During their time in Europe, Eiko & Koma were constantly on the move. They had a cheap car, and as soon as they heard about a new opportunity, they would head off. After spending some time in the Netherlands and forming the Linden Gracht Dance Laboratory with Mitsutaka Ishii, the pair toured in France, Switzerland, and Tunisia. In Tunisia one of their audience members urged the pair to perform in New York and suggested they contact her cousin, who turned out to be Beate Sirota Gordon, then performing arts director at the Japan Society. Gordon is a significant figure in US-Japanese relations.66 At age twenty-two, Gordon participated in the drafting, translating, and negotiating of the Japanese constitution and was instrumental in enshrining equal rights for women in that document. In addition to the Japan Society, Gordon also served as performing arts director at the Asia Society. In her role at the Japan Society beginning in the 1950s, Gordon was responsible for introducing both traditional and contemporary performing artists from all over Asia to American audiences. Both the cousin and Eiko wrote to Gordon, who was hesitant to present performers whom she had not seen and chosen herself. Despite her reservations, she decided to proceed with booking Eiko & Koma based on her cousin’s recommendation, provided they had round-trip tickets and money deposited in an American bank account for living expenses.67 The dancers agreed, then returned to Japan to work, raise the required money, and deal with Eiko’s ankle injury. During that time, they studied again with Ohno and began to work on a piece to perform in the United States the following year.
White Dance
Eiko & Koma arrived in the United States in April 1976, ready to premiere White Dance.68 By this time the Vietnam War had ended, and the pair were no longer conflicted about entering the country. Although the dance they made for their American premiere shared a name with their European performances, the dancers consider the 1976 piece their first set choreography. They felt that a high-profile venue like the Japan Society called for “a little more choreographic effort,” which included “actually deciding on music, costumes and program notes.”69 The dancers spent their time in Tokyo processing the movement, choreography, and expression lessons learned during their years in Europe, both through formal instruction and through their extensive performance experiences. Premiering five years after the pair met at Asbestos Hall, White Dance was the culmination of the duo’s first period of movement and life research.
A sense of momentous transition between their first five years working together and their arrival in America was captured in a version of their biography frequently used in programs in their first few years in the United States:
EIKO & KOMA began working together in 1971 while members of Hijikata’s company in Tokyo. After a Tokyo debut they traveled to Hannover, Germany, in 1972 where they met and studied with Manja Chmiel, a disciple of Mary Wigman. For the next three years EIKO & KOMA performed throughout Europe and Tunisia. A year’s added study in Yokohama with Ohno Kazuo prepared them to continue their dance in America.70
Indeed, the teachers and mentors enumerated in this biography remained consistent from this point forward in Eiko & Koma’s career, although mentions of Hijikata did diminish over the years, a fact Eiko explains by noting that their relationships with Chmiel, Ohno, and even Hoving were ongoing, while the one with Hijikata ended when they left Asbestos Hall. They never saw him or were in touch with him again.71 While the pair would continue their choreographic experimentation through the early 1980s, a process discussed in detail in chapter 2, their arrival in the United States was a major turning point in their work.
Two years of performing around Europe had taught them valuable lessons about how to generate opportunities for themselves. Before departing Japan, Eiko sent letters to all the Dance Magazine correspondents across the United States, letting them know of the duo’s impending visit and asking if anyone would help them set up a performance. Irene Oppenheim, then a West Coast reviewer for Dance Magazine and a critic for local Bay Area papers, responded, inviting the pair to contact her once they arrived, so they arranged a layover in San Francisco on their way to New York. Oppenheim recalls trying to figure out what their work was like during that first meeting: “I would ask them, ‘does it use kimonos?’ And they would say, ‘Yes, but it’s not traditional.’” The critic was quite taken by them, despite the dancers’ halting English, remembering, “They were very young and very charming and very beautiful.”72 By the end of the meeting, Oppenheim agreed to arrange an invitation-only performance in a former garage of a small private school the coming weekend in order to accommodate Eiko & Koma’s New York schedule. In addition to securing the venue and recruiting her friends and acquaintances to attend, she recalls being given the peculiar task of purchasing two hundred pounds of potatoes for use in the performance. Did the dancers really like to eat potatoes?
As a transitional piece in Eiko & Koma’s career, White Dance reflects the style that characterized the experimental dances they performed in Europe while introducing new choreographic elements. The dance also represents their efforts to connect with an entirely new audience whose context for what they were seeing was different than that of audiences in Japan or Europe. “When they first came [to the US] they really were pioneers,” says Oppenheim.73 Indeed, the pair arrived in the United States, and even Europe, before butoh or any similar movement practices were known outside of Japan, with the exception of a handful of photographs in William Klein’s 1964 book, Tokyo. For American audiences, the context for Eiko & Koma would have been Japanese performance artists like Yoko Ono, or American avant-garde performance, such as what Oppenheim talked about seeing in San Francisco at theaters such as the Theater of Man.74 Others found a context for what they saw in the “early moderns.” Janice Ross, for example, in a review of Eiko & Koma a year and a half after their San Francisco debut, describes their work as “an honest and forceful amalgam of the raw beauty and violence of Mary Wigman’s expressionistic theater and the metaphorical density and fragility of Asian art.”75 This view was likely shaped by press releases for the pair that described their work “as avant-garde dance in the Japanese manner, [showing] the influence both of Japanese traditional and German modern dance.”76 Whatever the context of the individual viewer, Oppenheim says, “I think that a lot of their appeal, at least in the early days, was that they were so exotic to us.”77 At that time, there was still a strong division between “ethnic dance” and “modern dance”; as Japanese people performing avant-garde dance, Eiko & Koma were perceived as a rarity.
Like their embrace of the political meanings of “white,” Eiko & Koma incorporate other gestures of opposition as part of their attempt to figure out how to further their own political questioning through dance. The US premiere of White Dance was supplemented by the appearance of a loose adaptation of Mitsuharu Kaneko’s uncredited 1948 poem Ga 蛾 (Moths) in the program. Written during the American occupation of Japan and postwar reconstruction, the poem speaks to glimpses of beauty and determination amid the overwhelming inevitability of death. Eiko’s adapted translation reads in part:
To live is to be fragile
So is it a fault to nurture a dream?
Oh moth! what is life to you?
You’ve been exhausted ever since you lost your cozy pupa,
You’ve carried the weight of time upon your back
And gasped for breath
While taking a rest
After such a short journey,
Then started on another voyage
Into an unknown future.78
Kaneko (1895–1975)