37,000 to make building improvements and keep the school running. Because

of polyvocal meanings, functions and visions, Cambodian Stories offered new possibilities and

ways of making dances while acknowledging the existence and individual value of human

beings, connecting people in a harmonious way.

The concept of Cambodian Stories represented the political ideology shared by Ly

Daravuth and Ingrid Muan, founders of the Reyum Institute of Art and Culture. Ly, who saw

Eiko and Koma perform Offering at St. Marks Dance Space in New York City in June 2003

invited them to visit the Reyum school in Phnom Penh. Daravuth Ly lived through the

Cambodian Civil War in the 1970s led by Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge. In 1971 when he was

eleven-years-old, he was relocated to a refugee camp in Thailand where he spent three years

before emigrating to France for asylum. He studied art history and visual arts at the Sorbonne,

returning to Cambodia in 1995. By the time he came back to Cambodia, the nation had been

devastated by the next Civil War that lasted until 1992. Having witnessed his native country’s

unfortunate fate of being controlled by dictators, Ron Nol and Pol Pot, who initially had been

abetted by the U.S. and other western allies, he had strong questions about violence and injustice.

This same opinion was also held by Eiko and Koma who had seen Japan’s devastation and

struggle in rebuilding. Ly’s education in art at the Sorbonne in the late 1970’s gave him insight

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about how he might be able, in some way, to work towards peace and justice through art. His

thoughts and hopes matched with Ingrid Muan’s.

Muan was an American artist and art historian who wrote her Ph. D. dissertation on

Cambodian Art, Citing Angkor: The "Cambodian Arts" in the Age of Restoration, 1918—2000

(Columbia University).247 Her researches began when she realized that work on Cambodian

contemporary art is dismissed from the current trend of Southeast Asian modern art researches

by Westerners.248 Although many scholars embark on research on Southeast Asian modern art,

they emphasize the famous and popular stylistic renderings of “world heritages.” Having seen

the present academic situation in which much of contemporary Cambodian art has been defined

as “modernized” (that is from the West’s point of view), with no attempts to uncover or

acknowledge Cambodia’s cultural specificity – Muan became anxious about the future path of

Cambodian art. In an important observation footnote in her dissertation, she writes:

I am arguing against recent projects that seem to suggest that “modern art” (taken in the stylistic sense of looking-(belatedly)-like-Western modernism) can be found everywhere and that the conventional armature of named “artists” and coherent “bodies of work” can simply be exported unproblematically. In such accounts, the particular trajectory of Western modernism towards abstraction has been generalized into “the” aesthetic response to modernization rather than one possible, culturally specific response.”249

Her dissertation focused on uncovering Cambodian contemporary art’s cultural uniqueness and

meanings.

Together Ly and Muan founded the Reyum Institute of Art and Culture in Phnum Penh in

1998. It was the first private school in Cambodia, serving also as a non-profit art gallery. The

Reyum Institute is one small but definite step that actualized Ly’s and Muan’s grand hopes.

Both believed that art helped instill individual value in the person, which can be expanded

through sharing. This basic principle gave the school both intrinsic and practical value

contributing “to coexistence – if not reconciliation – in Cambodia, by ‘restoring and enhancing

247 Ingrid Muan (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2001).

248 Ibid., Introduction 1.

249 Ibid., Introduction 7.

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individual and collective capacities for intellectual, social, emotional, creative and spiritual

life.’”250 The school’s institutional culture offers a holistic approach to Cambodian art.

Through research and technical art training in drawing and painting, the students learn both

traditional and contemporary Cambodian art. Works by the students are publicized and

presented to the public to foster dialogues and to encourage further research and creation of art,

and the school provides the students with practical skills. It also functions as a site for

furthering and evaluating Cambodian culture, so each individual can recognize his/her own

personal and collective value.

Eiko and Koma sympathized with Ly’s and Muan’s anti-materialistic activism and

humanistic idealism. Eiko and Koma had the deepest respect for them, articulated in an

interview at the Asia Society.

Reyum is really proof of what an individual can do with the help of others. But help only comes if the individual starts something. And Daravuth, and Ingrid Muan, together they started this institution, which is quite heroic… They are the first contemporary gallery that is not for commercial purposes. It is a non-profit, contemporary gallery. They have a printing division, they have the school division, they have also a research division. This is a small organization but it has tremendous achievements. Just like any place else, if you are the first one to do anything, you are the pioneer.251

Eiko and Koma visited the Reyum School of Art and Culture and stayed there for one

month in January 2004 with the support from Ralph Samuelson of the Asian Cultural Council.

During the residency they presented their work for the students and the Reyum community.

They also gave a “Delicious Movement Workshop,” had long conversations with the community,

and toured to historical places in Cambodia. This stimulated their artistic impulses, and they

started creating Cambodian Stories.

The children at Reyum, who were poor yet still innocent and sincere, reminded Eiko and

Koma of their childhood in postwar Japan. Children came to take classes at Reyum after their

250 From the application of Ly Daravuth and Ingrid Muan to the Brandeis International Fellowship Program Recasting Reconciliation through Culture and the Arts, citing "Engaging with the Arts to Promote Coexistence," Cynthia Cohen, in Martha Minow and Antonia Chayes, eds., Imagine Coexistence: Restoring Humanity After Violent Ethnic Conflict, 2003.

251 Eiko in “Interview with Eiko and Koma,” Asia Society 3 Mar. 2006, 17 Jul. 2007 <http://www.asiasociety.org/arts/06cambodianinterview.html>

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regular school was finished at noon. Because of the shortage of governmental funding, public

schools could not operate on full day schedules. Usually their parents were at work when the

children returned home, and many children were left with unrestricted time with no supervision.

Some children were put into the sex labor-force on streets or worked in markets. Finding a

good adult model was extremely difficult. Koma was surprised to see the adults, mostly

unemployed males, on the streets, playing card games or gambling all day.252 Given this bleak

situation, the future for the younger generation looked dark. Reyum, however, offered a safe

and healthy environment for the children, where they could learn, play with others, and gain

some sense of self-esteem. Children who had lost their families even lived at the school.

However, the school facilities were an old, rusty collection of mismatched tables and

chairs. Classes were held outside because of the lack of space. Certainly they had no

computers or any technological tools to play with. Students shared the paint, tools, and even

the paper they painted on. Lacking chairs, some sat down on the ground and drew.253 Yet,

regardless of the quality of facilities and tools, the children engaged in their activities quietly and

seriously and after class, they cheerfully took their works to their teachers for critiques. Some

left the school, and others stayed to keep painting or to play with friends. They played with

rubber bands or cards, things that Eiko and Koma had also played with when they were children

in postwar Japan. These things, coupled with the students’ abilities to enjoy life in simplicity

and poverty connected Eiko and Koma’s with the reality of these Cambodian youths.

Eiko and Koma made friends through their performance-presentation, through post-

performance dialogues, their Delicious Movement Workshops, and their direct interactions with

the students. Eiko and Koma were drawn to the students’ seriousness, their patience and

receptivity. The students were keen to watch Eiko and Koma’s work, calmly with curiosity,

despite the slow and reflective performative mode. The Reyum students’ attitudes were

completely different from what they experienced in the U.S. or Japan, where students’ patience

or curiositywas transitory. In the workshop, the students listened to Eiko and Koma, followed

252 Informal conversation with Koma.

253 Description from the images in The Making of Cambodian Stories and an informal conversation with Eiko and Koma.

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their directions, and enjoyed the process. They also voiced their opinions without hesitation,

and their honesty and confidence deepened Eiko and Koma’s artistic interests Cambodian

Stories. In a momentous decision, they decided to begin a large group piece, made in

collaboration with the students.

Eiko and Koma had complex feelings about Cambodia’s fate, which had been changed

and was being manipulated by super powers. As both Japanese and Americans, Eiko and Koma

felt responsible for the destruction of the nation. Although they were not involved in World

War II, they are the childrens of generations who experienced it. During WWII, Japanese

government justified its invasion to south East Asia. The government’s rational for exploiting

the countries such as China, Vietnam and Malaysia was to create a Daitoa kyoeiken (Greater East

Asia Co-prosperity Sphere): to establish regional order, improve economic interdependence, and

foster mutual understanding of and respect to different Asian cultures. This justified invasion

contributed to the America’s involvement in the Vietnam War which caused the subsequent war

in Cambodia. Japan was able to rebuild its country because of the paradoxical principle of not

being legally able to be at war, but being legally able to provide sanctuary and bases for the

Americans. The Japanese also enjoyed the “luck” of the other countries’ wars (benefiting

economically from the Vietnam and Korean wars). Cambodia could not, and would not, be

able to rebuild without assistance from outside. Eiko and Koma felt the need to give a hand, to

make some kind of atonement for their country, and to work toward the goal of bringing equality

to people. Presenting Cambodian Stories in the U.S. would be a direct, an actual way to affect

social change through art.

Having the philosophical concept – the recognition of individual for collective

empowerment – as its foundation, the mission of Cambodian Stories was three-fold: to give

empirical and financial contributions to Reyum school and its students; to introduce present-day

Cambodia to Americans thereby allowing each to re-assess their existence; and, to show how

Eiko and Koma merged visual art with dancing in a new way.

They began the project, following a series of progressive steps. Volunteer students

would work with Eiko and Koma. Having been trained in drawing and painting, the students

could capture images. Eiko and Koma took advantage of these skills and began their

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choreography by having the students transform still images into moving ones. Koma also

directed them to paint an image of the female deity/mother each day. This itself became a

process in the movement training, since it required the physical work of building the timberwork

quickly and drawing and painting on the ground and on the wall cooperatively.254 After the

painting came another movement exercise. The students were encouraged to move in front of

the paintings as they imagined the painted deities might move.

This reflects Eiko and Koma’s notion that dancing is a moving embodiment of drawn

and/or painted figures.255 Through dancing, the students became aware of the paintings’ implied

motion. It also gave them, and the audiences, another point of view about the paintings: to

consider paintings as frozen moments of motion.

By using the action of painting as an excise for dancing and for the choreographic

process, Eiko and Koma also used it as technical and professional training for the students.256

In the performance of Cambodian Stories, the students painted two huge mother images within

an extremely limited timeframe. Eiko and Koma had them to do this, each day, as if it was a

real performance. Gradually the students gained the skills they needed to paint quickly and

professionally. In addition, Eiko and Koma requested that the students paint both traditional

and contemporary paintings, which they could sell in the U.S.257

Experientially, touring Cambodian Stories offered an invaluable exposure to world.

The studetns visited twelve cities (including a residency at the Florida State University,

254 The timberwork was a huge frame constructed onstage about one foot above the canvas on the

ground. It was made with several long logs, set out neatly in a grid, then tied together with ropes. The students laid on the logs and painted on the canvas below them. The timberwork allowed many students to work at the same time on one huge painting, without wasting the time by waiting for the paint to get dry. Because the students had to creatively move their bodies -- lying or sitting down, hunching over their torsos, balancing over each other, and walking over each other on the timberwork -- the painting, in itself, became dancing. To enhance the dynamics of their movements, Koma instructed the students to exaggerate their movements.

255 Informal conversation with Eiko and Koma

256 This is different from Jackson Pollack and later 1960’s “action painters.”

257 The students performed and sold their products. This gave them a pride as professional painters and real and seamless experiences of making and selling works as independent artists.

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Tallahassee, Florida) in the U.S. Eiko and Koma allowed the students to learn through their

experiences working outside their native country – just as Eiko and Koma did when they were

young.

The theatrical experiences for audiences were gently didactic; they witnessed the past, the

present and the future of Cambodia represented in Cambodian Stories. While there was a

suggestion of Eiko and Koma’s criticism on power and injustice, Cambodian Stories never

hinted about a pessimistic worldview.

In the opening, the Reyum students talked about their families and their dreams. Most

had many siblings and a single parent. Exposing the students’ private lives gave them an

immediate reality, while allowing the audiences to understand the repercussions Cambodians

experienced in an undeveloped and war-torn country.258 War not only sacrificed innocent

people’s lives, it affected all the following generations’ lives. The message was clear. War is

not a single event, but a lasting event that altered generations. Since Cambodian Stories was

performed in 2006, it was also an indictment of the U.S.-Iraq war, the nuclear arms races, and all

the other wars still raging across the world. However, because these young students had

dreams, the negative reality was tinged with bright hopes and aspirations.

The message was not only conveyed by the students’ introductions but by their

movements, which also portrayed the struggle. At one point, Chakreya So (the girl) and

Setheap Sorn “Peace” (the boy) crawled in the sand on the floor; they were soon joined by Eiko

and Koma as if universalizing the struggle. In another startling image, all the performers

crawled through the sand, coating their bodies; then they returned to an upright position,

enforcing positive attitudes.

In terms of painting, Cambodian Stories presented the students’ professionalism as well.

During the performance, the students both painted and danced. Because painting is their

training and profession, they did so confidently and, although none of the students had had dance

training before, after fifteen months of intensive training with Eiko and Koma, they

258 The history of modern Cambodia was deeply affected by the hegemonic and ideological wars

by the West, and Japan, prior to and during WWII; then Cambodia was invaded during the American-Vietnam conflict, which led to the devastation by Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot regime, and the Civil War.

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demonstrated their strong commitment and improved capacity. Their experience also

emphasized the concept that depth of knowledge in one artistic form can be transferred to

another form of art (and, in a larger sense, to anything). The individual’s potential ability as

presented by Cambodian Stories was enormous. In fact, two members, Chakreya and Peace,

were praised so highly that they were invited to perform again with Eiko and Koma in

Cambodian Stories Revisited at St. Marks Dance Space in 2007, and in the recreation of Grain at

American Dance Festival in 2007. They will collaborate once more for the invited performance

at the Joyce Theater in New York in 2008.

Cambodian Stories portrayed the history in Cambodia as an imaginative artistic

construction. The creation of the country is represented by painting the birth of the mother in

the beginning. The period of the mass destruction is revealed in the middle of the piece, when

all the paintings of the deities (about thirty paintings in all) literally drop to the sandy floor,

symbolizing the wars’ destruction. When the paintings were lifted again, it represented the

enduring and optimistic vision for the country. Towards the end, the students painted one more

gigantic mother figure on the cyclorama, rising to the moon, as if signaling a rebirth. All the

performers prayed for the paintings and their history (no matter what happened in the past)

because it gave meaning to their existence in the present.259 (Video 6)

259 Eiko and Koma’s political ideology and aesthetic is also manifested in a documentary DVD,

The Making of Cambodian Stories. This DVD implicitly speaks of Cambodia as a victim of imperialist ideology. The footage is ironic, in that it is colorful and cheerful. The subtitle questions the past and the present Western world’s power over the third world. With the minimal presence of Eiko and Koma, the documentary sends a message indirectly, yet powerfully. The documentary consists of six sections, starting from an introduction of Cambodia and ends with the work-in-progress performance. In the first section, the image shifts from the calm and quiet flow of the Mekong River to the historical Angkor Wat. The sunshine illuminates the majesty of the ancient site. Then into the sunshine, the soloist “Peace” walks. As with Eiko and Koma’s many other works, nature plays an important role in guiding our awareness to something that deviates from our everyday life and takes us back with a heightened sensitivity. Our perception of the river and the sunshine changes. Simultaneously, Cambodia is now transformed into a known and common country from an unknown, third world countries. In the documentary, the notion of beauty blurs Eiko and Koma’s political statement. Peace’s walking into the sunshine symbolically suggests their hope in the future of the Reyum students and more widely, the future of Cambodia. Peace then introduces the other performers with a ritualistic gesture of pouring water, and each student briefly talks about their family and dreams. Most students have big families supported by a single parent. The situation is, however, then turned into the optimistic vision of their future. The coating of optimism over negativism pervades throughout the documentary as this project is based on Eiko and Koma’s insights about what art could offer. “In its essence, culture does not recognize national boundaries. But the societies within which arts are created and presented are affected deeply by national

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They also prayed for the audiences which, in both a direct and indirect sense, assisted

them to come and perform in the U.S. The hope was that this encouraged the audiences to

recognize their individual and collective value, and to re-think beyond themselves (as individual)

and to their country (as a collective).

In an interview at the Asia Society, Eiko commented: “It [Cambodia] is a country whose

recent history was deeply affected by America, in turn, the country's history and outcome have

deep significance for Americans.”260 At the same time, triggered by more immediate desire to

assist Cambodia and the school, many people purchased the students’ art works in a small yet

direct action to rebuild Cambodia.261 Cambodian Stories allowed everyone, performers and

audiences, to engage in actions for social change, a synergy of the power traveling from one to

the other. Eiko commented: “It (Cambodian Stories) is not just helping Cambodians, but

through the collective experiences and showing [it] to audiences who share [in] that, they

celebrate human beings as collective…So, I hope that this collectiveness will be a celebration of

humanity, of the experience of being human.”262

identities and economic and political realities. Conversely, art can change these realities.” (Eiko in “Eiko and Koma’s Goal,” Cambodian Stories – An Offering of Painting and Dance Inta, Inc. Nov. 2005.)

260 Eiko in Asia Society Interview.

261 In addition to the paintings, Eiko and Koma sold a documentary DVD of Cambodian Stories,

The Making of Cambodian Stories, and a music CD they used for the performance. The sales of the students’ works, the DVDs, and the CDs amounted to $37,000. All went to the Reyum school.

262 Eiko in Asia Society.

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Video 6 Excerpt from The Making of Cambodian Stories. Directed by Eiko and Koma. 2005. Available online <http://www.eikoandkoma.org/index.php?id=1202>

Once again in Cambodian Stories Eiko and Koma created a landscape as an environment

in which the performers fit. They recreated, symbolically, the landscape of Cambodia and

connected it with nature: the entire floor was covered in sand, and female deities’ paintings hung

around the performance space, hinting at the ruins of historical Angkor Watt.263 The images

were transformed into sculptural bodies moving. Their movements, the shape of their torsos,

the way in which their arms were held, treated their bodies as expansions of the paintings and

landscape.

The signature slow-motion movement was endowed with new significance since it was

the direct animated version of paintings; and, conversely, paintings were frozen versions of

263 In fact the performance space in Cambodia was at the garden in school filled with the sand on

the ground.

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motions. At the start of Cambodian Stories, the students collectively painted an image of a

mother walking, and the painting was lifted up while the paint was still wet, giving another sense

of aliveness.

Eiko and Koma treated the movement in painting as dancing. The students painted on

the ground, on the wall, and on the cyclorama so that audiences could see them moving from

multiple angles. Their bodies became splattered with paint as they worked, which, in turn,

transformed their bodies into living paintings. Movement semaphored from one form to the

other – the action of painting, the painting itself, and the dancing. Creating a seamless line, Eiko

and Koma merged visual art with the physical dance.

Questioning injustice and power, using dancing for thirty-seven years as a way to express

their ideals of egalitarianism, Eiko and Koma have maintained their anti-establishment and anti-

conventional spirit. They have shaped dance around their foundational philosophy, which has

always evolved.264 Cambodian Stories, however, revealed a substantial difference in meanings,

functions, and effects. The dances they created before Cambodian Stories may have enriched

the audiences’ lives, but without direct social actions. Eiko and Koma’s dance was a singular

presentation of their egalitarian perspective about human beings as a part of nature. Eiko and

Koma strove to take their viewers away from everyday life, into another world, and as Koma

said, to find a “serene moment” in which the individual might reflect and re-evaluate.

Although their dances had both psychological and physical impact on audiences, the

influence remained invisible and internalized. Audiences who came to see Eiko and Koma’s

performances at ADF, the Joyce, or the Zellerbach in San Francisco could afford to buy tickets.

They were the “haves.” But, with Cambodian Stories, Eiko and Koma gave expressions to

those who needed it the “have nots,” and they involved the audiences in the social activities

through the performance, presenting renewed meanings, and effects of the potential of dance.

264 Butoh dance has evolved and expanded so much (it is now practiced worldwide) that its

meanings and philosophy have become detached from the original intentions (anti-traditional and anti-conventional attitude expressed in a desire to create a new form of theater dance), leaving only certain stylistic features and forms as a ways to define Butoh.

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CHAPTER 11.

CONCLUSION

Eiko and Koma embody the spirit and dream of post-war Japanese avant-gardists:

“venture out into the world.” They have continued to create their own unique style of dance for

over three decades. Unrestrained by either convention or tradition, they used life-experiences

to educate themselves, which in turn shaped both their philosophy and dance form. Searching

for the possibility of dancing within the limitations of being a duo, they created a style that

proved to be truly individual. Breaking the boundaries of modern dance forms, and fitting into

the American avant-garde dance scenes, they also demonstrated postmodernists’ concerns.

Their involvement with the student movements in Japan as well as their background in

political science and law helped form their fundamental attitude toward social criticism and

equality. This naturally politicized their dance, transforming it into a means of revolt against a

stagnant, consumerist society. However, as they explored life outside of Japan, the emphasis of

their dance gradually shifted toward evoking awareness of, and sensitivity in, life. Staging their

dance to incorporate natural beauty, they demonstrated a unification between human being and

nature. They humanized nature and became a part of nature themselves. As the movements

were based on the landscape onstage, Eiko and Koma’s process of dance-making became unique,

acting as contercurrent to mainstream dance-making. Utilizing slow and low-strata movements,

they redefined dance vocablaries. With these movements, which may be considered grotesque,

uncomfortable, irritating, yet characteristically beautiful, the audience’s sense of time and space

were altered, and diverse human emotions were triggered. Eiko and Koma directed their

attention to the lower and neglected space, implying that we should pay attention to marginalized

people, culture, and art. These not only became their signature elements but allowed Eiko and

Koma to blur the borders between dance and visual art.

Eiko and Koma’s dance expressed the Zeitgeist of a constantly changing society. Their

dance reflected the movements of anti-art, postmodernism, technological, environmental, and

humanitarian. Against the backdrop of a changing social ethos, the imposed meaning of dance

continues to change, allowing society to put the unwanted labeling of Butoh onto their dance.

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By opposing the labeling, however, Eiko and Koma clearly revealed that they are independent.

Proving their distinctiveness, their latest project Cambodian Stories revealed their distinction

from Butoh, their achievements in the American dance scene, and their new direction. Their

quest for social justice and equality is manifested in the hybrid form of visual art, dance, and

social work. Eiko and Koma continue to present their evolving form of dance that keeps

expanding possibilities for dance and performance art.

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Chronicle. 6 Sep. 1982: n. pag.

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__________. “It's a Cave? A Temple? It's a Mystery; It's a Cave? A Temple? A Volcano? It's a Mystery.” The New York Times. 9 Nov. 2000. E1.

__________. “Japanese Collaborate With Indians of Taos; Japanese and Indians of Taos Collaborate Telling the dancer from the buffalo (or from the bear) in the Next Wave.” The

New York Times. 5 Nov. 1991: C13-14.

__________. “Reviews: III. Flying, Waltzing, Walking, and Jogging in Place: Batya Zamir Dance Company; Multigravitational Acrodance Group; Eiko and Koma; Andy deGoat; Dana Reitz; Clear Dance Lines.” Dance Magazine. Aug. 1977: 23-28.

__________. “The Dance: Avant Duo At Garage.” New York Times. 5 Aug. 1979: 40.

__________. “Two Dancers Who Never Step in the Same 'River' Twice; A Work That Started One Stormy Night on the Delaware River is Coming to Brooklyn.” The New York Times. 30 Nov. 1997: AR32.

__________. “Two New Stages for Modern Dance; New Stages For Dance.” The New York

Times. 20 Feb. 1977: 76-77.

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Harris, William. “A Rare Talent For Spotting Fresh Talent.” The New York Times. 23 Oct. 1994: H35.

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Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 9 Feb.1964: X18. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The New York Times (1851 - 2003) ProQuest. Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, FL. 22 May. 2005 <http://www.proquest.com/>

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Profiles and Reviews 1976 – 83. Boston: D.R. Godine, 1985: 185.

__________. “Dance: What Dreams May Come: When a Lot Is All Wrong and a Little Just Right.” The Village Voice. 14 Nov. 2001: 59. 8 Feb. 2006 <http://iipaft.chadwyck.com/cgi/fulltext?ACTION=BYID&FILE=./session/1139429020_29941&subset=5&entries=16&ID=00231892&JID=JID00426180&ROYID=LOUJID00426180>

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Voice. May 6-9, 1981: n. pag.

__________. “In Their Dance No Wind Blows.” The Village Voice. 9 Aug. 1976: Dance.

Kisselgoff, Ann. “Two Dancers From Japan In 'Fur Seal'; Jorge Bolet Fills In Milnes Saves 'Otello.'“ The New York Times. 25 Feb. 1978: 16.

__________. “Japan's New Dance Is Darkly Erotic :Dance. The distinguishing mark of Japan's Expressionist dance style is a body slowly changing shape.” The New York Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 15 Jul 1984: 54-55. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The

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__________. “An Arrow in a Snowfall of Feathers.” The New York Times. 9 Dec. 1993: C16.

__________. “An Indian at One With the Buffalo In Eiko and Koma's Spirit World.” The New

York Times. 7 Nov. 1991: C19.

__________. “Dance: Eiko and Koma in a Durham Premiere,” The New York Times 24 Jun. 1984, Late City Final Edition, Section 1; Part 2: 46.

__________. “Dance Festival Enjoys Visit of Japan’s Moderns” The New York Times. 10 July 1982: Late City Final Edition, Section 1: 14.

__________. “Dance View: The Spell the Balinese Cast Over the Avant-Garde." New York Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 4 Dec. 1977: 108-108. ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2003) ProQuest, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, FL. 31 Aug. 2006. <http://www.proquest.com/>

__________. “Dance View; Transformation Comes Naturally to Mummenschantz.” The New

York Times. 4 May 1986: Late City Final Edition, Section 2: 24.

__________. “Dance.” The New York Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 15 Jul 1984: 83-83. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The New York Times (1851 - 2003). ProQuest. Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, FL. 22 May. 2005 http://www.proquest.com/

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__________. “Dance: Japanese Group in Toronto.” The New York Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 19 Jun 1984: C15. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The New York Times (1851 - 2003). ProQuest. Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, FL. 22 May. 2005 <http://www.proquest.com/>

__________. “Legacies and Origins Were Emphasized.” The New York Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 30 Dec. 1984: n. pag. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The New

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__________. “Next Wave Festival Review; An Eerie Beauty Darkly Smolders Eerie, Timeless Beauty That Darkly Smolders.” The New York Times. 1 Dec. 2000: E1.

__________. “The Dance: Japanese Dai Rakuda Kan at Festival.” The New York Times. 12 July 1982: Late City Final Edition, Section C: 14.

__________. “The Dance: Montreal Festival.” The New York Times 23 Sep. 1985: Late City Final Edition, Section C: 17.

Klein, Alvin. “'Emperor Jones' to Be a Highlight of Summerfare: 'Emperor' a Highlight of Theater Events.” The New York Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 8 Jul 1984: n.pag. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The New York Times (1851 - 2003). ProQuest. Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, FL. 22 May. 2005 <http://www.proquest.com/>

Lee, Elizabeth. “Dancers Eiko & Koma Beautiful To Watch.” Durham Morning Herald 20 June 1984: A Review.

Loke, Margarett. “Butoh: Dance of Darkness,” The New York Times, 1 Nov. 1987, Late City Final Edition, Section 6: 41.

McDonagh, Don. “Eiko and Koma Are Enigmatic; Bold Dancers.” The New York Times. 18 Sep. 1977: 67.

__________. “Eiko and Koma Are Enigmatic; Bold Dancers.” The New York Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 18 Sep. 1977: 67. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The

New York Times (1851 - 2003). ProQuest. Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, FL. 22 May. 2005 <http://www.proquest.com/>

__________. “Eiko And Koma Dance a ‘Seal’.” The New York Times. 12 June 1977: n. pag.

Mott, Michael. Richmond News Leader, 1985: n. pag.

Nuchtern, Jean. “Tripping.” Soho News Weekly. 9 Nov. 1978: n. pag.

Pierce, J. Robert. “Eiko and Koma in Fur Seal.” Soho News. 16 June 1977: n. pag.

Rich, Frank, Jennifer Dunning, John S. Wilson, Grace Glueck. “Critics' Choices: Theater Dance Jazz Art.” The New York Times (1857-Current file) New York, N.Y. 22 Nov. 1981: D47. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The New York Times (1851 - 2003). ProQuest. Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, FL. 22 May. 2005 <http://www.proquest.com/>

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Ross, Janice. “At 81, Dancing With New Partners; At 81, She's Dancing With New Partners A Logical Match: The Three Dancers Work Intuitively, Letting the Choreography Emerge Naturally.” The New York Times. 27 Jan. 2002: A1.

Schulze, Franz. “Frank Stella as Architect.” Art in America 88.6 June 2000: 90. Academic ASAP. Thomson Gale. Florida State University. 11 June 2007 <http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=AIM&docId=A62685215&source=gale&userGroupName=tall85761&version=1.0>

Segal, Lewis. “‘White Dance’ by Eiko, Koma at Pilot Theater.” Los Angeles Times. 24 Oct. 1977: 11.

__________. “Eiko and Koma in 'Cock Crows.'” Los Angeles Times. 29 Aug. 1978: n. pag.

Small, Linda. “Reviews: VII. Simone Forti; Men Dancing; Anna Leo; Bebe Miller; Daniel Nagrin; Eiko and Koma; Dana Reitz; Sara Rudner Performance Ensemble.” Dance

Magazine. Sep. 1981: 44.

Smith, Amanda. “Reviews: III. Ed DiLello Group; Jessica Fogel and Dancers; Eiko and Koma; Susan Rethorst.” Dance Magazine. Mar. 1980: 36-41.

Strauss, Renate. “Avant-Garte Duo Unfolds Odd Allegory.” The Seattle Times. 24 May 1982: B8.

Tobias, Tobi. “… In the Recent Work of Eiko and Koma—Image is Everything. Almost…” New

York Food For the Eye. 14 Mar. 1983: n. pag.

__________. “Reviews: XII. Whirling Dervishes; Eiko and Koma.” Dancemagazine. Jan 1979:114-116.

Trucco, Terry. “U.S. Modern Dancers Spread Message in Japan.” The New York Times 28 Aug. 1984: Late City Final Edition, Section C: 13.

Tucker, Marilyn. “Avant Garde Dancers To Be Reckoned With.” San Francisco Chronicle. 14 July 1978: n. pag.

__________. “Koma Takashi And Eiko Otake Dance a 'Seal.'” San Francisco Chronicle.19 June 1977: 43.

On-line Sources:

“Okinawa, Japan,” Global Security 14 Jan. 2007 <http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/okinawa.htm>

133

“Takiguchi Shuzo.” TAMA Art University – Library Shuzo Takiguchi Archive’s Website <http://archive.tamabi.ac.jp/bunko/takiguchi/t-st(E).htm>

Eiko and Koma. “Interview with Eiko and Koma” Asia Society. 3 Mar. 2006, 17 Jul. 2007 <http://www.asiasociety.org/arts/06cambodianinterview.html>

Eiko and Koma’s Official Website 17 May. 2005 http://www.eikoandkoma.org

The Center For Land Use Interpretation. 15 May 2006 <http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/NY3199/>

The Lab Art & Media GmbH 30 Jan. 2006 <http://www.thelab-berlin.de/Eartistlinke1.html>

Williams, Simon. “Wagner, Richard” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. Ed. Dennis Kennedy. Oxford University Press, 2003. Florida State University. 4 April 2007 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t177.e4130>

Thesis and Dissertation:

Kurihara, Nanako, The Most Remote Thing in the Universe: Critical Analysis of Hijikata

Tatsumi's Butoh Dance. Diss. New York University, 1996.

Muan, Ingrid. Citing Angkor: The "Cambodian Arts" in the Age of Restoration, 1918—2000 Diss. Columbia University, 2001: Introduction.

Munroe, Alexandra. Avant-garde Art in Postwar Japan: The Culture and Politics of Radical

Critique, 1951—1970. Diss. New York University, 2004.

Ni, Shu-Lan Miranda. The Development of a Genre: Pina Bausch and Late Twentieth-century

Dance Theater. Diss. Texas Tech University, 2002. Retrieved August 7, 2006, from ProQuest Digital Dissertations database. (Publication No. AAT 3043219).

Film, Videotapes, and/or DVD:

“Breath.” Conceived and performed by Eiko and Koma. Eiko and Koma: Media Dance. DVD. 1985. Eiko and Koma’s personal archive.

“Excerpt of White Dance: Moth.” Conceived and performed by Eiko and Koma Eiko and Koma. VHS. 1978? Archived in The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

“Lament.” Conceived and performed by Eiko and Koma. Eiko and Koma: Media Dance. DVD. 1985. Eiko and Koma’s personal archive.

“Land.” Eiko and Koma. Oregon, WI: ADF Video, 1995.

134

“Seven Postmodern Choreographers.” Making Dances. Produced and directed by Michael Blackwood. New York: Michael Blackwood Productions, 1997.

“Seven Postmodern Choreographers.” Making Dances. Produced and directed by Michael Blackwood. New York: Michael Blackwood Productions, 1997.

Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis. Produced and directed by Michael Blackwood. New York: Michael Blackwood Productions, 1990.

Cambodian Stories

Grain. Conceived and performed by Eiko and Koma. DVD. 1983. Eiko and Koma’s personal archive.

My Parents: Eiko & Koma. Dir. Eiko and Koma Otake. DVD. Eiko and Koma, 2004.

Returning Home. Dir. Andy Abrahams. Wilson Anna Halprin, in artistic collaboration with Eeo Stubblefield. Open Eye Pictures, 2003.

Steve Paxton. VHS. ADF Video, 1996.

The Making of Cambodian Stories. Directed by Eiko and Koma. 2005. Available online < http://www.eikoandkoma.org/index.php?id=1202>

Woodstock. Dir. Michael Wadleigh.

Yvonne Rainer, Sara Rudner. Produced by Celia Ipiotis and Jeff Bush. New York, N.Y.: ARC Videodance, 1990.

Interview Transcripts:

Eiko and Koma. A Conversation with Eiko and Koma. By Leslie Windham. In Ballet Review. Summer 1988, 47-59.

Eiko and Koma. Interview with Deborah Jowitt. Oral History Project Dance Collection. January 6 and 8, 1998.

Eiko and Koma. Interview with Effie Mihopolous. 1983.

Eiko and Koma. Personal Interview. May 31 2006 and May 28 2007.

Ohno, Kazuo. Interview with Schechner, Richard. “Kazuo Ohno Doesn't Commute: An Interview; Kazuo Ohno,” in The Drama Review: TDR. Vol. 30, No. 2. (Summer, 1986), 163-169.

Booklet, Pamphlet, or Brochure:

135

Eiko and Koma’s Note to Presenters. N.Y.

Kampo Cultural Center. N.Y.

136

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

EDUCATION

Florida State University, Department of Dance, Tallahassee, FL M.A. American Dance Studies Concentrations: Postmodern dance, social dance of 21st century, dance technology under the direction of Dr. Sally Sommer, Dr. Juliet McMains, and Tim Glenn.

2007

Tamagawa University, Machida Japan

B.A. German

2006

ACADEMIC HONORS AND AWARDS

The Kenn Martin Scholarship in Dance Technology, Florida State University This award made possible to work on a dance documentary for Eiko and Koma, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow. The Making of Cambodian Stories was selected for the public review of Dance on Camera Festival in 2007.

2007

Award from the Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the thesis and presentation regarding international disarmament.

1999

MEDIA WORKS

is this dance?

Filmed and edited a 7-min documentary of Miguel Gutierrez, choreographic fellow for Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. This documentary examines his philosophy on body and dance.

2007

Check Your Body at the Door

Edited part of the video under the direction of Sally Sommer (producer, director). This documentary focuses on some remarkable club dancers and dancing in New York City from the late 1980s through early 1990s.

2006

137

Point A to B

Filmed and edited a 25-min documentary of Benjamin Levy, choreographic fellow for Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. This work reveals the process of movement research by Benjamin Levy who investigated and analyzed relations between presented movements and audience reactions.

2006

The Making of Cambodian Stories

Created a documentary-dance-video under the direction of Eiko and Koma. Involved in both pre- and post- production process. The Making of Cambodian

Stories was broadcast on Community Public Access Cable Television in more than 40 cities in California and was selected for the public review of Dance on

Camera Festival in 2007. The documentary captures Eiko and Koma’s innovative collaboration with young Cambodian painters at the Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture in Phnom Penh and their choreographic process of Cambodian Stories, a performance which toured twelve cities in the U.S. in 2005 and 2006.

2005

Paranoia

Created a 13-min documentary-dance-video as a course work for Graduate Studies in Dance Technologies. This work symbolically captures the history of the Argentine tango, its evolution, and the sensation of dancing.

2005

FSU in NYC

Filmed and created a short documentary to promote a special graduate dance program “FSU in NYC,” hosted by the FSU Dance Department.

2005

Soul

Produced a 3-min dance video that was presented in May 2006 at International Dance Festival 2006, hosted by Dance and Media Japan.

2004

Salsa in Japan

Produced a 45-min documentary on the history of salsa in Tokyo, Japan.

2004