It is not a matter, however, of simply inserting “forgotten” dancers back into the dance history canon. As Wong deftly demonstrates with the case of Michio Ito, a Japanese dancer who enjoyed enormous success in the United States before being deported to Japan during World War II, repeated revivals and retrospectives of his work have never quite remedied his absence from the canon.24 An examination of American legal, political, and popular discourses reveals that the pattern in dance history of alternately emphasizing or erasing Asian Americans is in fact a fundamental condition of American national identity formation. Karen Shimakawa explicates this condition as a process of abjection—à la Julia Kristeva—in which Asian Americans are both “constituent element and radical other”25 of the nation. In other words, “America” is defined through the (ongoing) exclusion of Asian (American)s, who nonetheless constitute an essential part of that same identity. It is important to note that the abject is always internal to the deject, even as it is excluded. This ambiguity or contradiction is reflected in the literal, material, legal, and symbolic abjection of Asian Americans. For example, Japanese internment excluded Japanese Americans from “America” by drawing them further in. Another example is the alternation between legal exclusion and model minority status. Abjection is, after all, an unstable process, requiring continuous reinforcement.
Asian American studies has proven invaluable for teasing out the complex forces that impact Asian American dancers in general and Eiko & Koma in particular. This book asserts that what Eiko & Koma do onstage—their choreographic decisions—can be productively analyzed as Asian American cultural critique. In addition to guiding my orientation to the dancers’ body of work as a whole, the discipline is also a source of scholarship on mourning, melancholia, reparation, intercultural performance, and multiculturalism that helps me analyze Eiko & Koma’s predominant themes. However, I must acknowledge that the discipline’s focus on art as a source of legible stories of immigration, oppression, and resistance has meant that text-based productions like literature and theater have been favored, while body-based or abstract work runs the risk of not being visible as Asian American. This is not unique to Eiko & Koma, but is a larger issue faced by many Asian American performers. Wong discusses the same phenomenon in relation to work by Sue Li-Jue and Denise Uyehara, noting that pieces lacking an explicit Asian American critique become “unidentifiable in terms of inhabiting a thematic Asian American niche.”26 In other words, content rather than form is where politics becomes comprehensible within the field.
This book takes as a given that choreography is inherently political, that aesthetic choices reflect political investments, and that dancing bodies are formed within regimes of discipline and viewed by their audiences in the context of the politics of representation. Though these statements may seem self-evident, this kind of thinking about dance only became possible with the rise of dance studies scholarship beginning in the mid-1980s and has not fully made its way into other disciplines.27 In bringing together dance and Asian American studies I, like Wong, seek to racialize and politicize aesthetics. In particular, I aim to demonstrate how the US Orientalism inherent in American modern dance has obscured the politics of Eiko & Koma’s dances, even while awarding those dances the highest honors. At the same time, I argue for the choreography itself as Asian American critique; in doing so, I assert that dance is not merely a vehicle for telling stories, but more important, is a way of enacting a particular politics.
Methodology
My goal to elucidate the politics of Eiko & Koma’s choreography is best achieved through choreographic analysis, through which I critically unpack the dances to demonstrate what these unique works effect in the world. My primary sources, then, are the dances themselves. I draw on extensive observation of Eiko & Koma’s performances, rehearsals, and workshops. Live performances I was not able to see in person I watched through video documentation and studied through photographs, promotional materials, newspaper previews and reviews, and program notes available in Eiko & Koma’s personal archives and in collections at The Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library and the San Francisco Museum of Performance + Design. Media dances created specifically for film or video I have watched on my computer, on gallery walls, and in university and museum screening rooms.
Eiko & Koma’s dances challenge an easy separation between choreography and performance. Because they are both choreographers and usually the only performers of their dances, it can be difficult to separate Eiko & Koma’s movement style and choreography from their individual bodies. Furthermore, the vocabulary often appears deceptively simple: small, subtle, continuous movements that contain none of the virtuosity or proscenium-oriented, presentational qualities of many other dance forms. Nonetheless it is possible to construct a choreographic analysis based on the following questions: What choices have the choreographers made in the creation of each piece, including the title? What is the site of the dance? How do the bodies move through time and space? What is the quality of their movement? Where are they in space? Are there other bodies in addition to Eiko & Koma? What is the relationship between the bodies onstage? How do the costumes, music, and sets relate to the moving bodies? What meanings accrete to this series of decisions? The writing of Thomas DeFrantz in Dancing Revelations is a particular influence in this sense.28 His richly descriptive prose paints a detailed picture of each dance, including movement vocabulary and quality, music, structure, and spacing. In each paragraph DeFrantz shows his readers what is happening in the dance and then, based on the evidence he presents, tells them what the choreography means; his analysis of many of Alvin Ailey’s eighty works forms his arguments, rather than merely supporting them. DeFrantz’s specific and evocative writing style employs the very same Africanist aesthetics that he detects in Ailey’s choreography, which pushes me to elaborate the aesthetic principles that undergird Eiko & Koma’s movement vocabulary, such as slowness.
Even as I foreground the process of choreographic analysis, I must acknowledge that my analysis could not have developed without an embodied perspective based on my experiences studying with Eiko & Koma, whom I first met in 2006 when I was a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Indeed, Susan Leigh Foster asserts in Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance—arguably the first text to outline choreographic analysis as a methodology—that developing a visual, aural, and kinesthetic knowledge of movement is a prerequisite to discerning a dance’s codes and conventions.29 In addition to taking Eiko & Koma’s movement class, Making Dance as an Offering, I also worked with Eiko to produce a written record of that class and served as an unofficial teaching assistant for her undergraduate seminar, Delicious Movement for Forgetting, Remembering, and Uncovering. Although I had seen one or two of their dances prior to meeting them, it was only through dancing with them twice a week, seeing how they contextualized their work with other artists and thinkers, and talking to them in their temporary office that I came to appreciate the full force of the choreography. At the same time I began to notice how Eiko & Koma’s dances were frequently misread as foreign and mystical: a type of meditation, or something akin to the process of tending a Zen Buddhist rock garden. I puzzled over the lack of critical and scholarly writing about their significant body of work that dared probe beneath the slow-moving surface. Why were their acclaim and success, both richly deserved, accompanied by such a superficial consideration