Clammy as the abysmal depth of an open grave
Your body is ponderous as sand-bags
How mediocre, how banal you are
Your somber elastic shape
Your dolorous lumps of rubber
Bob and sink in the sea
In the sorrowful rays of the evening twilight9
The poem focuses on seals at the time in their life cycle when they leave the water, through which they easily glide, for an awkward and lumbering sojourn on land spent mating and gestating. Despite the sunshine and celebratory air Kaneko lends the seal mating, his repugnance toward the creatures is palpable. His aversion to them reveals a sort of existential horror; he seems to ask, “Is this all we are?”
Whereas Kaneko encountered the seals as a disdainful observer, Eiko & Koma approached the creatures with a sense of bodily curiosity. Eiko described the seals in a newspaper preview of their dance: “We saw how they moved. They don’t need their feet very much, but move with their whole bodies. They are such lazy things, but they are always looking at you. And they are recreative. They know just enough of life; I think we know too much. We have so much information, we don’t know what to do with it. They know. We were interested in the way the seals eat, too. They don’t spend their whole time finding food—just a little. Then they are free to play and move. That’s where our dance came from.”10 What would it require to embody the seals? How could the dancers wallow, bow, curtsy, roll, bob, and sink on the seals’ “recreative” terms? After the fragility of moths, the ponderous, fleshy substance of seals must have presented a tempting challenge. Eiko & Koma roll, scooch, contract, and undulate, all without the use of their hands, arms, or legs.11 Eiko & Koma become all trunk, like the set piece hanging downstage left: a tree trunk stripped of all branches, leaves, and roots.12 Land-bound locomotion for both the seals and these seal-dancers is an awkward struggle, expending maximum effort for minimal forward motion.
Fur Seal had its premiere at the Riverside Dance Festival in New York City in June 1977. The festival program included the Sophie Maslow Dance Company, the Isadora Duncan Centenary Dance Company, the Rudy Perez Dance Company, guest choreographer Hanya Holm, and many others. In a bill that heavily featured modern dance, and particularly early modern dance, Eiko & Koma must have stood out as strikingly unfamiliar.
Upon first seeing Fur Seal, Jennifer Dunning wrote, “You watch, unable to look away,” adding, “There is no one like these two dancer-choreographers. Theirs is the intensity of strong, white light, exhausting but beautiful.”13 These sentences from a short two-paragraph Dance Magazine review (part of a much longer piece addressing a number of concerts) were used extensively in Eiko & Koma’s publicity materials for the next several years and came to define the pair’s early work in the press, framing their work as singular, something to which one is inextricably drawn.
For many audience members, the opening section concentrated the kind of experience Dunning described. When lights come up, the stage remains only dimly lit. One can discern two figures, one reclining, and one upright next to the tree trunk that hangs in the space. Dark costumes and a dark stage blend together, against which exposed fragments of bodies—lower legs, a torso, an elbow—pop out. And then nothing happens. Nothing at all. Like the seals Kaneko accuses of wallowing and laziness, Eiko & Koma seem to be doing nothing but existing on the stage for minutes at a time. Eventually it becomes evident that they are not still, but rather their movement is infinitesimal, proceeding at an unhurried pace. Beginning curled up on her left side, Eiko takes all the time in the world to transition to her stomach, arms tucked under, lower legs pointing up, face out to the audience. I cannot call what she does rolling, because that suggests momentum and gravity and a certain inevitability that cannot be assumed in this case. She then drops her feet to the left, millimeter by millimeter, eventually bringing them back up, then repeating the process on the other side. During the whole time, silence reigns. Still Koma stands, perhaps a foot away but in another world. He seems to lean on the tree trunk, eventually taking it off its axis and revealing its suspension. Finally, gravity takes over in both cases: the trunk swings back and Koma begins to play with it, even as the weight of Eiko’s lower legs finally takes over, provoking a response from the rest of her body. From this point, approximately five minutes into the dance, the pace picks up, but the experience of suspended time, of watching with bated breath, suffuses the rest of the performance, imbuing even periods of whimsy and hyperactivity such as the seal-waltz Eiko & Koma perform to the Beatles’ “I am the Walrus,” with a feeling of intensity and microcontrol. More than anything, Eiko & Koma’s masterful stillness, their commitment to “doing nothing” onstage, grabbed audiences’ attention and immediately characterized their work for critics.
The dancers, once sped up to a recognizable pace, neutralize Kaneko’s poetic distaste for the seals with a bodily exploration of seal free time. What might they do during their “big holiday”? (See figure 2.1.) Koma spends his solo recreative seal time fully exploring the stage space. Everything he does is bigger and more accelerated than anything he has done before. He propels himself into the air and falls loudly, only to spiral immediately back up to standing. He circles the stage, a full-legged walk developing into deep lunges, his arms held above his head in an overcurve that seems to extend his trunk upward. He sinks to the ground. Jumps. Collapses into the floor. This time as he tries to rise back up, everything is superheavy: legs, torso, all of it. I am the walrus GOO GOO GOO JOOB, indeed.
FIGURE 2.1 Flyer for 1977 concert at Theater of Man, San Francisco.Courtesy of Eiko & Koma.
When late in the piece, Eiko reenters the stage wearing a furry shift, Koma skitters toward her and past her off stage. Her seal playtime is taken up with light, controlled, almost waltzy steps. If Koma’s games were big and heavy, Eiko’s are full of suspension and extension. She bounces and then twists slowly forward. Whooooooo! She waltzes with herself and then arrests her momentum. Ending eventually at the bare trunk, she is rejoined by a now fur-clad Koma, a big flower stuck behind his ear. The absurdity begins to build. They both assume positions around the hanging trunk, feet wide and knees deeply bent. As they begin to locomote from this position, weight shifting side to side, their trunks feel heavy, as if they have to grunt with exertion each time they lift a leg. Coming back to the tree trunk, Eiko beats it rhythmically and ritually first with one bent arm, then the next. Finally, they come together in an awkward embrace that appears frequently in their body of work, arms over each other’s backs, rocking back and forth from one side to another. Ho ho ho, he he he, ha ha ha! Eiko jumps on Koma, her legs around his neck, and flips back over. As he drags her across the stage, she spits a flower, Koma’s erstwhile hair ornament, from her mouth. These expert texpert choking smokers stomp around the stage, arms bent at elbows, upper arms level with shoulders, lower arms pointing straight up. They hiss. They shout. They stagger. They bow. It’s over.
Whereas the 1984 media dance based on Fur Seal, Wallow, attempts a more thorough, and sober, embodiment of seals, the 1977 dance makes no claim to verisimilitude, favoring instead a postmodern collage sensibility.14 Whale sounds, a popular song ostensibly about a walrus, a poem about fur seals, harbor seal behavior, a tree trunk—all of these are equally valued in the dance, no matter their actual relevance to fur seals. The black satin costumes worn for most of the piece make the dancers look human, though ironically their movement is more seal-like while in the satin costumes and more human-like in the fur ones. Nonetheless, the human-animal morphing ventured in this dance is an important initial experiment that later became a hallmark of Eiko & Koma’s work.
Not all reviewers embraced Eiko & Koma’s second work. One review (“‘Fur Seal’ boring, but intriguing”) goes so far as to suggest that adding video of actual fur seals to the performance would help audiences understand the dance better and would go a long way to prevent people walking out of the performance,