Flowers Cracking Concrete. Rosemary Candelario
more than four-decades-long collaboration. From these influences, Eiko & Koma developed a singular performance technique and approach to choreography. Though they are considered part of a generation of American dance artists that includes David Gordon, Bebe Miller, and Ralph Lemon, their unique movement style, unrelated to modern dance or ballet; rejection of a company model; insistence upon choreographing almost exclusively on their own bodies; and do-it-yourself practices set them apart from their peers in American concert dance. The Retrospective drew attention to their impressive intersections with dance history on three continents and highlighted the skill with which they move from proscenium stages, to outdoor sites, to museum installations, and in front of and behind the camera.
Eiko & Koma’s Retrospective Project also issued a vivid reminder that the two dancers have been central figures in the American concert dance scene since they moved to New York from Tokyo in 1977. But it also raised important questions, such as why so little academic research exists on Eiko & Koma, despite prestigious recognition by the MacArthur Foundation and the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, among many others; international renown; and overwhelming critical acclaim.2 Dance reviews constitute the largest body of writing on the pair, including early and sustained attention from noted American critics including Jack Anderson, Suzanne Carbonneau, Jennifer Dunning, Deborah Jowitt, Anna Kisselgoff, Janice Ross, Lewis Segal, and Tobi Tobias. Another important collection of writings is by Eiko herself, comprising choreographer’s notes available in programs and on their Web site, and published essays.3 Academic writing is limited to two master’s theses4 and my own published materials. A couple of books include chapters on Eiko & Koma in the form of interviews or expanded encyclopedia entries.5 The Walker Art Center’s 2011 catalog, Time Is Not Even, Space Is Not Empty, is the most significant text on Eiko & Koma to date, comprising a comprehensive biography, artistic essays, and descriptions of every piece made by the pair from 1972 through 2010. Richly illustrated with photographs and including writings by some of the photographers who have worked with them for decades, the catalog is a major document. Useful appendices include information on funders, commissioners, and presenters from 1972 to 2011.6
Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma’s Asian/American Choreographies does not attempt to duplicate the contributions of previous texts, but instead provides the first book-length critical analysis of the Japanese American duo’s body of work, examining in detail more than half of their sixty-plus stage, outdoor, video, installation, and gallery works created over more than four decades. This long overdue study argues that Eiko & Koma’s dances, like the flowers of the title, effect a gradual but profound transformation that has significant political implications. I trace the elaboration over time of the concerns that have become central to Eiko & Koma’s work: the linkages between humans and nature, sustained mourning for personal and historical traumas, and the sometimes-fraught alliances among humans. My goal is to intervene in how these dances are viewed by providing historical and political contexts for the development of Eiko & Koma’s choreography in Japan, Europe, and New York City. These contexts place Eiko & Koma firmly in American dance history even as they reveal the necessity of considering the duo as both Japanese and Asian American.
Adagio Activists
An extraordinary—and defining—facet of Eiko & Koma’s work is the slowness with which they unfold their bodies and their dances, a pace less human and more geologic. Moving at a speed significantly decelerated from daily life, Eiko & Koma’s dances shift attention to the ways that seemingly fixed elements of our world—trees, mountains, continents—are also constantly changing. The title of this book, Flowers Cracking Concrete,7 signals the profound corporeal and affective work of Eiko & Koma’s dances. This impossible-seeming image conveys a slow yet violent process effected through persistent and insistent micromovements and embodies the contradictions inherent in Eiko & Koma’s work. Though commonly described as slow and subtle, the effect of Eiko & Koma’s performances is like water eroding rock or tree roots displacing a sidewalk: the sometimes imperceptible movements of two bodies over time have a profound impact physically and emotionally on one another, their environment, and their audiences. Watching them perform, one may think that nothing in particular is happening until—gasp!—one is hit with a realization that something significant—a major shift, a rupture—has transpired. Not only have their drawn-out moving images compelled audiences to pay a different kind of attention, but they have also effected a transformation: slowly, imperceptibly, and then suddenly all at once. Although the dances do include moments of explosive movement, stuttering limbs, and sudden shifts, overall they are marked by an extraordinary insistence on taking time and an attention to the importance of the smallest of movements.
Slavoj Žižek argues persuasively that it is a political choice to do nothing, and that doing nothing is in fact still doing something.8 For Eiko & Koma it is a striking choreographic choice. Of course Eiko & Koma do not do nothing. Even when they seem to an audience to be utterly still, for minutes or hours on end, they are always active. Eiko & Koma’s appearance of doing nothing, of taking their time, of taking space to take time, results in the central mission of their dance slowly revealing itself, both over the course of one performance and over the forty-plus years of their danced collaboration. Slowness then is not just an aesthetic for the stage, but also a method of working over the long term. Moreover, in that they are often doing the same thing, it may appear as if they are doing nothing (new). And yet their stubborn persistence, their insistence upon returning again and again to the same themes and the same movements, demonstrates an extraordinary commitment to taking their time to find out what is important to them and giving that issue physical form.
What stood out to critics who first saw Eiko & Koma’s choreography in the mid- and late 1970s, and continues to be the case into their fifth decade of work, is the surprising effect of their minimalist movement. Critics may have disagreed about the meaning of various performances, but they agreed on the work’s impact. Unfortunately most critics have not probed the dancers’ slowness further, often leaving it at the simple fact of slowness. (“Eiko and Koma Slow Time Down” and “The King and Queen of Slow Get Busy” are representative headlines.9) Their speed, or lack of it as it were, moreover leads some to make Orientalist associations with noh or Zen rock gardens. Many audience members assume Eiko & Koma meditate before performing, as evidenced by the regularity of questions about meditation and yoga at after-performance talk backs. Reviews often neglect to mention the moments of absurdity or outbursts of speed or violence that frequently puncture their dances, leaving unexamined the implications of taking longer than expected to start dancing, to stop mourning, and to form connections.
In order to intervene in the prevailing misreading of Eiko & Koma’s aesthetic of slowness, I emphasize Eiko and Koma’s backgrounds as student activists and the context of the Japanese avant-garde. As I discuss in chapter 1, Eiko and Koma each came to avant-garde performance as student activists in the early 1970s in Japan. Searching for an alternative to what they saw as the dead end of the leftist political scene, they found in dance a compelling way of acting in the world. Rather than seeing their transition from protesting in the streets to performing in galleries and theaters as a break with activism, I see it as a continuation of their critical stance in a new medium. Thinking about Eiko & Koma’s choreography as a kind of activism requires a shift from focusing on what the dances signify to paying attention to what they do. I am not suggesting that Eiko & Koma’s work is beyond representation or signification. Nor am I suggesting that the meaning of these dances cannot be expressed in words. On the contrary, this book challenges such beliefs, insisting instead on articulating the specific ways Eiko & Koma’s choreography actually effects something in the world. Eiko & Koma do not represent mourning, I argue; they do it. They do not just represent new kinds of alliances with nature and across difference; they generate them. Very slowly.
Previously I wrote about the ways Eiko & Koma’s work generated what I called “spaces apart” through the choreographed relationship among moving bodies, sites, and technologies.10 I argued that it is in these spaces apart where alternatives to the dominant society may be rehearsed, and entrenched binaries such as nature/culture and East/West may be challenged. In this