Flowers Cracking Concrete. Rosemary Candelario

is basically alien to American audiences, but using an alien theatrical language as well.”¹⁵ For others, this “alienness” elicited an Orientalist deference, if not understanding; it was a performance, as one reviewer put it, “to respect and in some ways to enjoy for its originality and sense of integrity.”¹⁶ This sentiment calls to mind Bonnie Sue Stein’s later writing about butoh: “The work of these Japanese artists is so thorough and so ‘Japanese’ that Westerners sense a searing honesty…. [S]pectators who may not like it … still respect the experimentation and the performance skills required.”¹⁷ Couched in these remarks by both authors is an assumption that one cannot understand the performance because it, like the performers themselves, is so “other.” It is assumed to be incomprehensible, but still has something to admire. While this Orientalist response to the work was not the attitude of the majority of critics, it did represent a growing trend, one I track through this chapter and examine in detail in chapter 3. By and large, however, critical response to Fur Seal was overwhelmingly positive, and Eiko & Koma were welcomed into the New York dance scene as singular avant-garde artists. Anna Kisselgoff, for example, wrote, “At root, their method is as old as Aesop. But their message has the same resonance of post-Sartre and post-Beckett drama.”¹⁸ Their next work mined precisely this tension between fable and postmodern performance.

       Before the Cock Crows

      Eiko & Koma’s first dance created entirely in the United States, Before the Cock Crows, Thou Shalt Deny Me Thrice, premiered at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in summer 1978.¹⁹ As the name suggests, the sixty-minute dance tells a story of betrayal, though it has perhaps more resonance with Delilah’s Old Testament seduction and betrayal of Samson than with Peter’s New Testament fear-based denial.²⁰ Featuring the most specific story line of all Eiko & Koma’s dances, Before the Cock Crows is also the most specifically gendered. Eiko owns the birch-branch-delimited stage, spiraling and snaking seductively past Koma before shooting him in the back with her childhood playtime finger guns. Immediately remorseful, she mourns excessively even as Koma comes back to life. Abruptly, Eiko becomes a chicken herself, the cock that has crowed throughout the dance, pecking and scratching, oblivious to the preceding events or the spellbound audience watching her. Accompanied by a Romanian folk song, music by “Belly Dance King” George Abdo and his Flames of Araby Orchestra, and rooster sounds, the dance ends with Koma sinking beneath the weight of a birch branch contraption borne on his back—part oversized crown, part cross—as Eiko herself (no longer a chicken) is bowed by the weight of her own actions. Unlike their two previous works, in this dance it is eminently clear that Eiko & Koma are humans playing characters, at least until Eiko becomes a chicken.²¹ Seen retrospectively in the context of Eiko & Koma’s larger body of work, Before the Cock Crows is an early iteration of the pair’s oft-repeated mating ritual and a precursor of their attention to cycles of mass violence in the most intimate of settings, a theme explored in detail in chapter 5. For critics, this dance also opened up the possibility of comparing and contrasting Eiko & Koma’s work with modern and postmodern dances.

      Like Fur Seal, Before the Cock Crows opens with a period of extended stillness, which had by that point become a marker of Eiko & Koma’s dances in the United States. Although reviews and video documentation reveal distinct variations in the opening²²—sometimes Eiko is onstage braiding her hair when the audience enters, sometimes both are there when the lights come up, sometimes Koma comes crashing in later—the lack of discernible movement remains a constant. A cock crows. For minutes, a pulsing track with Middle Eastern instrumentation, perhaps meant to evoke biblical lands, fills the space. The dancers do not respond; impassive, Eiko kneels upstage center while Koma stands downstage right, his left arm raised. They are both draped in folds of material: she in red, he in tan. The stage is inexplicably outlined with long, thin birch branches. By the time the music ends, Eiko has microscopically shifted her head forward, her torso twisting ever so slightly in response. In silence and decreasing light, Koma raises his head and lets his hand descend slowly to his side. This seems to be a signal to speed up to a tortoise-like pace. The protracted openings for which Eiko & Koma were becoming known seemed designed to grab the audience’s attention and keep them there, holding their breath (a number of reviews use this as metaphor), until they are absolutely sure that the audience is with them, at which point they slowly begin to unfold their movement. The dancers recognized the necessity of shifting their audience into an alternate time space and rooting them there for the duration of the piece.

      While today that same stillness, combined with layered images and curious juxtapositions, might be seen as butoh or butoh-like, it is important to remember that butoh was not yet known in the United States and was only just being introduced to France. Moreover, Eiko & Koma have never used that term for their work. Instead, at the time Eiko & Koma were embraced and understood as avant-garde or postmodern. Shoko Letton sees a connection between Eiko & Koma’s movement style and American postmodern dance, which she identifies as “a minimalist philosophy of simple means, repetitions, everyday movements and objects, and the manipulation of time.”²³ At the same time, Letton continues, “Eiko and Koma’s slowness was considered to be a part of their cultural performative tradition.”²⁴ In other words, audiences assumed that what they were seeing was in some way inherently and traditionally Japanese because the dancers themselves were Japanese. Just enough information about Japanese arts and practices had circulated popularly in the United States that audiences felt they could identify things like Zen and noh in Eiko & Koma’s dances, even though the dancers had little experience with either.

      In fact what Eiko & Koma were doing at the time was actively exploring and absorbing new influences. For example, Eiko took belly-dancing lessons while they were making Before the Cock Crows; that experience is particularly evident in the dance’s Middle Eastern sound track and in a solo watched by Koma and the audience alike. Eiko’s willowy arms slowly wave above her head like two snakes, only they are the ones doing the charming. As her hips swivel, taking their time, her dress emphasizes the spirals in her body. Her gaze appears internal, but she keeps her body facing the audience and occasionally even glances its way as her arms and torso continue their side-to-side body waves. Employing the arched back, cocked hip, and spirals of belly dancing, she seduces the audience and Koma both without ever exposing her belly.

      While Eiko holds down the center of the stage with her serpent-like arms and torso, Koma circles and criss-crosses the stage, drawn to her, but also trying to draw some attention of his own. Despite largely appearing to be in their own worlds—each with his or her own movement vocabulary and swaths of stage space—the two dancers are clearly, though inexplicably, drawn to one another. They follow each other, approach and then retreat. After one such retreat Eiko hides her face and turns her back to Koma, yet a slight turn of her head indicates that she is still paying close attention. Is she being coy, drawing him in? In other dances in which the pair less clearly represents human characters, this choreographic pattern is described as a mating ritual. Here it is better described as seduction, with Eiko clearly seducing Koma, and the audience in the process (see figure 2.2).