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Article Excerpt
It's a breezy night in late May 2004. People are still gathering at the gate of New York's St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, hoping to grab a chair or a cushion on the ground for Eiko & Koma's free performance in the churchyard. Some have been following this duo's career since the two arrived here from Japan in the 1970s; others are clearly first-time viewers.
When Eiko & Koma, their limbs and faces white-painted, have been lying motionless in the dirt for at least 20 minutes, a waiting spectator whips out a cell phone and urges a friend to hurry over and see this event, which he struggles to define: "It's not 'we're gonna dance'--like dance dance." For sure.
When the performer-choreographers first showed up in New York in 1976, presenting their White Dance, they were a shocking, mesmerizing anomaly. Americans hadn't yet been exposed to butoh, or we might have linked their work to that radical postwar Japanese dance form. But who among us had ever seen barely moving dancers clad in what looked like ashen, peeling skin, their feet turned in, their eyes staring into dark distances (Trilogy, 1979-81)? Or watched a willowy young woman sway sinuously with myriad Q-tips stuck through her hair (Before the Cock Crows, 1978)?
During their early years in America, the pair had to identify themselves in programs as "Eiko (female)" and "Koma...
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