Over the past decade and a half, the Japanese-born team of Eiko and Koma has developed a body of work that is uniquely its own. Although they are usually reviewed by dance critics, their art is closer to the great tradition of silent acting you can see in films made before the sound era. Theirs is a powerful art, due both to their great presence on stage and to their subject matter: life after man's fall from grace.
Some writers have speculated that the tortured figures Eiko and Koma depict in their works can be seen either as primordial tribespeople, a la Kei Takei (to name another Japanese artist now based in New York), or as survivors of a global disaster yet to come. I don't see a focus on either the past or the future. As I understand it, Eiko and Koma mean to show us a hell that exists right now.
Meaningful Concept
But with the premiere of Tree, first shown last fall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, the husband-and-wife team seems to have provided us, for the first time, with a glimpse of redemption. Tree is the first work by Eiko and Koma to hint that hope may be a concept with some meaning.
In so doing, they have not undercut the meaning or impact of their earlier work, which had become an increasingly grim portrait of humankind. Rather, like a single stroke of bright color on a dark canvas, the fragile beauty of Tree underscores the seriousness of their older dances. If two beings can, truly, combine their lives into a meaningful whole--and I think this is the implication of Tree, though Eiko and Koma are never as explicit in movement as these words are in print--then life is rendered just that much more tragic if this union never takes place.
But Eiko and Koma's work usually concerns some grim sorrow, such as hunger or thirst, as illustration of nothing less than the philosophical irrelevance of life. How, they seem to ask, can one live in such a world? Indeed, in an interview conducted several years ago, the dancers were quoted as saying, "There is no room in this world to be blind; things are getting worse and worse." The couple makes a point of stating in their biographical material that they were raised in postwar Japan. Although they are too young, I believe, to have experienced the horrors of World War II personally, Eiko and Koma infuse their work with the despair of a devastated nation. (They did grow up in the only country that has suffered a direct nuclear attack.) Like all young Japanese, Eiko and Koma inherited an ancient culture that had recently undergone a profound and brutal initiation into modern--which is to say, Western--life.
But if Eiko and Koma's work, up to Tree, consists of solitary journeys toward the spiritual, it is nonetheless rendered in harsh physical terms. Neither had studied traditional Japanese dance and theater forms, such as No and Kabuki, before they met in 1971. Eiko and Koma were law and political science students when each decided separately to join the Tokyo company led by Tatsumi Hijikata.
A dynamic figure whose teachings would inspire a legion of Japanese dancers, Hijikata is generally credited with the promulgation of butoh, a radical form of postwar dance-theater that quickened out of various rebellious currents in the 1960s. Hijikata's original
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