When we arrived here [in New York] in 1976, we had the feeling that somehow we missed a very important art movement. Already, Judson [Dance Theater] was over. We could see that Soho was developing into artists’ lofts by then. We couldn’t find Yayoi Kusama [she lived in New York from 1956 to 1973, when she returned to Japan] or Allen Ginsberg—though we did find Ginsberg later. And the city was bankrupt. Garbage was everywhere. People were lying down everywhere on the street. It was a weird time.3
Despite the feeling of having missed an era, Eiko & Koma in fact arrived in New York in the middle of a major boom in American postmodern dance, often referred to as the downtown dance scene.
In remarks made at a 2012 event sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Koma recounted his memories of being told that nothing good was happening above 14th Street. “So I tried to look for good things under 14th street,” he says. “I visited Meredith Monk, the experimental composer and vocalist. She was performing at her loft. And after that we played baseball together in a vacant lot. I remember Tricia Brown performing at her loft. David Gordon was also performing at his loft. Nobody had money. Lucinda Childs was performing her solo piece without any music at Danspace.”4
As Koma’s narrative indicates, downtown Eiko & Koma found themselves immersed in an active group of artists who, like the pair of new New Yorkers, were using their art to imagine new ways of being in society. Even when a specific political message was absent from the work—and it often was—the act of identifying with “downtown” was not just a geographic orientation, but a fundamentally political one. During this time, Eiko & Koma began experimenting with a variety of movement vocabularies, novel themes, and interdisciplinary collaborations with their new artist friends. Their pieces infused the then predominant mode of “dance for dance’s sake” with uncommon qualities such as extended stillness and overt expressivity. Moreover, Eiko & Koma’s combination of recognizable postmodernist characteristics such as nonlinearity and juxtaposition with novel (to the United States) ways of moving their bodies led to the pair quickly becoming critically acclaimed mainstays of the New York avant-garde.
I argue that the dances Eiko & Koma made in their first years in New York—Fur Seal (1977), Before the Cock Crows (1978), Fluttering Black (1979), Trilogy (1979–1981), and Nurse’s Song (1981)—participated in the inherent social critique that characterized much of the late 1970s downtown arts scene. Although these works sometimes employed radically different styles (belly dance, punk, hippie), reviewers nonetheless came to expect a particular kind of quality of movement from Eiko & Koma and did not hesitate to critique dances that did not live up to their expectations. It is not my intention here to say the reviews were right or wrong, but to point out how a misunderstanding of Eiko & Koma’s choreography was beginning to accrue even around these early works. As I show in chapter 3, this misunderstanding had a major impact on their dances being seen as Asian rather than Asian American. The danger of reading Eiko & Koma’s choreographic preference for slowness and stillness as a culturally determined aesthetic attribute rather than the bodily articulation of a fundamental oppositional politics is that dances deviating from a particular style are then rejected on that basis, without a consideration of how they might be attempting to politically achieve the same thing as previous dances, simply through different means.
This experimental period in Eiko & Koma’s choreography coincides precisely with a transitional period in American experimental dance observed by critic Marcia B. Siegel. In the introduction to The Tail of the Dragon: New Dance, 1976–1982, Siegel argues that the changes that took place in the dance scene between 1976 to 1982 were not the result of a specific and visible revolt, as had been the case with Judson Dance Theater a generation earlier,5 but their effects nonetheless resulted in a visible and distinct change in American experimental dance. According to Siegel, social and cultural changes in the United States produced dancers who were concerned with dance itself, expressive not abstract, aggressively physical not pedestrian.6 Her description of how the height of arts funding in the 1970s (before the beginning of the Reagan era) enabled the wider circulation of experimental dance while also requiring it to become standardized is particularly worth noting, especially since this is the precise climate in which Eiko & Koma began performing in the United States and during which they made a name for themselves. Siegel notes, “Subsidies underwrote dance performance and dance touring across a spectrum of taste wide enough to encompass experimental artists…. In some ways the experimental companies were better prepared to reach a wide audience than traditional groups. They were committed to flexibility, not wedded to proscenium spaces or rigid programming; they could dance in parks or schools, they could include local performers, improvise, and adapt to the conditions they found. But little by little, the diversity, the unpredictability, the strangeness that was so much a part of experimental dance was tamed and toned down.”7 She points out how the exigencies of these increased touring opportunities produced a need for set repertory pieces that fit into allotted time slots and could be billed as either well-reviewed hits or exclusive premieres.
Eiko observes that the kinds of needs described by Siegel had a specific impact on their choreography. Rather than presenting a full evening, as they had done on the European festival circuit and as they did in their first dances in the United States, Eiko & Koma began making shorter works. “Here, for the first time we were asked to make a piece and it doesn’t have to be a full evening, which allowed us to think differently. And I think that’s a choreographer’s thinking, and that’s why I feel like at that point we are also are very much a part of American modern dance.”8 This chapter focuses on the transitional period of Eiko & Koma’s first five years in New York to demonstrate how their work during this time was both impacted by and incorporated into the larger contexts of American postmodern dance, avant-garde arts and music, and late 1970s politics.
Fur Seal
When Eiko & Koma returned to the United States from Japan in late spring 1977, a little over a half a year after their first trip ended, they brought with them an entirely new dance, Fur Seal. In this piece, the dancers playfully alternate between embodying seals—lying on the ground, upper body raised forward and up, hands working like flippers—and exploring the full use of their human legs through walks, runs, jumps, balances, and lifts that they may have picked up during their time studying with Manja Chmiel a few years earlier. The sixty-minute performance is accompanied by whale songs, Schubert, and “I Am the Walrus” by the Beatles, punctuated by frequent silence. An encore was performed to Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee.” The dance is representative of the experimental, high energy, and sometimes absurdist work of Eiko & Koma’s first years and at the same time foreshadows the pair’s abiding concern with nonhumans and nature, particularly American landscapes. A 1976 trip to see harbor seals mating on the beaches of northern California impressed Eiko & Koma and inspired them to work on this new dance in Tokyo with the express intention of premiering it in New York.
Fur Seal marked a crucial break from Eiko & Koma’s long-term work with White Dance. The new theme spurred them to expand their movement vocabulary and explore new ways of staging their work. At the same time that they broke new choreographic ground, the use of another Mitsuharu Kaneko poem (from which they took their title) and reference to a nonhuman subject provided some continuity with their previous piece. In the case of Fur Seal, however, seals were not the metaphorical inspiration that the moths had been for White Dance, but a real-world one. The experience of seeing and smelling the seals in California must have resonated strongly with Kaneko’s evocative stanzas:
The sunlight beats down like sleet
Today is their wedding feast
Today is their big holiday
All day long they wallow in the mud
Ceaselessly bowing and curtseying
Rubbing their fins together
And rolling their bodies like carrels
Fur Seal
How