From all accounts, Asbestos Hall was an open and fluid environment at the time, where no one was turned away. In addition to apprentices who were committed to working with Hijikata for the long term, like noted dancers Yoko Ashikawa and Saga Kobayashi, there was a steady stream of students, radicals, and young artists coming and going at any given time. According to butoh scholar Caitlin Coker, “People would somehow get introduced to Hijikata, or they would just find the studio and show up.”38 There they would have an interview, or more likely a conversation with Hijikata, who would at the end of the talk tell them to come to keiko (training) the next day. At a time when frequent student strikes meant no school, young people needed something to do with their free time or something to help them recover from the intensity of the barricades. Moreover, the good economy meant that many young people could afford to float around from place to place without worrying too much about how they would eat or where they would stay.39 In a climate in which many young people were unsettled and searching for an alternative way of life, Asbestos Hall provided a viable, and likely exciting, short- or long-term option.
When Eiko arrived at Asbestos Hall, Koma had already been there for three months. They started working together after they were assigned to dance what was called an “adagio” at a cabaret. Neither Eiko nor Koma had studied dance seriously growing up, so they acquired dance and performance training on the fly. From all indications, this was a completely typical experience. According to multiple sources, people who showed up at Asbestos Hall were typically sent out to dance cabaret right away, sometimes even their first night at the studio. They would be given simple instructions, often by fellow performers, such as “hold this position,” or “move slowly,” or “if something goes wrong, take off your shirt very slowly.”40 As the performers gained more experience and improved their performance, they would be given more complicated choreography.
Asbestos Hall residents would dance in both cabarets and more “artistic” performances in small theaters like the Shinjuku Art Village, where they would typically wear a small thong-like garment with white makeup covering the body. Photographs taken by Tadao Nakatani in 1971 show a small stage with what looks like white sheets casually hung up at the back and stage right.41 The photos show frequent partner work, with a couple of patterns. In the first, one partner is on hands and knees while another partner sits atop the first. In a variation of this position, four dancers kneel side by side, flanks touching, to provide a base for a fifth dancer to recline, head thrown back, abdomen tensed, feet floating in the air. Other partner work took place in the vertical plane, as a man standing tall and straight held a woman with her legs wrapped around his neck, facing him, his face obscured by her pelvis. Another photograph shows a person laid back, rear lower ribs balancing on the supporting partner’s shoulder as the legs arc forward and toward the floor. Although the photos show static poses, one can imagine the performers slowly morphing from one position to the next, as Eiko & Koma do in their 1983 work Beam. Other photographs show slides projected onto Ashikawa and Kobayashi’s near-naked bodies as they kneel downstage center, calling to mind later work by photographer Eikoh Hosoe (Ukiyo-e projections, 2002–2003, and Butterfly Dream with Kazuo Ohno, 2006) as well Eiko & Koma’s 1976 White Dance, in which a drawing of a moth is projected onto and over Eiko.
After the late-night cabaret shows were over, the night was not yet at an end. Motofuji talks about everyone going to a local bathhouse to wash off the makeup, before rushing to catch the train home for a few hours of rehearsal before bed (see figure 1.1).42 Some people recall they were not given enough food to eat. And while the cabaret shows were quite profitable—payments averaged 10,000 yen per performance—the dancers turned over all their earnings to Motofuji and received only 500 yen back.43
FIGURE 1.1 Late night rehearsal at Asbestos Hall, Tokyo, 1972.Photo: Makoto Onozuka.
Eiko has described the studio as a temporary hideout from the chaos on campus and in the streets that characterized Japan, like much of the world, at the time. Three months after meeting, Eiko and Koma decided together to leave the autocratic environment under Hijikata to pursue their own projects. If as part of the student movements they were trying to challenge power, why would they stay with a man with a singular power? Although their time with Hijikata was brief, it is clear that Eiko and Koma absorbed his basic approaches to performance, the foremost being that it was possible to make a living dancing cabaret. Baird goes so far as to call cabaret, rather than a high art approach, constitutive in the development and spread of butoh and butoh-related movement beyond Hijikata, in that “acquisition of a kind of fundamental cabaret style is an important avenue” for dancers to make a name, and a living, for themselves.44 Certainly the experience dancing cabaret with Hijikata gave Eiko and Koma and other dancers like Ko Murobushi, Carlotta Ikeda, and Yumiko Yoshioka a way to market and support themselves when they first went to Germany in 1972 and France in 1977, respectively.45
Even though Eiko and Koma had less than a year’s training between the two of them, they were clearly excited by the possibilities performance offered and felt empowered to make their own dances. They put together a cabaret show under the name Night Shockers to make money to fund a trip abroad. At the same time, they put together “artistic” shows for which they created their own sets and costumes. The pair gave their first performance of original work at Waseda University in 1972, an event captured through four extant black-and-white photographs.46 All four images show Eiko, naked or perhaps wearing a small thong, her skin covered in clumped and flaking white makeup or rice flour. Koma is only present in two of the images. In one he wears a dark, knee-length kimono, and his skin is also covered in the white, flaking substance; in the other, he is in a side lunge, all in shadow, while she is captured mid-movement, head in profile, torso forward, the light from a projected image of a still life spilling over her skin. In these images, Koma is low to the ground, his kimono blending with the shadows and dark floor, whereas Eiko is upright, frontal, and often splayed open to the audience. Even when she kneels, she towers over Koma’s curled form. Though her skin appears to be peeling off her body, and her joints, ribs, and hip bones protrude, she is no fragile creature, but a concrete and rooted body, confronting her audience with a barely contained urgency.
In these images, elements from Hijikata’s cabaret shows are evident. For example, white body makeup and using the body as a screen for projections were common in Hijikata’s dances at Shinjuku Art Village at the time. On the other hand, the use of a kimono as a costume (which became a frequent element of Eiko & Koma’s performances) seems unrelated to Hijikata. Although he does wear a kimono in Rebellion of the Body,