Chapter 3, “Japanese/American,” shifts the perspective from the contexts in which Eiko & Koma began to make dances to the discursive contexts that impacted the reception of their work. Specifically, the chapter examines a change that took place between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s in how Eiko & Koma’s work was represented and understood by producers and critics. At precisely the time when Eiko & Koma’s work was becoming more integrated into American dance, the pair—initially called “avant-garde” and “postmodern”—became increasingly presented as “Japanese” and “Asian,” particularly after Japanese butoh companies began to appear on American stages in the early 1980s. Through an analysis of dance reviews in the New York Times and other New York papers covering dance, I argue that Eiko & Koma have not been legible to US audiences as Asian American, or even American, because discourses that interpellate them as Japanese or Asian have been too dominant. I discuss multiple discourses that impact Eiko & Koma’s work, including what Barbara Thornbury has called a “kabuki discourse,” something I have identified as a nuclear discourse that is particularly entwined with the American reception of butoh, and an Asian American discourse.
Having discussed in chapters 1 through 3 the cultural, dance historical, and discursive contexts of Eiko & Koma’s early work, in chapters 4 through 7 I abandon chronology in favor of analyzing recurrent choreographic and kinesthetic themes evident in dances from across Eiko & Koma’s body of work, including nature, mourning, and intercultural alliances. These chapters individually and as a whole demonstrate how the duo’s artistic concerns cycle throughout their repertoire, extending over long periods of time and sometimes overlapping with other themes. Just as Eiko & Koma’s choreography and career constantly return to earlier projects to mine them for further significance, my analysis, too, cycles through temporalities to get at what the dance is about and what it does. Individual works cannot be discussed in isolation, but must be understood in relation to other dances that grapple with the same ideas or produce the same effects. For example, when analyzing a particular cycle within Eiko & Koma’s body of work, I focus first on one dance in particular, then compare and contrast that dance with others that precede and follow it in order to articulate what remains constant over the decades and what changes, to what effect. Moreover, these cycles do not necessarily take place in a defined span of time and then give way to another theme. Rather, Eiko & Koma may return to an earlier concern years later. Chapters 4 through 7 thus overlap in terms of chronology. Furthermore, no one theoretical approach could account for all of the cycles. Each theme calls for its own unique frame of analysis.
Chapter 4, “Dancing-with Site and Screen,” explores the prominence of human-nature relationships in Eiko & Koma’s body of work, as exemplified in River (1995) and as seen in stage pieces like Grain (1983) and Night Tide (1984), site dances like The Caravan Project (1999), screen dances such as Husk (1987), and the living installation Breath (1998). Specifically, I home in on the relationships choreographed in these pieces between nature and culture, bodies and technology, that are not based in binaries or mutual exclusion but in interconnection, or what I call interface. I argue that Eiko & Koma practice in these dances a choreographic methodology of “dancing-with” nature and technology that enables the generation of interfaces through a slow and concerted process in which all active participants, including potentially the audience, are altered. This body of work is a recurring reminder of the potential for creating alternate ways of being in the world, in which the relationship between nature and technology has many complex possibilities beyond an either/or binary.
Chapter 5, “Sustained Mourning,” examines Eiko & Koma’s decades-long investigation of mourning as a choreographic practice. Here slowness refers not only to the movement in a particular dance, but also to Eiko & Koma’s long-term focus. In works including Elegy (1984), Lament (1985), Wind (1993), Duet (2003), and Mourning (2009), the duo prolongs mourning such that it acts as a stubborn, even resistive melancholia. I draw on psychoanalysis, Asian American studies, and art analysis to provide a context for my theorization of the labor of Eiko & Koma’s prolonged mourning and its effects. I argue that this group of dances theorizes mourning as not merely a private, individual process, but a societal, public melancholia that highlights issues and events that can never be resolved but must nonetheless be grappled with. Their choreography, I suggest, accomplishes this with performances of a sustained mourning through which Eiko & Koma evidence the ability to dwell in a space of heightened emotion without necessarily effecting a transformation of those strong feelings, both over the course of one dance and throughout the decades of their work. Grief in this case becomes a physical labor—sometimes even a battle—on endless repeat. This corporeal theorization of mourning is a crucial reworking of the concept that rejects the beginning-middle-end ideology of Freudian psychology in favor of a postwar temporality in which such a linear resolution is no longer possible.
Chapter 6, “Ground Zeroes,” demonstrates how Eiko & Koma’s post-9/11 dance, Offering (2002), drew on their long-term engagement with sustained mourning. Together with other dances, including Event Fission (1980), Land (1991), Raven (2010), and Fragile (2012), Offering calls attention across time and continents to a shared history in Trinity, New Mexico, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and New York City. I argue that this collection of Eiko & Koma’s dances generates a critical transtemporal and transnational space in which divisions between here and there, now and then, us and them are called into question. I further suggest that these pieces differ from the melancholic choreography of the previous chapter, in that they transform rather than sustain mourning. These dances display a process of metamorphosis that occurs over the course of a piece, in which the bodies become something new through interacting with the other elements in the piece. I understand this transformation of mourning through the notion of reparation, a concept derived from psychoanalysis and adapted by Asian American studies scholars, that offers the possibility of creative action to productively address crisis and loss.
Chapter 7, “‘Take Me to Your Heart’: Intercultural Alliances,” centers on a group of dances beginning with Cambodian Stories (2006) that points to an important attention to intercultural alliances in Eiko & Koma’s work. Made in collaboration with young painters from the Reyum Art School in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, these intergenerational and interdisciplinary works among Asians and Asian Americans—including Cambodian Stories Revisited (2007), Quartet (2007), the revival of Grain (1983/2007), and Hunger (2008)—were presaged by the duo’s collaboration with Anna Halprin in Be With (2000). In particular, this chapter engages with the history of intercultural performance to demonstrate how Eiko & Koma’s work, focused on what I call choreographing intercultural alliances, differs from other noted intercultural collaborations that often remain mired in Orientalist discourses or uneven power structures. Unlike the interfaces of chapter 4, intercultural alliances do not attempt to create a new entity, but instead seek to enact strategic ways of working together, undoing in the process assumptions that separate East and West, modernity and tradition.
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