Flowers Cracking Concrete. Rosemary Candelario
an idea furthered by the fact that he dons it backwards. In contrast, Koma never uses a kimono to cross-dress, and though gender is often obscured or blurred in Eiko & Koma’s body of work, this is often effected through nakedness, rather than clothing. Nor does Koma’s way of wearing the kimono resonate with the way Hijikata playfully misuses geta sandals in History of Smallpox. Instead, the kimono is simply something to wear that is easy to move in. Some of the kimonos that Eiko has worn over the years from her geisha grandmothers are markers of cultural context. They are worn simply and loosely (and sometimes backwards), without the conventional undergarments and belts.
At the same time that Eiko and Koma worked in cabarets as Night Shockers to save money to travel abroad, they started to make artistic work as Eiko & Koma, and took a twice-a-week improvisation class with Kazuo Ohno. Whereas the atmosphere under Hijikata was highly controlled—from what one should do onstage, to what one earned and ate offstage—the scene at Ohno’s home studio, high on a hill in the Kamohoshikawa suburb of Yokohama, could not have been more different than the urban Asbestos Hall. Ohno never told students what to do or how to dance, and in fact he often claimed that he had nothing to teach. He did not lead movement exercises or phrases, but rather talked about metaphysical concepts, art and artists, and dancers he had seen. From these inspirational words and image prompts meant to inspire movement, students were expected to find their own dance.
As a young man in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Ohno saw dancers such as La Argentina and Harald Kreutzberg perform, experiences he returned to again and again over the course of his life, including through the dance that made him world famous at age seventy-three, Admiring La Argentina (1977).47 However, it was not these experiences that prompted him to start taking modern dance classes; rather, it was his lifelong job as a physical education teacher at a Christian girls’ school that led him to study with the founders of Japanese modern dance, Baku Ishii, Takaya Eguchi, and Misako Miya, the latter two of whom had studied with Mary Wigman in Germany. Ohno had only just started to perform with Eguchi and Miya when he was called up for military service; he served for eight years, including one year as a prisoner of war. Upon his return to Japan in 1946 he resumed performing, and in 1949 he had his solo choreographic premiere. That same year he opened the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio. For the next ten years, he made his own dances while participating in other people’s works. While dancing for Mitsuko Ando, Ohno met Hijikata. For most of the 1960s, Ohno stopped choreographing his own dances in favor of participating in Hijikata’s dance experiences. By the time Eiko and Koma met Ohno in 1971, he was performing live only occasionally and was making a series of experimental films with filmmaker Chiaki Nagano.48
FIGURE 1.2 Eiko & Koma with Kazuo Ohno after a performance in Tokyo.Photo: Courtesy of Eiko & Koma.
Even though Hijikata and Ohno had long collaborated, leaving one to study with the other was still an unusual move, even in the avant-garde world of butoh. Given Eiko and Koma’s political background and the general antiauthoritarian atmosphere among student protestors and young avant-garde artists, the attraction to someone who says, “I cannot tell you what to do, you have to figure that out for yourself,” must have been undeniable. Still, it was not easy work. Eiko remembers the trek from Sagami-Ohno, where she lived with her parents, out to Yokohama for Ohno’s twice-weekly class: the train ride followed by a walk up the hill, and the extra effort it took when it was cold. One night she arrived to find she was the only student. She describes the sweet awkwardness of receiving his full attention. He taught her how to bloom and wilt, placing his hand behind hers. She never forgot this first (and last) experience of Ohno’s one-on-one coaching.49
But even this self-driven, more open environment was not enough to keep Eiko and Koma rooted. Though they openly and lovingly credit Ohno as a teacher and had frequent contact with him until his death (see figure 1.2), they acknowledge that they were not among the disciples who worked intimately with him for years, if not for decades. Indeed, some of Ohno’s closest disciples became his caregivers and constant companions through his death at age 103 in 2010. Eiko and Koma’s early political activism instilled in them a fierce independence and an insistence on a “do it yourself,” or DIY, approach to art making, which made them bristle at the idea of being someone’s disciples. (Nor have they ever wanted to have their own disciples, thus their resistance to codifying a technique or transferring their repertoire to other dancers.) So, after studying with Ohno for less than half a year, Eiko and Koma left Japan together. Having already left school, they had a drive to do their own thing and felt that they needed to get far away in order to have the space to do that. Eiko once suggested to me that extended proximity to greatness results in just serving that greatness. Obviously they would not be who they are or be making the work that they do without the formative experiences living at Asbestos Hall or training with Ohno, however briefly. But they also craved experiences beyond the islands of Japan, and in late 1972 Eiko and Koma set off to continue their movement research elsewhere.
White Dances
The early 1970s was a period of major departures for Eiko and Koma, who were at that point on their way to becoming Eiko & Koma. They left school, two major figures of avant-garde dance, and finally even their country. Suzanne Carbonneau emphasizes that Eiko & Koma were not traveling in order to perform. “Performing was, rather, a strategy for discovering the world … while they ‘researched [their] lives.’”50 Although she seems to mean this quite literally—dance was a means for the pair to see the world and travel beyond Japan—her phrasing quite nicely points to the way that Eiko & Koma have since used their dance to understand their relationship to time, history, humans, and nonhumans. In a manner prescient of their future movement style, in which a specific beginning or end is less important than noticing and participating in the ever-evolving moment, the pair embarked on a slow journey whose destination was not entirely clear at the outset, departing Japan on a boat bound for the Soviet Union. The one thing they knew for certain was that they had made a conscious decision not to go to the United States. On the one hand, their opposition to the Vietnam War precluded the United States as a destination; going there, they felt would signal an implicit acceptance of the government’s actions. On the other hand, they had a sense that everyone was going to the United States at that point, and indeed a number of Japanese avant-garde artists, including Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama, had been welcomed into the New York art scene in the 1960s. Spain was one possible destination—Eiko remembers studying Spanish on the ship—however, they ultimately rejected that option because of their political opposition to Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship. After their ship docked, the pair then took a train to Moscow. Somewhere along the way they decided to go to Germany, and in Moscow they boarded a plane to Vienna, where finally they took a short train ride to Munich.
Ending up in Germany was not random, however. In a discussion about this period of their lives, Koma pointed to the long history of artistic exchange between Japan and Germany, and in particular to the links between their teacher, Ohno, and Mary Wigman’s modern dance style.51 Cultural exchanges among Japan and European countries had in fact been commonplace since the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when the Japanese began a concerted effort to show their country, policies, and products to be on a par with those of the Western powers, often through the adoption or adaptation of Western practices and conventions. At the same time, all things Japanese enjoyed an enormous popularity in the United States and Europe, prompting artists there to themselves adopt or adapt Japanese techniques. For example, the aesthetics of noh circulated to Europe and were incorporated into the practices of playwrights and theater directors such as W. B. Yeats, Jerzy Grotowski, and Samuel Beckett; in turn, Japanese theater practitioners of the 1960s and 1970s were themselves influenced by some of these same European artists.52 It was not unusual then that the Japanese pioneers of modern dance studied in Europe in the 1920s, some with Mary Wigman herself, and introduced German “new” dance to Japan. Koma remembers Ohno talking to them about Kreutzberg and Wigman. Koma and Eiko themselves discovered pictures of Dore Hoyer in the Music Library at the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan 東京文化会館. Of these German dancers Eiko says, “They were like kind of romantic