Although this book is not an ethnography of Eiko & Koma, I did employ the ethnographic method of participant observation to continuously deepen my knowledge of the movement I analyze. Since 2006 I have spent many hours with Eiko and Koma at their home in New York City and have traveled to their performances, workshops, exhibitions, and residencies across the United States and in Japan and Taiwan. I have also participated to varying degrees in their work. For example, in addition to participating in numerous Delicious Movement workshops, I have done a range of tasks, including stage managing performances, mending props, assisting backstage, handing out programs, and more. In 2012 I worked as a Mellon Archive Fellow with the Dance Heritage Coalition to inventory, assess, and organize Eiko & Koma’s personal archives, alongside Eiko and Patsy Gay, a specialist in archival methods. I also worked with Eiko to help her conceptualize their Archive Project, consistent with their artistic vision and practices. This hands-on approach to research has given me enormous insight into individual choreographic projects as well as the entire span of Eiko & Koma’s career.
In addition to analyzing Eiko & Koma’s choreography, it is important to pay close attention to how Eiko and Koma’s early years in Japan, their time performing in Western Europe, and their decision to settle in New York influenced both their movement style and concerns. This contextual information is not always available from the dances themselves and must be acquired through supplemental historical and archival research and interviews with people who were there and can give firsthand reports. I have interviewed Eiko & Koma numerous times in addition to spending hours simply hanging out and chatting. My relationship with the artists has given me access to their longtime friends, collaborators, presenters, and critics, who have generously shared their thoughts, memories, and materials with me through formal interviews and casual conversations. These interviews provide vital background information and form part of the evidence to support my argument about Eiko & Koma’s choreography.
I furthermore examine archival materials about Eiko & Koma to ascertain the extent to which changing discourses of race, multiculturalism, and identity in the United States have impacted how their choreography is viewed. How was contemporary Japanese performance received in the mid-1970s in the wake of the Vietnam War and in the midst of a nascent Asian American political movement? What does it mean that butoh performances by Kazuo Ohno and Dairakudakan proliferated alongside performances by New York–based Japanese artists Eiko & Koma and Kei Takei at precisely the moment that the Japanese American redress movement, which sought reparations and an official government apology for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, gained traction in the 1980s? How have Eiko & Koma benefited from multicultural policies and practices of the 1990s? Have those same multicultural policies and practices also obscured the force of Eiko & Koma’s dances? Furthermore, what does it mean during this time period to be performing “modern” Japan in the form of an avant-garde movement practice and yet to be read in Orientalist terms, which generally tie the “Orient” to traditions fixed firmly in the past?
Some of the same questions I ask of the archive can also be asked of Eiko & Koma, presenters, dance critics, and the dancers’ artistic collaborators through interviews. For example, Beate Sirota Gordon, the former performing arts director of the Japan Society and the Asia Society and the first presenter of Eiko & Koma’s work in the United States in 1976, has provided me with invaluable information about the cultural contexts in which Eiko & Koma began to perform in the United States.30 At that time, Gordon’s programming decisions in New York City played a large role in determining what “Japanese” meant in America, as artists she booked for shows at the Japan Society often subsequently toured all across the country. Similarly, presenters such as Charles Reinhart of the American Dance Festival and Jeremy Alliger of the now defunct Boston-based Dance Umbrella played a large role in defining Eiko & Koma’s work through the contexts in which their dances appeared, establishing the choreography (often commissioned as well as presented by these agencies) as American in the former case and as part of a cutting-edge Japanese dance community in the latter. These brief examples are illustrative of the ways presenters, critics, and collaborators have participated in the construction of Eiko & Koma’s work before it is choreographed, as it is performed, and after the performance is over. Conducting interviews allowed me to get the details and nuances of this information, often not available in archives and not evident in the dances themselves.
The result, I hope, is that my engagement with Eiko & Koma and their choreography mirrors their own engagement with their work. Like them, I do not want to approach their work “with a concept that is just hunted,” but I want the analysis to develop out of a sustained engagement with the dances themselves. My goal is to employ their choreographic method in my analysis in order to offer readers a more complex and slowed-down experience of Eiko & Koma and their work. Taken together, these varied experiences, along with analytical, archival, and ethnographic methods, suggest the major themes, or concerns, of Eiko & Koma’s body of work.
Overview of Chapters
Flowers Cracking Concrete places Eiko & Koma’s dances in their political, dance historical, and cultural contexts and analyzes those dances for their individual and collective impact. The first two chapters pay particular attention to establishing Eiko & Koma’s influences and early history in order to intervene in the Orientalist discourse that too often defines them as singular and timeless. It is true that their work is unique, but it developed through particular life and artistic decisions and encounters, not through some inherent cultural or national essence. The examination of Eiko & Koma’s early career in chapters 1 and 2, for example, provides an alternative view of three crucially important periods of dance history, but from the perspective of marginal participants in these moments. What was it like to study with the key figures of butoh for short periods of time in the early 1970s, but not be in the inner circle of disciples who worked with Hijikata and Ohno for years to develop their unique butoh expressions? What did it mean to study dance in Germany with Chmiel at a time when her Wigman-influenced style was out of favor, but Tanz Theater had yet to predominate? How was it possible to be integrated into the New York downtown dance scene as newcomers to the United States whose performance style differed from the predominant white abstract and pedestrian postmodern dance? And how did each of these encounters shape Eiko & Koma’s body of work?
Chapter 1, “From Utter Darkness to White Dance,” traces the development of Eiko & Koma’s political commitments, aesthetics, and dance style from their time growing up in postwar Japan through their early “cabaret” performances in Japan and their initial dances in Europe and the United States. The chapter focuses particularly on the years 1971 to 1976, during which the pair moved from the “utter darkness” of not only their ankoku butoh teachers but also the political situation in Japan to the premiere in New York of what they call their first piece of set choreography, White Dance (1976). I argue that for Eiko & Koma choices about how, where, and at what pace to move have from the beginning always been both choreographic and political decisions.
After their American debut, Eiko & Koma returned briefly to Japan before moving to the United States permanently in 1977, where they immersed themselves in the New York downtown dance scene, creating one new piece each year and establishing themselves as critically acclaimed mainstays of American avant-garde dance. Chapter 2, “‘Good Things Under 14th Street’,” considers Eiko & Koma’s experimental choreography—Fur Seal (1977), Before the Cock Crows (1978), Fluttering Black (1979), Trilogy (1979–1981), and Nurse’s Song (1981)—in relationship with their new home in New York City, placing the duo’s work in the larger contexts of American postmodern dance, the downtown dance scene, and 1970s