Absurdity and opposition are both evident in White Dance’s opening scene. A version of the madrigal “The Agincourt Carol” plays as Eiko sits slumped forward in a printed casual kimono center stage, and Koma strikes a flouncy pose upstage left.79 No one moves for what seems an eternity, and then Koma begins to carefully pick his way around and across the stage, stepping lightly on his toes and occasionally flicking his foot back with a flourish to reveal his bare buttocks through a slit in the back of his bright red short kimono, worn backwards. Satisfied with his trip around the stage, he exits purposefully, having never acknowledged Eiko’s presence. In Kaneko’s poem, “Opposition” (not quoted in the program), the poet lists all the things to which he is opposed, including school, work, and “the Japanese spirit.” “I’m against any government anywhere / And show my bum to authors’ and artists’ circles,” he writes.80 For those familiar with Kaneko’s poetry, Koma’s mischievous reveal of his own bare bottom in White Dance recalls the poet’s desire to challenge every element of society. This cheeky behavior is furthered in publicity materials and programs for the dance. A photograph of Eiko shows her suspended midair, leaping yet posed almost as if she is seated in a chair. Her torso is bent all the way forward, feet flexed, knees bent, her whitened buttocks and legs revealed by her kimono as it floats above her body. Another frequently reprinted photo shows Koma facing away from the camera, his butt sticking out from a slit in his mid-calf-length kimono donned backwards, legs in wide parallel.81 This “showing of the bum” resonates with Eiko & Koma’s days as student activists, but here it is more playful than militant, more sassy than offensive.
But White Dance was not limited to absurd and cheeky moments. Eiko’s slow-moving solo, which makes up the middle section of the dance, ushers in a contemplative mood. Balancing on her tailbone, she reclines midstage, allowing her four limbs to billow around her until it seems there is nothing else happening in the world except this small dance. Eiko developed this solo when she was suffering from her ankle injury, so the movement was initially functional. The solo, however, demonstrates the value of rootedness in their work, not only as a visual anchor, but also in terms of duration of time. Even when she eventually rises to the vertical plane, allowing projections of photos of medieval Japanese patterns to suffuse her and her surroundings, her sustained movement-in-stillness is captivating.82
In contrast to Eiko’s intense, grounded presence in the center of the stage, Koma often bounds across the space. When the two are reunited onstage, they move not in unison but rather in tension with one another. Their taut muscles bristle even as their joints bend in unexpected angles, only to rebend in other configurations again and again. A kick or a slap explodes out of stillness. Then, near the end of White Dance, it suddenly becomes clear why Oppenheim had to buy all those potatoes. Koma rushes onstage, a huge sack over his shoulder, as potatoes cascade to the ground in a series of rolling thumps, kicking up small clouds of dust as they fall. The tubers have scarcely rolled to a stop, scattering across the stage, when Koma scurries back with another sack over his shoulder, repeating the dramatic potato drop once, twice, before throwing the canvas sack in a wide arc toward the wings and careening into the back wall. Meanwhile, Eiko holds the center of the stage, her deep stance rooting her in place as she pulls her hands into fists at her hips, elbows jutting backwards, as if ready to fight. Robert A. Fredericks, reviewing the Japan Society debut performance for Dance Magazine, wrote of the potatoes: “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.”83 The multisensory engagement demanded by the potatoes—how they looked, sounded, smelled—draws attention to Eiko & Koma’s neo-Dada-style use of these everyday objects.
Even as it revels in the nonsensical—“Why potatoes? What have they got to do with moths?”84—White Dance also signals an attention to cycles of living and dying and the attendant violence thereof that later became a central concern for the choreographers. Deborah Jowitt saw struggle and combat in the dance: “But their work isn’t pretty or sentimental; it’s pervaded with horror, studded with moments of violence.”85 Fredericks noted how Koma “swatted [Eiko], and not gently.”86 Oppenheim saw a violence in the piece that was less shocking than it was moving. For her White Dance evoked a deep sadness that felt linked to Vietnam, a war that had ended only the year before.87
Perhaps more significantly, the work shows Eiko & Koma trying to determine what their choreographic project will be. The piece stages modern dance influences such as Koma’s enthusiastic leaps and Eiko’s striking side attitude alongside a startling cascade of potatoes and alternately meditative and disturbing minimalist movements. Shoko Letton suggests that the “ugly” movements can be traced to Hijikata and the “beautiful” ones to Ohno;88 this binary interpretation is in line with many analyses that contrast Ohno’s “angelic” works with Hijikata’s “demonic” ones. Rather than staying with this dichotomous view, Kaneko’s “Opposition” offers another way to approach these contradictions. Kaneko writes: “[T]o oppose / Is the only fine thing in life. / To oppose is to live. / To oppose is to get a grip on the very self.”89 In this way we can see the oppositions in White Dance—the ugly and the beautiful, the sublime and the absurd, the meditative and the explosive all together in this one piece—as not merely an amalgamation of previous influences, but rather a way of coming to understand Eiko & Koma.
By the time Eiko & Koma ended their trip to the United States, they were no longer just using dance to see the world, but were making a concerted decision to become artists. Their bodily research had led them beyond experimenting with Hijikata and Ohno’s movement approaches to finding their own unique combination of extended stillness with moments of absurdity that unfold over time into a profound engagement with existential matters. Their experiences in New York in particular led them to see a place for themselves in that city’s experimental downtown dance scene, a possibility they had not seen for themselves in Tokyo. When they returned to Japan, it was to arrange cultural exchange visas, with Gordon’s help, for their return to New York, where they settled in 1977. The following chapter examines Eiko & Koma’s first five years as residents of New York City, with a focus on the dances they created during that time, one new piece each year, and the various artistic influences they absorbed.
CHAPTER 2
“GOOD THINGS UNDER 14TH STREET”
When Eiko & Koma settled in New York, the city, like many other major US cities, was experiencing what was referred to as an “urban crisis.” So-called white flight to the suburbs, coupled with systematic economic disinvestment and government neglect, had left abandoned swaths through cities like New York, and particularly neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, which had traditionally been working class and immigrant communities. As landlords abandoned and even destroyed their buildings, and residents fought to stabilize their neighborhoods, artist subcultures were able to take root and flourish downtown thanks to low or no rent on commercial and residential spaces.1 According to Christopher Mele, “Downtown described not only a place but an aesthetic or genre of music, dance, fashion, hairstyle, art, and performance.”2 In particular, Mele claims, the downtown scene was defined in opposition to “uptown,” which was epitomized by the famous nightclub Studio 54. While uptown stood for wealth, excess, commercialism, celebrity, and privilege, downtown stood for alternative, experimental, radical, underground, and weird. The economic opportunity to live and create work inexpensively downtown allowed clubs, galleries, and performance spaces to develop as crucibles for a new art scene in which punk music, visual arts, film, and performance intersected.
Koma’s