“Do you mean we should do NOTHING? Just sit and wait?” One should gather the courage to answer: “YES, precisely that!” There are situations when the only truly “practical” thing to do is resist the temptation to engage immediately and to “wait and see” by means of a patient critical analysis.12
Looking back at Eiko & Koma’s body of work over the past forty years, it becomes evident how they have used their dances as an opportunity to continuously analyze with their bodies the issues most important to them. In a 1986 interview, Eiko shared, “We do not want to jump into working on a dance with a concept which is just hunted. It should be some theme that slowly comes up as a concern, which we cannot help but deal with. Making the dance is one way to deal with our concern.”13 In other words, adagio activism is a decelerated, durational process compelled by a deeper searching, a patient and corporeal discernment that reveals matters of great importance. Eiko & Koma’s body of work is evidence that the themes of their dances are not random but are ones with which they deeply connect, with the result that those things they choose to explore, they explore exhaustively. Moreover, their dances do not signify these matters of importance but realize them.14 That is, dance for Eiko & Koma is not only a way to come to understand something, but a means to give it physical form, to actualize it in the world.
Slowness for Žižek, and for Eiko & Koma, is therefore not a benign aesthetic but a political intervention, like a labor slowdown when workers intentionally decrease production on an assembly line to demonstrate their centrality to the success of capitalism.15 Slowing down enables analysis of a complicated and bewildering situation, like the function of violence, which Žižek categorizes as subjective and objective. Subjective violence includes acts committed by an individual or group of individuals that visibly disturb the status quo; crime and terror are two obvious examples. Objective violence, on the other hand, is the necessarily invisible violence—both symbolic and systemic—that sustains the very status quo from which subjective violence so graphically stands out. The urgency (Žižek calls this a “fake urgency”) with which we are prompted to respond to subjective violence actually serves to mask objective violence and prevents us from comprehending how objective violence in fact begets subjective violence. Ultimately, for Žižek the most profound act is one “that violently disturbs the basic parameters of social life.”16 It is at its heart “a radical upheaval of the basic social relations”17 that could disturb the functioning of objective violence.
Eiko & Koma’s dances over the past four decades—generating connections and change over time and across borders—offer an alternative model for how art can reflect and transform society. Avant-garde art need not only cause radical breaks; it can also effectively engage in a slow, sustained process of change. Slowness as choreographic method provides the time to learn how to develop alternative ways of working in the world, including tactics that may allow one to pass outside the visibility of subjective violence, reveal the functioning of objective violence, and create alliances that could prove effective in countering objective violence. Eiko & Koma say they make work about something they need to discover, not something they already know. Their concerns, the things that they “cannot help but deal with,” require repeated and careful analysis, which they conduct through their choreography.
In both Eiko & Koma’s body of work and in this book, slowness is foundational without itself being the point of the dance or the analysis. It is a consistently used tool, but its results are not always the same. For example, Eiko & Koma use slowness in their dances for different ends: it may be a way to prolong mourning or to facilitate connections among humans, nature, and technology. Slowness can also draw attention to cycles of destruction and regeneration, making the long duration of cycles over lifetimes comprehensible over the course of one dance. Similarly, slowness in this book provides the foundation for viewing Eiko & Koma’s work; it is a prerequisite that must be understood before the analysis can proceed. As such, aesthetics as politics is not the focus of this book, but it is the foundation. The focus instead is on the variety of ways that Eiko & Koma employ their aesthetics and to what end.
Asian/American/Dance
When I was doing research in Japan, people would say to me, “Well you know, Eiko & Koma are really American.” They are simply not considered part of Japanese dance history, even though they began performing while briefly living at Hijikata’s Asbestos Hall and studied with Ohno early in their careers. This view is understandable given that the dancers have had their primary residence in New York since 1977 and—not counting their experimental performances in the early 1970s—have only performed in Japan a handful of times. On the other hand, Eiko & Koma’s significance in American dance history and their ongoing role in American concert dance is often elided by a popular discourse that persistently categorizes them as Asian. Rather than pointing to specific political, historical, or cultural markers that might be relevant to Eiko & Koma’s work, “Asian” too often slips into an Orientalism that says far more about Asian American racialization and the legal and discursive regulation of Asian bodies in the United States than it does about the dance at hand. Moreover, these perspectives that would have the dancers be either generically American or Asian foreclose consideration of the complex personal, political, and dance historical webs that form the foundation of the work.
In this book I situate Eiko & Koma both as Japanese artists who began performing through their encounters with butoh but who have never called their work by that name, and as Asian American artists in American concert dance who have had international success. This orientation to their choreography has theoretical and methodological implications that require me to cross boundaries of dance studies, Japanese studies, and Asian American studies, and take into account theories of transnationalism, diaspora, and Asian American racial formation. In the process, I seek to expand critical understanding of the radical nature of Eiko & Koma’s body of work, while also demonstrating how that work—of which the artists themselves sometimes question whether it is indeed dance or choreography—influences the field of dance studies. The book contributes to the nascent body of literature concerned with Asian American dance and expands American dance history to include the contributions of Asians and Asian Americans.
By insisting on thinking about Eiko & Koma as part of American dance history, I join Asian American scholars who examine the ways Asians have or have not been included in the idea—and state—of America. This thinking is reflected in the book’s subtitle, Eiko & Koma’s Asian/American Choreographies. I follow David Palumbo-Liu’s use of the solidus to signal a simultaneous connection and separation, inclusion and exclusion, between Asian and American.18 The addition of the slash points to the repeated exclusions of Asians from America, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1872, even as the punctuation simultaneously resists the nationalist project of the subsumption of Asians into America, particularly as model minorities after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The slash furthermore highlights the unsettled state of both terms, acknowledging repeated and historically changing international as well as intranational contact. This is a particularly appropriate approach for Eiko & Koma, who have been permanent residents of the United States since 1979 and whose career is inextricable from American concert dance, but who maintain their Japanese citizenship.
Unlike Asian American theater and performance, Asian American dance remains woefully undertheorized.19 Dance studies is itself a relatively new discipline, and while an analysis of race, class, and gender has been central to its formation, Asian American choreographers and dancers have remained largely invisible. I lean heavily on the work of Yutian Wong, a scholar at the forefront of Asian American dance. She is joined by scholars such as Priya Srinivasan and SanSan Kwan in developing a nascent body of literature on Asians dancing in America, the meaning of dance in diasporic communities, and the contribution of Asian Americans to American dance history.20 As Wong established in the essay “Towards a New Asian American Dance Theory: Locating the Dancing Asian American Body” and expanded on in her book Choreographing Asian America, Asian American contributions have been largely erased from American dance history,