There was something in these dancers, whom they only knew through photos and stories, which resonated with the political focus on the individual, that contributed to Eiko & Koma’s worldview. They had seen Martha Graham and had read about Merce Cunningham, which gave them the sense that they knew what was happening in American modern dance. But at that point, Wigman’s style was out of favor and even disappearing, and Koma says that in that context they were interested in searching out the roots of what was by then called Ausdruckstanz.54
Arriving in Munich soon after the 1972 Olympics, the city had a vibrant young people’s culture that attracted the dancers. Almost immediately, they self-produced a two-month, late-night run at a small theater called ProT, while also continuing to support themselves with cabaret shows.55 Upon arriving in Germany, Eiko had written to Mary Wigman about the possibility of studying with her and had received her response that she was too ill to teach.56 At their performances they distributed a flyer asking for leads to where they could study Wigman’s technique. One day an audience member suggested that they contact Manja Chmiel in Hannover. Chmiel, a longtime assistant to Mary Wigman, had developed her own career as a solo dancer and had a school there. Eiko wrote to her immediately, and when they received a letter in return inviting them to Hannover, they packed up the old car they had acquired and moved north.
Upon meeting, Chmiel asked them to dance for her. Eiko reports, “Whether she liked it or not, I don’t know, but she did say immediately after that that we shouldn’t be learning about choreography from her.”57 Despite this recent statement, Eiko said in a 1998 interview with Deborah Jowitt that Chmiel gave them feedback that helped them “maximize the visual and emotional impacts” of their dances by paying attention to lighting and paring down their movements.58 In addition, Chmiel “encouraged them to train their bodies for expansion and life so that they could transmit movement on a larger scale.”59 She arranged for the dancers to take ballet classes for free at the Stadthaus in the mornings and to take her modern classes in the evenings. In the afternoons, she gave them access to her studio to rehearse for their regular late-night cabarets and for occasional campus and museum performances at the Studentenheim and the Kunstverein.
According to Eiko & Koma, however, the most important thing Chmiel taught them was not dance technique, but their power as a team; until that point they had viewed their partnership as merely a tool for survival and a step to becoming solo dance artists. She gave the duo the time and space to develop their work and pushed them to take their partnership seriously by entering them in a noted competition (alternately referred to in materials by and about Eiko & Koma as the Kölner Preis, the Young Choreographers’ Competition, and the Cologne Choreographers’ Competition), with Kurt Jooss as one of the judges. Eiko & Koma were among the three finalists in the competition and were invited to perform at the Cologne Opera (see figure 1.3).
FIGURE 1.3
White Dance, Young Choreographer’s Competition, Cologne Opera, Germany, 1973.Photo: A. Loffler.
That show, like all of their performances in Europe, was called White Dance.60 The title acts as an expression of independence from their first dance teachers, Hijikata and Ohno. Eiko & Koma’s dance, the title suggests, is specifically not the “utter darkness” of their butoh teachers, nor that of the failed student movement. The color white moreover provided a powerful contrast to the black and red flags of various political movements. In Eiko and Koma’s activist histories, as well as in the times in which the piece was made, there was a significant resonance of political allegiance with the color white, especially in opposition to black (anarchism) or red (communism). White also calls to mind the act of surrender, death, and ritual. Suzanne Carbonneau suggests that in “embracing whiteness as an antidote to the black uniforms of anarchism they had worn in the student movement, they meant whiteness to signal their decision to leave their pasts behind in order to create anew.”61 The choreographers explicitly took up the white flag of surrender almost a decade later in Event Fission (1980), an act that calls to mind John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1973 declaration of the conceptual country, Nutopia, with its white flag of surrender to peace. While calling their dance “white” implied a strong sense of rejection, it also provided continuity, for example through the white makeup used in both traditional Japanese performance and butoh. In this way, the literal whiteness of their dance provides a connection, like that sought by some other avant-gardists, reaching back beyond recent history. Indeed, one of the few books the dancers took on the road was Zeami’s late fourteenth- to early fifteenth-century treatise on noh, the Kadensho.62
The movement in these White Dances was not set, although Eiko & Koma did have a loose score of movements to draw from and an order of the movements agreed upon in advance. According to Joan Rothfuss, “The events combined moves they had learned from their various dance teachers—Kazuo Ohno, Tatsumi Hijikata, and others—with such Dadaesque actions as cutting their hair, throwing raw eggs, cooking fish, dragging a bundle of carrots, and painting their bodies with dough.”63 In Koma’s words, “We were just trying to do something strange.64 Remnants of these dances remain in photographs from performances in theaters and museums in Germany and the Netherlands, and in a recently discovered twelve-minute color film—minus sound track—made in Amsterdam circa 1973, which is the earliest known footage of Eiko & Koma (see figure 1.4). The film alternates between performances and scenes of Eiko and Koma in their kitchen, revealing the closeness of their communal relationship in life as well as in dance. While their words are lost, their dancing includes movements strikingly similar to Hijikata’s early 1970s choreography for Ashikawa and Kobayashi as well as original vocabulary that would later appear in Eiko & Koma’s White Dance (1976) and Fur Seal (1977).
FIGURE 1.4
Still from first known video footage of Eiko & Koma, Amsterdam, circa 1973.Courtesy of Eiko & Koma.
Despite Koma’s seeming dismissal—“just trying to do something strange”—in fact they were clearly doing something radical and shocking, and even profound, with their bodies, evidenced in the enthusiastic reception that greeted them in Europe and North Africa from 1972 to 1974. Those performances moved easily among late-night theaters, opera houses, museums, and performance festivals, echoing the way that Hijikata’s radical dances could also read to multiple audiences, both high art and bawdy at the same time. Certainly in Europe there was an added layer of Orientalism impacting the reception of their work, in the sense that “Oriental” read as high culture. Eiko concedes that “the fact we grew up in postwar Japan remains significant and essential in the ways we think and work, more so than the fact we studied and worked in Germany briefly. You know, sometimes you are reminded of what you have absorbed early on when you are away from where you grew up. But we were not cultural exports and we didn’t play for exoticism. I think we are careful not to.”65
In negotiating their cultural and national differences through dance, the pair found themselves having to work with and against being received as the Other, no matter where they were. In any case, their singularity as Japanese dancers in Germany in the early 1970s, drawing from an as-yetunseen-outside-Japan movement style, helped them stand out to audiences and mentors alike.
Their high-profile performance at the Cologne Opera resulted in other artists seeking them out and led to further performance and teaching opportunities beyond Hannover. For example, Lucas Hoving saw Eiko & Koma perform in Amsterdam and