Flowers Cracking Concrete. Rosemary Candelario

      CHAPTER 1

      FROM UTTER DARKNESS TO WHITE DANCE

      Eiko & Koma had their New York premiere with White Dance at Japan Society’s Japan House on May 6, 1976. The delicate yet tension-suffused dance featured periods of extended stillness punctuated by moments of absurdity: a slap, a cry, a cascade of potatoes. Although only a one-night engagement, the performance enabled a six-month sojourn in the United States, including subsequent performances at The Cubiculo, The Performing Garage assisted by Dance Theater Workshop, and the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center (the latter under the title The White Moth). Prominent dance critics at The Village Voice, Dance Magazine, and Soho News called the work “shocking in some way I can’t articulate”¹ and “profoundly exciting,”² in part for the way it “coheres and engages our interest because we watch Eiko and Komo [sic] repeatedly enter, inhabit, and leave the inextricably linked states of fragility and determination.”³ How is it that two Japanese student activists turned dancers were able to create such a stir in New York, both uptown at the venerable Japan Society and NYPL and downtown at venues known for producing avant-garde and postmodern performance? Where did this dance come from? What was it about their dance that left dance critics unable to articulate meaning yet captivated nonetheless?

      This chapter examines the development of Eiko & Koma’s political and aesthetic commitments during their early years in Japan and their initial forays into dance performance in Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. I contend that their choreography evidences from the very beginning an oppositional stance that although devoid of explicit activist messages nonetheless proposes ways of being in the world that challenge structures of power. It is also during this time that Eiko & Koma can be observed making decisions about what is important to them and how to incorporate it into their dancing. As Eiko said in a 1988 interview, “The question is: How shall I continue? What do I preserve and what do I not take in? What do I fight against in consideration of keeping something that I care about?”⁴ I open with an introduction to Eiko and Koma’s background growing up in postwar Japan and coming-of-age as activists in late 1960s and early 1970s Tokyo.⁵ The focus then turns to their formation as dancers and dance makers from 1971 to 1976, first in Japan with the key figures of butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, then through more than two years of performance and study in Europe, including with Mary Wigman dancer Manja Chmiel, and ending with their first performances in the United States. This period of movement from one continent to another parallels the pair’s movement away from the “utter darkness” of their ankoku butoh teachers toward their own White Dance. At the same time, their trajectory provides the opportunity to retrace some of the paths of twentieth-century modern dance history.

      The Dance of Utter Darkness

      In a time line Eiko & Koma created for their Retrospective Project, the dancers constructed a chronological representation of their lives and career.⁶ With this document, the pair situated their body of work historically, culturally, and politically, including not only notable moments from their career, but also significant events such as the Beatles’ first concert in Tokyo, the beginning of the Vietnam War, and their own participation in Jimmy Carter’s 1980 presidential campaign. Notably, the time line begins not with Koma’s birth in provincial Niigata on Japan’s northwestern coast in 1948 and Eiko’s in Tokyo in 1952, but with the defeat of Japan in 1945. By marking their own beginnings with this decisive ending, an act of aggression and destruction unparalleled in human history, they acknowledge this moment as a major rupture, a turning point after which nothing can be the same. With this deliberate staging of their relationship to history, Eiko & Koma demonstrate how their sense of time extends beyond what we normally think of as beginnings and endings, a quality that has become characteristic of the sense of time in their work. The time line also places the dancers’ births in the context of the end of the US occupation of Japan and the duration of the Korean War, and therefore subject to and implicated in geopolitical entities and events well beyond the local.

      Though this act of staging their relationship to history is a recent one, there is no doubt that aftershocks of war and occupation resonated in both of their lives. Eiko and Koma were small children during the period of reconstruction after the intense destruction of World War II. Hiroshima and Nagasaki of course were devastated by the atomic bombings, but many other cities, including Tokyo, were firebombed and had to be rebuilt. Evidence of the war lingered, through broken infrastructure, the visible evidence of wounded war veterans, and US military occupation. Even after occupation officially ended in 1952, US military bases in Japan served as supply stations for the Korean War and later for the war in Vietnam, keeping armed conflict in the forefront of people’s minds, even as Korean residents of Japan were relocated to North and South Korea.

      Takashi Koma Yamada’s parents split up when he was still small.⁷ His father, reportedly haunted by the war, took Koma’s brother, while Koma remained with his mother. Their life together in the often snow-covered port city of Niigata was modest. Koma talked in a movement workshop about how his mother would split an egg with him during his childhood, giving him the yolk to eat with his rice, taking only the white for herself.⁸ In contrast, Eiko Otake was the only child of a banker and homemaker. Though based in Tokyo, her family spent a number of years living in Tochigi Prefecture in rural central Japan for her father’s job, which gave Eiko an early appreciation for nature. In the midst of this solid middle-class foundation, arts and politics were also strong currents in the Otake household. Both of Eiko’s grandmothers were geishas (indeed, Eiko has worn one of her grandmother’s silk kimonos as a costume for years), and her grandfather was an artist. And despite her father’s profession, he was also a communist.⁹ In this politically active and creative environment, Eiko took three years of modern dance classes as a child and played the piano, but reportedly did not have an affinity for either.

      The mid-1950s through the early 1970s in Japan was a time of intense change, including rapid industrialization and urbanization coupled with enormous economic growth. These developments were not disconnected from postwar US involvement in the country, a relationship concentrated in (but not limited to) the US-Japan Mutual Cooperation and Security Treaty, referred to in Japan as “Anpo.” The treaty came up for renewal in 1960 and 1970 and in both cases was driven through by the ruling party and riot police, despite massive protests against it. In the wake of the treaty’s renewal, the government promoted what William Marotti calls “a depoliticized everyday world of high growth and consumption and a dehistoricized national image”¹⁰ in order to defuse the opposition. By the time of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, this strategy appeared to be successful. All evidence of postwar destruction was gone, and in its place was a modern, regulated, thriving version of Japan for the world to see.

      In the midst of such radical changes, many Japanese struggled with how to negotiate and express their relationship to those changes. As Marotti eloquently states, “Artists in Japan discovered hidden forms of domination in the everyday world and imagined ways in which their own practices might reveal, or even transform, such systems at their point of articulation in people’s